Book Reviews

Summary

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. West-Eastern Divan. Complete, Annotated New Translation, including the “Notes and Essays” & the Unpublished Poems. Translated by Eric Ormsby. Berkeley, CA: Gingko, 2019. xlii + 595 pp.

Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson, eds. A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East & West. Berkeley, CA: Gingko, 2019. xvii + 187 pp.

These two complementary volumes were published in 2019 in connection with the 200th anniversary of Goethe's West-östlicher Divan. Schwepcke and Swainson's A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East & West is composed of two parts. The first part consists of twenty-four poems by twenty-four poets from both “East” and “West” who were invited to enter into a dialogue with Goethe on themes of his Divan: namely, the poet, love, the tyrant, faith, and paradise. The poems appear in their original language with facing-page English translations. The second part of A New Divan contains six exciting essays that examine issues of translation involving both East and West, including those raised by Goethe in the Divan's “Noten und Abhandlungen” (“Notes and Essays”). These essays help to situate Eric Ormsby's prose translation of Goethe's entire Divan (including the “posthumous” poems and the “Notes and Essays”).

Ormsby's bilingual Divan reproduces Goethe's original poems and, on facing pages, an English translation in paragraph form without lineation. For the poems, Ormsby relied on the two-volume Hendrik Birus edition of the Divan (1994/2010), and for the “Noten und Abhandlungen” (English text only) on Max Rychner's edition (1963). Although Ormsby studied in Germany, his scholarly background is in Islamic studies. Thus, he knows the languages in question, differentiating, for instance, the poetic forms in Goethe's Divan from the inexhaustible prosody of Hafiz's Persian. His familiarity with the commentaries on Hafiz’s work and on the “Eastern” context of the traditions on which Hafiz himself drew (and Hammer and Goethe in turn) is evident in accompanying footnotes that, among other things, annotate Arabic, Persian, or Turkish references to unfamiliar persons and places, while also referring to “Goethe's own sources in the German translations he used.”

The introduction informs in short order of the background of Goethe's interest in Persian poetry, including pre-Hafiz (William Jones's translation of Arabic poetry; pre-Islamic odes; knowledge of Orientalist scholarship). Alongside themes Goethe himself identified in his Divan, Ormsby adds three others: song itself, longing, and the “Sufi vision of personal transformation.”