West-Eastern Divan. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      FOREWORD

      GOETHE'S last important body of lyrical poetry, the West-Eastern Divan, is known to very few English readers. Many persons who are familiar with Faust and Iphigenie and the ballads have never opened this collection of verse. Even in Germany the Divan, as a whole, is much less known than it deserves to be. There are excuses to be pleaded for such neglect. The Divan is the product of Goethe's Indian summer of art-life, the rejuvenescence that came to him when he was sixty-five; and Indian summer has not the mighty ravishment of spring. In this the marks of old age are evident in thought and feeling, in style and diction. Few of its poems are quite equal individually to the most enchanting of Goethe's earlier lyrics; some are obscure even to German commentators; some require for their comprehension an acquaintance with Goethe's scientific ideas; the play of sexagenarian love-making in the book of Zuleika may be easily misunderstood.

      Yet the Divan has had, as a whole, worthy lovers and diligent students. Hegel placed it in the forefront of modern poetry; Heine learnt from it some of his lyrical manner, and wondered how such ethereal lightness as that of certain of its poems was possible in the German language. It was the subject of Düntzer's laborious scholarship – it was carefully edited by Loeper. No one has done so much to further a true appreciation of it as Conrad Burdach, and it was the subject of his Festvortrag at the General Meeting of the German Goethe Society in June 1896.

      My husband, whose words I have here in part reproduced, says in continuation, in his Essay on "Goethe's West-Eastern Divan" (published in Essays Modern and Elizabethan, J. M. Dent & Sons): "I follow the guidance of that excellent scholar and would aspire to come with a long interval after Conrad Burdach. Having previously known the poems well, I took with me last summer (1907) Loeper's edition to Cornwall, and found that the game of translating Goethe's poetry into what aimed at being English verse could be played on the wind-blown cliffs of the Lizard, or in the shadow of some fantastic cave of Serpentine, to the accompaniment of the Western waves. Even to fail in such a game was to enter into the joy of l'amour de l' impossible.

      " By slow degrees the whole of Goethe's silver arabesque work was transmuted into Cornish or British tin. But the foiled translator had at least to scrutinize every line of the original and encounter every difficulty. And there were some things so wise, so humane, so large in their serene benignity, that they could not be wholly spoilt even by a traduttore, who at least, as regards the sense of each poem, strove not to be a traditore."

      Lay readers who happen to have at hand that volume of Edward Dowden's Essays will do well to set aside this Foreword and seek their information about the Divan in that Essay as a whole. (I may mention here that it has been translated into German and published in the " Erdgeist " by Herr Paul Tausig of Vienna, translator of other writings of E. Dowden.)

      For readers who cannot immediately refer to that Essay for information, if they need such, I give here for guidance some of the facts noted herein.

      Goethe, from his early years, had been attracted to the poetry of the East. In the period of his youthful Titanism he had chosen Mohammed as the central figure of a dramatic poem, and had prepared himself for the task – never to be accomplished – by a study of the Koran.

      In 1774 he informed his friend Merck that he had translated Solomon's "Song of Songs,"the most glorious collection of love-songs ever fashioned by God." At Weimar he had translated one of the pre-Islamic poems of the Mu'allakat. He had been charmed by the Indian drama Sakuntula. Roses from Saadi's Garden and Jami's Loves of Laila and Majnun had introduced him to Persian poetry.

      But it was not until after the publication of Joseph von Hammer's celebrated translation of the Divan of Hafiz in 1812 that the great German poet became, as it pleased him to imagine himself, a wandering merchant in the East, trucking his wares for those of Persian singers. He speaks of himself in this character in the dissertation which follows the verse of the West-Eastern Divan.

      Is Goethe here only assuming an Eastern garb? No he interprets in his own way a tendency of the time. The dominating classical influences, Greek and Italian, had waned and the new romantic literature was turning to the East. But the East of Goethe's imagination was not the East of the English poets who had looked Eastward: Southey, Shelley or Byron. From Byron's East, indeed, it was as remote as possible.

      If he became a Romantic poet again it was in his own original and incomparable fashion. He felt profoundly hostile to the neo-Catholic party in the Romantic School, and in the Divan some shrewd thrusts are delivered against them by the old Pagan – the old Pagan who was in spirit more religious than they who had found, like Hafiz, the secret of being " selig " without being "fromm," which fact they never could admit nor understand.

      Goethe turned to the East as to a refuge from the strife of tongues, as well as from the public strife of European swords. There the heavens were boundless, and God – the one God – seemed to preside over the sand- waste. There Islam – submission to God's will– seemed to be the very rule of life.

      Before