A 2011 Albatros reprint cover depiction of DieWahlverwandtschaften.
In human chemistry, DieWahlverwandtschaften is the original German title of German polymath Johann Goethe’s 1809 physical chemistry based novella Elective Affinities(most common English rendition), the terms breaking down as Die [The] + Wahlverwandtschaft [Elective Affinity] + en [s]. As Claudia Brodsky comments on the subject of language translations attempts of the original title: [1]
“The attempt to identify the equivalent of ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ in another language makes evident a semantic difficulty already present in its ‘original form’.”
See EA-IAD: title decoding for further discussion on this "semantic difficulty".
References 1. Brodsky, Claudia. (1982). “The Coloring of Relations: Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Farbenlehre” (abs), MLN, 97(5): 1147-79.
