The World in Weltliteratur

In his introduction to What Is World Literature? Damrosch defines the concept as comprising of “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4). Damrosch discovers the concept of circulation at the center of Goethe's project, arguing that Goethe saw the reading of world literature as conducive to German pride, at a time when he feared German culture was peripheral and incohesive when compared with French culture in particular (8). The risk in Goethe's conception of world literature is that the world enters the purview of the literary in order to enrich the German nation and its citizens—including Goethe himself (7). While noting that Goethe allows the Chinese novel into his canon of world literature, Damrosch clarifies, “Goethe is no multiculturalist, however: Western Europe remains the privileged modern world of reference for him, and Greece and Rome provide the crucial antiquity to which he always returns” (12). For Goethe, worrying about the status of German culture, Western European history offers a modern point of reference while ancient Greece and Rome represent an ideological European essence.

Damrosch's theorization raises two questions. First, how do we account for literature that travels, in translation and in its original language, without becoming world literature? The Serbian poem Goethe invoked in 1827 traveled beyond its local and regional points of departure and entered the discourse on world literature, yet until its recent recovery in PMLA it remained—in the recent scholarship on comparative literature—unnamed in both its original and in translation. Moreover, most discussions of Serbian poetry are framed by its dismissal. As Damrosch writes:

In Damrosch's reading, Goethe's dismissal of Serbian poetry seems to remove it from the possibility of its canonization in Weltliteratur. The Goethe recovered by Damrosch is therefore not Eurocentric, because Serbian poetry is dismissed alongside medieval Germanic poetry. Elitism promises to save Goethe from his Eurocentrism. But Damrosch's account remains in need of a series of supplements.

The temporal frame used by Damrosch (1827–28), which sees Goethe's dismissal of Serbian literature following in the footsteps of its invocation, requires elaboration. This limited time frame does not account for Goethe's extensive, long-term engagement with Balkan literature. Goethe's translation of the infamous South Slavic epic song “Hasanaginica” (“The Mourning Song of the Noble Wife of Asan Aga”) had appeared fifty years earlier in Johann Gottfried Herder's influential Volkslieder (1778; Popular Songs; see Ćurčin and S.-W. 127).Footnote ⁸ An important node in the network that connects Goethe to Serbian literature is the figure of Grimm. Before the first pamphlet of folk songs that Vuk published in 1814 and Kopitar shared with Grimm, Kopitar had encouraged Grimm to study Slavic languages during Grimm's visit to Vienna from 1814 to 1815.Footnote ⁹ Grimm's review of the first edition of Vuk's Serbian Folk Songs was subsequently published in September 1815. Although Grimm was too busy to host Vuk in October 1823, his letter of introduction to Goethe enabled Vuk to spend a week with Goethe in Weimar. He returned for a second meeting in February 1824. On 18 January 1825, Goethe's continued attention to Serbian epic poetry surfaces in a comment to Eckermann, which Eckermann reproduced in his Conversations. Goethe told Eckermann that he found the poems admirable: “es sind einige darunter, die sich dem hohen Liede an die Seite setzen lassen, und das will etwas heißen” (“there are some among them that compare well with the Song of Solomon, and that is saying something”; Eckermann 118; my trans.). He clarified that Talvj, the pseudonym of Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob Robinson, was translating the poems, using her knowledge of Russian to learn Serbian (Eckermann 117; Goethe 65).Footnote ¹⁰ An exploration of this German-speaking constellation thus uncovers an extensive network attending to the conceptualization and circulation of Serbian literature.

Although Goethe's attention to Serbian folk traditions indeed waned from 1827 to 1828, Goethe published two additional articles on Serbian literature, “Serbische Gedichte” (1827; “Serbian Poems”) and “Das neueste Serbischer Literatur” (1827; “The Newest Serbian Literature”). The latter ends with a call to Grimm, Talvj, and Gerhard to translate and promote Serbian poetry (Subotić, Yugoslav Popular Ballads 182). This endorsement of Serbian literature constitutes an effort to enhance its circulation in a world-literary mode. Goethe's appeal resulted in Gerhard's publication of Vila: Serbian Folk Songs and Heroic Tales, which anthologizes in German translation a selection of the poems in Vuk's Serbian Folk Songs. Goethe's essays include reviews of John Bowring's Servian Popular Poetry, which brought Vuk's poems into English translation, and Prosper Mérimée's La Guzla (The Gusle), also translated into German by Gerhard (183).Footnote ¹¹ In March 1830, we see a final engagement with Serbian poetry in a letter Goethe wrote to Friedrich von Müller, where Goethe mentioned Milosch und den Serbiern (Miloš and the Serbians), presumably in reference to the epic poems that mythologize the 1389 battle of Kosovo: “Ja, es war doch eine schöne Zeit, als die Übersetzung der serbischen Gedichte zuerst hervortrat, und wir so frisch und lebendig in jene eigenthümlichen Zustände hinein versetzt wurden. Jetzt liegt mir das ferne, ich mag nichts mehr davon wissen” (“Yes, it really was a lovely time, when the translation of the Serbian poems first appeared, and we were so briskly and vividly transported into those peculiar circumstances. Nowadays that is far from my mind, I no longer want to hear any more about it”; qtd. in Jahrbuch 13; my trans.). While Goethe's interest had waned by 1830, it nevertheless stretched beyond the years 1827 and 1828.

Eckermann's own dismissal of Serbian poetry appears in Conversations as an aesthetic dislike of the ending of “The Prison-Key”—in other words, “The Wedding of Radul Vlašić”—which he finds “abgerissen und ein wenig unbefriedigend” (“abrupt and rather unsatisfactory”; Eckermann 195; Goethe 131). The abruptness of the poem's ending does require some explanation. In this decasyllabic heroic poem recited with the accompaniment of a single-stringed instrument called the gusle, a Montenegrin prince named Radul Vlašić sends two groomsmen and three hundred guests to retrieve his bride. In a forest on their way, they encounter Dinjar Banjanin. Saved by the bride from being branded an enemy and killed, Banjanin informs her that his two brothers are imprisoned in Radul Vlašić's dungeon. Accepting gold coins from Banjanin, the bride eventually saves his brothers and several other captives, summons assistants to groom and dress them, and sends them to Banjanin with a golden apple. Indeed, the poem concludes abruptly:

Vuk footnoted the original poem to contextualize the name of the hero and clarify the poem's ending: “Радул-бега из Каравлашке, а оженио се из Црне горе синовицом Ивана Црнојевића. У Црној се гори ова женидба и пјева и приповиједа много пространије, и врло ми је жао, што нијесам могао добити читаве пјесме по редуЋ” (“Sir Radul from Karavlaš, who was married to the Montenegrin niece of Ivan Crnojević. Indeed, this wedding song is sung in Montenegro and narrates much more extensively, and I regret that I could not obtain all the lines in the song”; Karadžić, “Ženidba” 520; my trans.). The poem's ending is thus not the result of an aesthetic deficiency, as Eckermann surmised, but rather a function of its fragmentary reproduction.

Goethe belonged to a network of writers, critics, and translators dedicated to the study of folk poetry, much of it focused on the East—Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. James MacPherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) and Ossian (1773), the discovery of Nibelungenlied, and Herder's Popular Songs (1778) had been foundational to the development of this network. The attention given to Serbian folk poetry in particular is reflected in the abundance of publications claiming stakes in this project. They include Alberto Fortis's Viaggio in Dalmazia (1774; Travels into Dalmatia); Herder's Popular Songs, which contains Goethe's translation of “Klaggesang von der edlen Frauen des Asan Aga” (“The Mourning Song of the Noble Wife of Asan Aga”); Vuk's ten-volume Serbian Folk Songs (1814–62); Sima Milutinović's Srbijanka (1826; The Serbian Woman); Mérimée's The Gusle (1827); Bowring's Servian Popular Poetry (1827); Gerhard's Vila (1828); Leopold von Ranke's Die Serbische Revolution (1828; The Serbian Revolution), written in collaboration with Vuk; Johan Ludvig Runeberg's Serviska Folksånger (1830; Serbian Folk Songs), which translated Vuk's poems into Swedish; and Aleksandr Pushkin's Pesni Zapadnykh Slavian (1834; Songs of the Western Slavs), which translated Vuk's poems into Russian.Footnote ¹² The network was dense and circular: Milutinović taught Serbian to Gerhard, whose initial exposure to Vuk's poetry came through Talvj's translations (Wilson 199). An examination of this expansive network and Goethe's enduring interest in Serbian poetry accounts for a literature that travels and enters the purview of an emergent discourse on world literature, and yet its literariness has never been analyzed in a world historical framework.Footnote ¹³

The second question raised by Damrosch's theorization of world literature regards Goethe's preference for classical antiquity: How might historical events contemporaneous with the formulation of Weltliteratur inform Goethe's preference? The Serbian poem invites an analysis of the pan-Slavic movement and its engagement with classical antiquity. Emerging during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), the First Serbian Uprising (1804–13), and the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–12, which was ignited by Napoleon's invasion of the western Balkans, the pan-Slavic movement gained legitimacy by demonstrating Slavic languages’ capacity to translate Greek. Derived from Greek orthography, the Cyrillic script materialized the proximity of Serbian, Bulgarian, and Russian to the Greek language (Cooper 41).Footnote ¹⁴ Grimm planned to publish a collection of Greek and Serbian poems (Wilson 196). This expanded field of signification for classical references points to the circumstances reenergizing attention to classical epic poetry, especially the Greek War of Independence, which ended in 1831 with the culmination of an independent Greek nation and fueled the 1828–29 Russo-Turkish War. Accompanying the outbreak of war against the Ottoman empire, newly published Greek national songs motivated the circulation of modern Greek literature (197).Footnote ¹⁵ Kopitar learned modern Greek and cultivated relationships with advocates of Greek independence (81).

The conceptualization of the term Greek, traveling as it did into numerous spheres of signification, invites further attention. Victor Roudometof suggests that the pan-Slavic movement rested on the prevalence of the term Greek as a racio-religious identity marker, or what he calls an “ethnie” (13).Footnote ¹⁶ The term Greek was used interchangeably with Greek Orthodox, in contrast with the terms Latin and Turk. According to Roudometof, members of newly mobile social classes often established themselves as “Greek” when they moved to cities. He elaborates, “In Belgrade, for example, Serbian townsmen dressed in the Greek style, the Belgrade newspapers included the rubric Grecia (Greece), and . . . the local Christian ‘higher strata’ were Grecophone until 1840” (13). In the early nineteenth century, the wife of the Serbian prince Miloš Obrenović was described by a British travel writer as being dressed “in the Greek style” (Pavlowitch 324). Noting the widespread participation in the Greek War of Independence, Roudometof concludes, “The liberation of the Greek was part of the Europeans’ ‘civilizing mission’” (24). The project entailed narrowing the space between classical antiquity and modern Greece. The nineteenth-century translations of Vuk's folk songs function as cultural correlatives to an emergent nationalized literary sphere (Serbian), counterpointing an inter-imperial alignment against the Ottoman empire across Europe. A literary-historical reading of the poem Goethe read reveals the inter-imperial field in which the concept of world literature emerged.

The Serbian Poem

In Forget English! Mufti revisits the scholarly conversation about Goethe's concept of world literature in an effort to decenter both Western Europe and classical antiquity and remap Weltliteratur onto the space of the Middle East and South Asia. In his reading of Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, Mufti critiques the narrow temporal and spatial frames Casanova and other scholars project onto Goethe's engagement with “Oriental” works in his imitations of Hafiz and the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan).Footnote ¹⁷ Instead, Mufti retraces Goethe's interest in William Jones's translation of the Sanskrit play Śākuntala; or, The Fatal Ring (1789), which predates his interest in the verse of Hafiz by thirty years (80).Footnote ¹⁸ In Mufti's reading, Casanova described a “Herder effect” legible throughout Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe since the late eighteenth century, which led to the formation of a linguistic and literary nationalized space. Mufti, however, argues that this effect, which he understands as a historicist-Orientalist phenomenon, took on a world historical dimension in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (76). Although in different forms, the construction and legitimization of nation-based vernaculars became visible not only in Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe but also in the Middle East and South Asia. Mufti cites Charles Wilkins's Bhagvat-Geeta; or, Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (1785) and Jones's Śākuntala as comparative “acts of invention with far-reaching consequences of a different sort for the colonized society” (“Orientalism” 473). From the Balkans to the Middle East and South Asia, translation provided a nationalized platform on which the project of world literature could be tested.Footnote ¹⁹

In his two reviews of Vuk's collections of Serbian folk poetry, Grimm explicitly appealed to a comparative model involving Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Such an appeal was necessary, Duncan Wilson infers, in order to interest Goethe, given his recent imitations of Hafiz. Grimm wrote that in Serbian poetry “the thoughts are more forcible and colourful than those of the folk-songs of other European countries, but without the bombast and superfine expressions of Arab and Persian poetry. Their smell is sweet without being intoxicating. Their scent is of the rose, not of attar of roses” (qtd. in Wilson 188). Persian poetry also figured prominently in Goethe's references and resurfaced in the January 1827 conversations with Eckermann. While much attention has been given to 31 January as the day Goethe formulated the concept of Weltliteratur, we should note that Goethe brought up Hafiz two days earlier, on 29 January, the same day he first mentioned the Serbian poem: “Ich werde durch Béranger immer an den Horaz und Hafis erinnert, die beide auch über ihrer Zeit standen und die Sittenverderbnis spottend und spielend zur Sprache brachten” (“Béranger reminds me ever of Horace and Hafiz; who stood in the same way above their times, satirically and playfully setting forth the corruption of manners”; Eckermann 192; Goethe 129).Footnote ²⁰ Goethe's formulation of Weltliteratur thus involves an even more expansive referential network—the Chinese, the Serbian, the Spanish, the Nibelungen, the ancient Greek and Roman, the French, and the Persian. In this network, it becomes ever more difficult to distinguish between a European and a non-European sphere as understood by Mufti.

In his comparative model, Mufti differentiates between an “intra-European ‘competitive’ vernacularization” and a “colonial absorption and transformation” in the Middle East and South Asia (Forget English! 76). Although Mufti acknowledges that the construction of national traditions in India through vernacularization corresponds to the nationalization of literary traditions in Europe, he delineates a paradox in the case of India: “the process of vernacularization that we know to be inseparable from modernization—and, outside of Europe, we may think of such language revolutions as the May 4th movement in China, genbun ichi in Japan, the nahda in Egypt and Greater Syria—produced in India not one but two claimants to the status of lingua franca” (“Orientalism” 480). Mufti ascertains that the separation of north Indian vernacular into “Hindi” and “Hindostani”—Hindu and Muslim languages, respectively—occurred as a result of vernacularization in a colonial context. One language prioritized Sanskrit as its “lexical source,” the other Persian and Arabic (482).Footnote ²¹ Indeed, Jones's translation of Śākuntala, the “first complete text translated from the Sanskrit without a Persian intermediary,” marks this separation (Figueira 9). For Mufti, this process of vernacularization with its resulting translations is to be distinguished from its intra-European variants. Implicitly, the vernacularization evidenced by the Serbian poem would fall into the category of intra-European variants.

However, the mechanics of differentiation in the Balkan project in fact overlap with those in the Persian and Indian complex. Projects to de-Persianize modern Hindi, a history Mufti details, paralleled projects to purge Serbian of its Ottoman Turkish.Footnote ²² We attend today to the “weird” forms of languages—English in particular—but the rise of nationalized and racialized languages during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries widely and similarly reflects the multicultural contact zones that languages embody.Footnote ²³ Like the Persian and Indian complex, the Serbian language represented in Vuk's collections of folk poetry manifests the weird Serbian of its time.Footnote ²⁴ “The Wedding of Radul Vlašić” folds into its fabric two characteristic elements: Cyrillic script and Ottoman Turkish colloquialisms. At that time, Orthodox liturgical texts reserved Cyrillic for their exclusive use, orthographically symbolizing their preservation of imperial Russian influences (Neubauer 215). Following the guidance of the phrase he would later be known for, “piši kao što govoriš a čitaj kao što je napisano” (“write as you speak and read as it is written”), Vuk uses Serbian words of Turkish origin.Footnote ²⁵ For example, “boščaluk” stands in for wedding presents wrapped in a “bošča,” a veil or kerchief:

Unlike Gerhard's German translation, the English translation emphasizes the inter-imperial rootedness of the Turkish words, leaving words like čauš, dabulana, hazur, and boščaluk untranslated.Footnote ²⁶ In the original, the poem articulates the embeddedness of colloquialisms that testify to Ottoman imperial legacies. The resulting inter-imperial vernacular—the so-called Serbian language—resists the simplifying gestures of nationalized language models when read in this way.

In the nineteenth century, linguistic traces of Ottoman imperial legacies faced opposition both from the Eastern Orthodox Church and from Obrenović, the prince of Serbia, who banned the publication of Vuk's work in Serbia. While the Habsburg empire under Joseph II vied to decouple Church-Slavonic from Russian, the Orthodox Church in turn framed Serbian vernacular as disreputable, continuing its long-standing opposition to a secularization campaign that the writer Dositej Obradović had advanced in the previous century (Neubauer 215). John Neubauer argues that Grimm considered it “a ‘strange folly’ that Serbian Church scholars should regard their spoken daily language as a bastardized Cyrillic Church language, corrupted with Turkish words that should be left for herdsmen and peasants” (218).Footnote ²⁷ The reproduction of “The Wedding of Radul Vlašić” as a Serbian poem manifests a resistance to both Christian Orthodoxy, a religion seen as outside the pale of the European Christian tradition, and, through the omission of Turkish colloquialisms in the German translation, the Ottoman hold over the Balkans. The implicit acceptance of Cyrillic script into the discourse on Weltliteratur testifies in part to an inter-imperial alignment against both the Ottoman empire and the encroaching Russian empire in the territory of Serbia. The Cyrillic script in Vuk's publications casts a new Serbian language dismissive of its purely Russian imperial influences through a revision of Church-Slavonic. Racio-religious demarcations, class, and rurality signal differences perceived in language. The scholarship on world literature that reevaluates the Eurocentrism of Goethe's references would benefit from giving more attention to this inter-imperial, linguistic history evidenced by the nation-based vernacularization and anthologizing of literature.

The inter-imperial resistances of “The Wedding of Radul Vlašić” address the influence of the Habsburg empire and the Germanic states. The Austrian authorities deployed several strategies to counteract the Ottoman hold over the Balkans and the encroaching Russian empire. As early as 1770, Peter Herrity elaborates, the Austrian empire had banned the import of Russian texts, established a Serbian press in Vienna (which printed the Serbian newspaper where Vuk would publish an article about the Serbian Uprising upon his arrival in 1813), and attempted to introduce the Latin alphabet (369). The latter in particular aggravated the Eastern Orthodox Church's belief that the non-Cyrillic vernacular would become a means to spread Catholic propaganda (369). Indeed, part of the opposition the Eastern Orthodox Church directed toward Vuk's work rested on his association with Kopitar, a Catholic Slovene and Austrian imperial censor, and his borrowed use of the letter j from the Latin alphabet (370). Liturgical opposition extended to Slavonic cultural societies like the Matica, established in 1826, which did not actively promote Vuk's ideas until the 1840s. In 1850, this support was authorized by the signing of the Vienna Agreement, or Literary Agreement, formalizing Vuk's language as the Serbo-Croat language (now Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, or BCMS).Footnote ²⁸

The establishment of the term Serbian over two previously used terms, Illyrian and Morlach, is echoed in Goethe's reference to the “Serbian poem.” One can trace its rise to the First Serbian Uprising of 1804–13, in which Vuk participated (Norris 20). After the Ottomans’ reclamation of Belgrade in 1813, Vuk joined migrations to Vienna. There, on the occasion of publishing the article about his experience in the Serbian Uprising, he met a Kopitar deeply influenced by Herder's model of “natural” and national vernaculars superimposed on populations perceived as homogeneous units (Wilson 79). Bethany Wiggin names this enduring model the “monolingual fallacy,” or the “assumption that monolingualism is ‘normal’ across time and place” (488). According to Herder, rural and illiterate communities constituted so-called authentic speakers of natural language. It is in this overtly inter-imperial context that Kopitar encouraged Vuk—the son of peasants in a small Serbian village near the Bosnian border who called himself “čovjek iz naroda” (“a man from the people”)—to collect Serbian folk songs dating as far back as the 1389 battle of Kosovo against the invading Ottomans (qtd. in Hajdarpašić 25). He also encouraged Vuk to write a new dictionary and grammar for the language in vernacular.

Although Vuk subsequently came to be known as the “Illyrian Homer,” he insisted on the designation “Serbian” against the supposed imposition of the term “Illyrian” on the nationalizing imperative (Wilson 184). The Serbian language standardized by Vuk relied on collections of epic songs curated to impress upon readers a sense of homogeneity “‘uncorrupted’ by literacy and scholarly influence” (Pavlović and Atanasovski 367). While having never visited southern Bosnia himself, he presented the “Herzegovina” dialect as the idiom “strongest in its eponymous area” but “also spoken in a far larger geographic expanse” (Hajdarpašić 23). According to Vuk, this expanse included all “who live in Herzegovina, Bosnia (both Greek and Turkish confessions), Montenegro, Dalmatia, Croatia, and [parts of] Serbia” (qtd. in Hajdarpašić 23). As reflected in “The Wedding of Radul Vlašić,” the dialect embedded Turkish-origin words that Vuk had foreignized in his Serbian Dictionary (1818) by appending an asterisk to them. Instead of designating these speakers “Turks,” using a derogatory term denoting Muslims in the Balkans, he claimed that whoever spoke the “Serbian” language was in fact “Serb” (32).Footnote ²⁹ Edin Hajdarpašić explains how Vuk categorized the poems: “Heroic (junačke) songs were supposed to be longer epic tales (of conquests, battles, deeds) and women's (ženske) were shorter lyrical songs (of love, longing, nature, etc.)” (27). Vuk's methodology thus reflected a process as much of discovery (of multilingual forms) as of invention (of monolingual homogeneity), an argument Aleksandar Pavlović and Srđan Atanasovski clarify in dialogue with the work of Eric Hobsbawm (359).

Because of the presence of multiple empires vying for power in the region, Serbian resistance constituted a particular kind of resistance—not to one but to multiple imperial and protonational formations. Multiple and varied Orientalisms consequently take shape through this simultaneous engagement with the intra-European “Serbian,” “lllyrian,” or “Morlach” on the one hand and the extra-European “Chinese” and “Persian” on the other. What John Pizer calls Goethe's “trans-European cosmopolitanism” attests to Goethe's implication in trans-European inter-imperiality (5). The texts that make up Goethe's Weltliteratur are more helpfully mapped onto empires rather than nations—the Ottoman empire in much of the Balkans, the Austrian empire in the western Balkans, the Timurid dynasty and the British empire's Persian Gulf residency (established in 1822 to prevent the Russian empire from colonizing the gulf), the Qing dynasty, Habsburg Spain, and the French empire. In the creation and circulation of nationalized epic poetry, thriving during the increasingly decentralized rule of the Ottoman empire, there is an imperial and colonial discourse shared with its neighbors more eastern still. A focus on the Serbian poem in Goethe's hands thus reveals the process through which nationalized languages with racio-religious foundations offer the transformative potential for both local agencies and inter-imperial realignments against the Ottoman empire.

Eurocentric Europe

In Recoding World Literature, Mani delineates a network of “colonial bibliomigrancy,” in which Sanskrit, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic texts were circulated and translated in the British and French empires (52). This colonial circulation relocated German literary space from the relative periphery of Western Europe, where Goethe had placed it, to the center. Examining Goethe's library, Mani describes an imperial German project of cultural acquisitions whose circulation was directed inward: “Not yet a unified nation (like Britain and France) and not an established colonial power (such as Britain, France, Spain, or Portugal), Germany becomes a major beneficiary of continued physical access to faraway societies and cultures opened through colonialisms in Asia and Africa” (65). Mani develops his argument through Goethe's reference to the unnamed Chinese novel, which distinguishes Goethe's articulation of world literature (23).Footnote ³⁰ While attempts to identify the novel remain inconclusive, the many variations of these potential identifications reflect how much recent attention has been dedicated to its implications for world literature.

Citing the overall lack of Chinese literature in Goethe's library, Mani argues that Goethe formulated world literature through “an engagement of the European center with its non-European peripheries” (52). Mani lists the following categories for literatures represented in Goethe's library, giving the number of titles in parentheses: “German (448), Greek (139), Latin (126), French (112), Italian (60), English (58), Oriental and Indian (32), Eastern European (25), Spanish and Portuguese (18), and Nordic (6)” (53). The exceptionally broad categories Goethe allotted for the diverse implications of “Oriental and Indian” and “Eastern European” remain unquestioned in Mani's account. I argue that the Orientalization of Eastern Europe legible in the logic of this list allows the Serbian poem to enter Goethe's conversation with Eckermann. The Orientalist framework out of which the phrase Weltliteratur emerges takes two forms: one extra-European, the other intra-European. The category of “non-European peripheries” envelops both the Chinese novel and the Serbian poem.

The scholarship that reevaluates the Eurocentrism of world literature would be enriched by a precise description of what it means by Europe and thus Eurocentrism. To account for the variegated contours of Europe, Manuela Boatcă offers the concept of “multiple Europes.” Anca Parvulescu elaborates:

The longue durée history of “Eastern Europe” explains this endurance, which Ezequiel Adamovsky traces to Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man). For “Slavs in the East,” Herder designated a “third space” called “östlichen Europa” (“Eastern Europe”; Adamovsky 597). In French thought, “Eastern Europe” became “Europe orientale.” Eastern Europe thus underwent a literal Orientalization whereby it became a space distinguishable from Europe.

Just as Europe needs pluralizing, so do the Balkans. To this end, Milica Bakić-Hayden proposes the term “nesting orientalisms.” The easternmost point in her tiered concept is Asia, followed by Eastern Europe and the Balkans (918). The Balkans register still other Orientalist formulations. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, Bakić-Hayden explains, those

During the period of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as Robert Lemon elaborates, “many Viennese German-speakers held that the Orient began not at the border with the Ottoman Empire, but rather at the doors of their Slavic, Jewish, and (following the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908) Muslim compatriots” (2). In this list of racio-religious demarcations, “Slavic” is a substitute for “Eastern Orthodox.” Moreover, the shifting construction of “Slavic” echoes earlier vernacularization projects that replaced “Illyrian” and “Morlach” with “Serbian.” An Orientalism that recognizes gradations attends to the possibility of such pluralized significations.

The collection, production, translation, and publication of folk poetry often witnessed shifting fields of Orientalism. In the Balkans, the circulated poetry and its attendant Orientalism construct “Serbian, Croatian or Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian or Bosnian-Herzegovinian forms and language” (Concetti 199). One may qualify these nationalized attributions further, inextricable as they are from racio-religious discourses and imperial realities and legacies. Riccardo Concetti singles out Bosnian nationalization following its annexation—as a historical inter-imperial center—by the Austrian empire because it attends to a “mission of carrying civilisation to Oriental peoples,” as described by the imperial minister of finance and administrator of Bosnia, Benjamin von Kállay (qtd. in Concetti 199).Footnote ³² Reading Mani alongside Boatcă, Parvulescu (“European Racial Triangulation” and “Old Europe”), Adamovsky, Bakić-Hayden, and especially Doyle's theories on inter-imperiality reveals the importance of distinguishing where in Europe and in which Europe the Balkans are located. While Mani contends with the profusion of binary frames in the discourse on world literature—including “recent or archaic, singular or plural, permanent or ephemeral, homogenizing or heterogenizing, disciplined or undisciplined, comparative or assimilative, universal or particular, original or in translation”—I argue that the binary “European or non-European” should be added to this list (33).

Worlds and Their Literatures

In “The Politics of World Literature,” Sanja Bahun urges scholars to acknowledge the project of world literature. Beyond a collection of literary works, Bahun explains, the project constitutes a “metaphor as well as a means of expression; a concept, a discourse, a moldable pedagogical tool, and an ‘imaginary community’; a knowledge, a practice, a stance, and an affect” (373). The word project, Bahun points out, involves projection. Both in the attempted colonial simplification of the Persian and Indian complex discussed by Mufti and in the nationalization of Serbian vernacular investigated in this essay, the concept of Weltliteratur navigates a line between “project” and “projection.”Footnote ³³

This essay has examined the project of world literature through a reading of the nationalized languages and folk songs in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Balkans, which helped construct racio-religious demarcations vis-à-vis empire. It has focused on the appropriative translational project of Weltliteratur in the case of the Serbian poem in Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. Like the Chinese novel Goethe referenced in his formulation of Weltliteratur on 31 January 1827, Vuk's poem “The Wedding of Radul Vlašić” remained unnamed. Considering the Chinese novel and the Serbian poem together—as Goethe did—reveals the unevenly applied process of creative invention in world-literary practice.

Recentering this unevenness in our conversations on world literature allows us to redescribe, pluralize, and remap the threads we continue to follow from the Goethean foundations of Weltliteratur.Footnote ³⁴ An inter-imperial analysis of the literary sphere uncovers the nesting orientalisms involved in the expansive East of Weltliteratur.Footnote ³⁵ A close reading of the Serbian poem articulates how these Easts are bound by their peripheral condition at the same time that they comparatively reference different empires, languages, and religions. Mani suggests that Goethe's references polarize the aesthetic and the historical: “The Chinese might have had thousands of novels akin to what Goethe has read, but, despite all their narrative and moralistic qualities, along with the Serbs and Calderon, they remain merely a historical reference point to Goethe's idea of world literature” (58). The circulation of these texts in a world-literary mode is deeply embedded in the imperializing projection and construction of distinct cultures within the frame of nationalized and racialized vernaculars. A relational reading—of the Chinese, the Serbian, and Calderon—decenters our notions of Eurocentrism; the binary “European and non-European” does not account for the distinctness of these worlds. While the project of world literature involves, as Mani states, a “conscious disarrangement of national literatures,” it also aids the arrangements by which these nationalized literatures were constructed in the first place (244).