Poems for the Consideration of Our Age

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...who occasionally made the work more difficult for the translator. His style of writing is a delicate web of allusions—partly to books that he read, partly to the affairs that he saw and conducted, and partly to characters and the secret spirit of his age, which he understood with piercing insight. Just as it is much easier to bring to light general truths and speculations (which perhaps seem to belong to all ages precisely because they are suited to none) than those subtle, individual observations that spring from innermost feeling and from the intuitive contemplation of the spirit of things around us, so this work becomes even more difficult in the style that Andreä chose. With him, everything becomes allegory original: "Einkleidung," literally "clothing" or "dressing up" an idea in a literary form and poetry; his wit strikes subtly, but