ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the background to the composition of the cycle, and investigates the text itself in a more textimmanent manner, in order to discover in what sense the 'Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten' may really be considered a work of intercultural significance. It argues that the cycle concerns itself on three levels with the concept of encounter. As a contribution to the work already begun on the extent to which the intercultural impulse emerges from Goethe's thinking, the chapter investigates Goethe's cycle of fourteen poems, first published in the Berliner Musenalmanach fur das Jahr 1830. In 1817, Goethe read the play Laou Seng Urh in English translation, mentioning it in a fragment later entitled 'Indische und Chinesische Dichtung'. The cycle 'Chinesisch—Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten' consists of fourteen poems. If, on the intercultural level, the 'Chinesisch—Deutsche Jahres- und Tages-zeiten' stages an encounter between German and Chinese cultures, it is equally about an encounter on the interpersonal level.
