Goethe’s West-Oestlicher Divan: An Attempt of Interpretation

Abstract

This article is based on the analysis of the commentaries to Goethe’s West-Oestlicher Divan for a new bilingual edition; the purpose of these commentaries was to explore the inner wholeness of a book created at the boundary of Eastern and Western cultures, and also its metapoetical plot. The problem of the commenting is that the whole plot is “beaded” on the frame of Eastern poets’ quotes and images – precise, minimally changed, retold, versified, often given without quote marks, as if “dissolved” in Goethe’s works. These quotes are fit into various contexts and create a special “evasive” book form, where the meaning of a word “blinks” from between separate words, voids, cycles, finding its way into Goethe’s paraphenomenal symbolic reality that is one for the poetic word-symbol, nature, East and West.

Keywords

• goethe
• west-oestlicher divan
• oriental poetry
• hafiz
• word
• symbol