Goethe traduce la “Grazia” di Elena: luce, suono, bellezza in movimento

Goethe’s Helena is treated as a thematic, linguistic and metric rewriting of the ancient tradition, undergoing a genuine metamorphosis into a modern form. It can be seen as intergeneric progressive ‘translation’ (from tragedy to satirical drama to melodrama) of an 'original' that is not given, but lingers as eidolon within the 'new' text in various shapes. Goethe, combining 'symbolically' his Farbenlehre and poetics of wiederholte Spiegelungen with theatrical phantasmagoria, puts her in a metamorphic, spectrographic series in which she herself is continually changing, according to the logoi and doxa following her appearances. He puts her then in sequence with other female figures, from Gretchen to the Mater Gloriosa, effecting out of the Helena episode the prism through which his conception of the relationship between ancient and modern, and its visual and musical reconfiguration of Ewigweibliche (understood as "grace", or beauty in motion) are refracted.