Large-scale translation movements were seminal for the development of both a modern Turkish and German national literary culture. Yet while German authors utilized their translations to posit a unique sense of cosmopolitan Germanness, Turkish authors viewed the need to translate as a sign of their literary belatedness vis-à-vis the “West.” My paper questions how comparing the Turkish history of translation to the German context can help to counter perceptions of a belated Turkish modernity and accusations of Ottoman culture as derivative to a Western model. As a case study, I examine the first Ottoman translations from German: Between 1886 and 1894, thirteen letters from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) were rendered into Ottoman by a total of five translators (Ahmet Rasim, Hüseyin Dani?, Halil Edip, Mustafa Faz?l, and one anonymous author), and published in leading literary journals of the time period. By reading these translations not simply against their “original,” but within a larger nexus of texts and cultural events, I develop a comparative model of translation as negotiation that can help to break down East/West and center/periphery dichotomies. In contrast to early Republican rhetoric, which criticized late Ottoman translation movements for their haphazardness, erroneousness and superficial adaptation of Western values, I read the Goethe translations as an important debate in practice that preceded the more theoretical literary debates of the 1897 Klâsikler Tart??mas? (Classics Debate). By placing differing translational decisions in dialogue with one another, I consider translation as an emergent form of literary criticism that expresses a form of Ottoman agency rather than belatedness. My reading of the Werther translations culminates in a discussion of Goethe’s own engagement with the Ottoman courtly poetry translated into German by the Orientalists Heinrich von Diez and Jospeh von Hammer-Purgstall. Goethe’s incorporation of Ottoman poetry into his West-östlicher Divan (1825) poses a challenge to many Ottomans’ refusal to view their own literary past as conducive to the concept of a “classic,” or as worthy of translation into Western European literary languages. At a time when Ottomans’ experimentation with new genres such as the novel led to a devaluation of Divan poetry, what did it mean for translators to view Goethe as a classical European author, when he himself valued Eastern forms of writing such as the Divan toward the end of his career?