Three Translations from the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum: “Preliminary Tasks of Comparative Literature, Part III: Decaglotism”; “Laws of Comparative Literary Research”; and “Goethe’s World Literature”

The ACLU’s mission statement for the new field of comparative literature—“Vorläufige Aufgaben der vergleichenden Litteratur”—was serialized across three issues of Acta Comparationis (parts I and II appearing in 1877, with part III appearing in 1878). The third part of the text appears here in full for the first time in English translation. Parts I and II were first translated into English as “Present Tasks of Comparative Literature” by Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H. Rhein for their anthology Comparative Literature: The Early Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973, 53–62). Schulz and Rhein’s translation has been reproduced in more recent anthologies: see, for example, The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, edited by David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, 41–49); and World Literature: A Reader, edited by Theo D’Haen, Cesar Dominguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013, 18–22)....