Working to improve mutual understanding between the Middle East and the West
Working to improve mutual understanding between the Middle East and the West
£20.00
A Lyrical Dialogue between East & West
edited by Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson
Format: Royal Hardback
Published: June 2019
Pages: 187
ISBN: 9781909942288
A unique publication celebrating original poetry and poetic translation
Published in honour of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the 200th anniversary of the first publication of his West-Eastern Divan (1819), A New Divan contains outstanding new poems by twenty-four leading poets, twelve from the East and twelve from the West, and presents a truly international poetic dialogue inspired by the culture of the Other and Goethe’s late, great work. Writing in Arabic, English, French, German, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, and Turkish, each pair of poets has responded to one of the themes of the twelve books of Goethe’s Divan. Working either directly with the original poets or via a bridge translation, the twenty-two English-language poets have created poems that draw on the poetic forms and cultures of the poets taking part. Three pairs of essays enhance and complement the poems, mirroring Goethe’s original ‘Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan’.
Bill Swainson is a freelance editor and literary consultant. In 2015 he was awarded an OBE for services to literary translation.
Dr Barbara Schwepcke is the founder of Gingko and the chair of its board of trustees. In 2003 she founded Haus Publishing.
THE POETS
Adonis Khaled Mattawa
Khaled Mattawa
Abbas Beydoun Bill Manhire
Durs Grünbein Matthew Sweeney
Iman Mersal Elaine Feinstein
Homero Aridjis Kathleen Jamie
Amjad Nasser Fady Joudah
Don Paterson
Reza Mohammadi Nick Laird
Antonella Anedda Jamie McKendrick
Fatemeh Shams Dick Davis
Gilles Ortlieb Sean O’Brien
Mourid Barghouti George Szirtes
Jaan Kaplinski Sasha Dugdale
Nujoom al-Ghanem Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Raoul Schrott Paul Farley
Mohammed Bennis Sinéad Morrissey
Aleš Šteger Brian Henry
Gonca Özmen Jo Shapcott
Angélica Freitas Tara Bergin
Hafez Mousavi Daisy Fried
Clara Janés Lavinia Greenlaw
Fadhil Al-Azzawi Jorie Graham
Jan Wagner Robin Robertson
THE ESSAYISTS
Sibylle Wentker Rajmohan Gandhi
Robyn Creswell Narguess Farzad
Stefan Weidner Kadhim J. Hassan
Click here to learn about the complete, annotated new translation of Goethe’s original West-Eastern Divan by Eric Ormsby, including Goethe’s ‘Notes and Essays’ & the unpublished poems.
A New Divan is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
| Weight | 0.600 kg |
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Publisher’s Note
Foreword by Daniel Barenboim
Foreword by Mariam C. Said xvi
POEMS
The Poet
Adonis / Khaled Mattawa
Khaled Mattawa
Hafiz
Abbas Beydoun / Bill Manhire 8 Durs Grünbein / Matthew Sweeney
Love
Iman Mersal / Elaine Feinstein
Homero Aridjis / Kathleen Jamie
Reflections
Reza Mohammadi / Nick Laird
Antonella Anedda / Jamie McKendrick
Ill-Humour
Amjad Nasser / Fady Joudah
Don Paterson
Wisdom
Fatemeh Shams / Dick Davis 50 Gilles Ortlieb / Sean O’Brien
The Tyrant
Mourid Barghouti / George Szirtes
Jaan Kaplinski / Sasha Dugdale
Suleika
Nujoom Alghanem / Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Raoul Schrott / Paul Farley
The Cup-Bearer
Mohammed Bennis / Sinéad Morrissey
Aleš Šteger / Brian Henry
Parables
Gonca Özmen / Jo Shapcott
Angélica Freitas / Tara Bergin
Faith
Hafez Mousavi / Daisy Fried
Clara Janés / Lavinia Greenlaw
Paradise
Fadhil Al-Azzawi / Jorie Graham
Jan Wagner / Robin Robertson
ESSAYS
Sibylle Wentker: Bringing Persia to Germany.
Joseph von Hammer and Hafiz
Rajmohan Gandhi: Goethe and ‘the East’ of Today
Robyn Creswell: Playing a Part: Imru’ al-Qays in English
Narguess Farzad: Hafiz and the Challenges of Translating Persian Poetry into English
Stefan Weidner: The New Tasks of the Translator Kadhim J. Hassan: On the Translation of
European Poetry into Arabic Culture
Notes on the poems
Notes on the essays
Editors’ Note 166 Acknowledgements Biographical notes
Index of poets
Index of poems
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Hafiz, Goethe and A New Divan
It all started with Goethe’s poem ‘Gingko Biloba’, which the late Anthea Bell beautifully translated in memory of Werner Mark Linz when the pain felt at the loss of this inspirational man was still raw, and which appears as the epigraph to this book.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sent this poem to his beloved friend Marianne von Willemer as a token of his affection. He pasted two dried, crossed leaves from this ancient tree below the three stanzas and dated it 15 September 1815. Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet and polymath, natural scientist, statesman and true cosmopolite, had picked the Gingko leaf as a symbol of hope, long life and, above all, deep affection. The poem was his ode to friendship and symbolised the union between old and young, man and woman, human and the Divine, literature and scholarship, East and West – a union which in his mind was inseparable.
The poem became part of his West-Eastern Divan, which Goethe was inspired to write when he read the first German translation of the divan composed by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz. Goethe called Hafiz his ‘twin’ and decided to enter into a lyrical dialogue with ‘the Other’. In Islamic cultures divan means a collection of poems and Goethe proceeded to assemble his own divan of twelve books of poetry, calling them nameh, the Persian word for ‘epic poem’. He added a second part, ‘Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan’, which included a section on a ‘Prospective Divan’. Considering his own Divan ‘incomplete’, it was his suggestion of how a divan might be attempted by poets and scholars of the future.
The West-Eastern Divan, published in 1819, was Goethe’s very personal attempt to broaden the horizons of readers both ignorant and fearful of the Islamic world. From the time of the Persian Wars the Orient had been seen as alien, as a threat to the West – a threat, how- ever, that was central to the formation of Western identity.
Two empty chairs, cut from one single block of granite, stand in Weimar, facing each other. They represent Goethe and Hafiz, divided by centuries and cultures, but united by poetry, which is woven into the carpet-like bronze base. The German president Joachim Rau, who with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Khatami inaugurated the monument, chose the following lines from the West-Eastern Divan:
Know yourself and in that instant Know the Other and see therefore Orient and Occident
Cannot be parted for ever more
‘To everything there is a season!’ These words from the Book of Ecclesiastes open the scholarly essays that form part of the West- Eastern Divan. Today we face another era in which the West feels threatened by Islam, by the ‘Other’, by the unknown, which, whilst understanding very little about what this means, is all too often equated with religious fundamentalism. ‘To everything there is a season!’, Goethe said, and the season now seems right to attempt a divan for our times: a New Divan.
Thus, on 15 September 2015 – exactly two hundred years after Goethe sent his poem to Marianne – flanked by Narguess Farzad and Joachim Sartorius, my advisors of the first hour, I outlined the roadmap of this ambitious endeavour. I mainly addressed my words to people in the audience without whom this project would never have come to fruition: Bill Swainson, my co-editor of this volume, and Mena Mark Hanna, the Dean of the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin, where the two- hundredth anniversary celebrations will culminate.
We would invite twenty-four leading poets – twelve from the ‘East’ and twelve from the ‘West’ – to metaphorically take a seat on the empty chairs in Weimar and continue the lyrical dialogue Goethe started with Hafiz 200 years ago. In addition six essayists would be invited to explore
the differences and similarities between Eastern and Western poetry and discuss the challenges of literary and cultural translation. Their contributions to this volume enhance and complement the poems, and mirror Goethe’s original ‘Notes and Essays for a Better Under- standing of the West-Eastern Divan’.
On the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the West-Eastern Divan, the ‘Dichter und Denker’, the poets, scholars and translators, will assemble at the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin for a three-day festival; Gingko will not only bring out a new bilingual edition of the West-Eastern Divan but also this volume, of which the German edition is published by Suhrkamp. The festival will be a celebration of poetry and music, drawing on the interwoven traditions of one art form inspiring the other and one culture enriching another. It is our firm hope that A New Divan will continue the mission of the West-Eastern Divan, that of trying to bridge the perceived divide between Orient and Occident. The greatest accolade of the two- hundredth anniversary of the West-Eastern Divan, however, would be if this lyrical dialogue, which Goethe started with Hafiz, were to continue for another 200 years.
Barbara Haus Schwepcke London, 18 March 2019
‘The multilingual delights of A New Divan, published 200 years after Goethe’s, are inspired by the inspiration Goethe took from Hafiz, and his passionate vision of common humanity across cultural difference. The editors, publishers expert in translated poetry and fiction, summoned more than 50 poets, translators and scholars, commissioned new poems in English, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Slovenian, and asked English-language poets to make versions of them. Twenty-four poets — 12 from the east, 12 from the west — respond to Goethe and Hafiz, and also to the east-west relations of today. Six brilliant essayists meditate on the process, nature and aims, past and present, of translation between east and west.’
– Ruth Padel, Financial Times
‘…The Gingko poets seem to use the Divan not as a bustling street market of imagery but as a lens to look at our times’.
– Brian Morton, PN Review
‘…The volume enacts a meeting of West and East very much in Goethe’s spirit.’
– Ritchie Robertson, TLS
‘…How exhilarating and enjoyable it is to read a book that combines such strikingly different kinds of artistic excellence and such diverse perspectives with the underlying coherence that comes from the shared reference to Goethe’s original cycle.’
– Edmund Prestwich, Acumen
‘Goethe believed an East-West dialogue would continue long after him, and this was the challenge taken up by Schwepcke when she announced a new divan on September 15, 2015, the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s letter to Willemer. Schwepcke recruited Swainson, a renowned editor in literary translation who has worked with writers such as Amin Maalouf, Juan Gabriel, Delphine de Vigan and Matthew Sweeney […] They believed translated poems should both reflect the original work and stand on their own merit. A New Divan has the Arabic, Farsi, Turkish or Slovenian poem printed across the page from its English version. Poets were assigned themes that had been used by Goethe as titles for the 12 books in West-Eastern Divan, including The Poet, Love, Faith, Paradise, Proverbs and The Tyrant. “The challenge was to commission new poems from the best poets we could persuade to take part,” says Swainson. “They had either to be familiar with Goethe or to respond to his ideas. We wanted them to speak to the world we are in now.”
– Gareth Smyth, The National
‘UK-based publisher Gingko has produced an admirable and elegant volume that is also an act of homage: A New Divan: A lyrical dialogue between East & West (£20) that is itself a celebration of artistic sensibility transcending geographical and ideological or religious boundaries. Edited by Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson the volume contains poems by 24 authors, East and West, in nearly a dozen different languages, with English translation on the facing pages. The act of translation is itself at the heart of the project, as most of the poems in English are renderings by an English mother-tongue poet based on a more literal translation by a third party. To emphasize the importance of the nature and art of translation even more, there are three essays (among a few others) which follow the poems and which give added food for thought. The poems themselves are to be read and reread, some raising a smile, others a wince of pain, all inviting the reader to enter into the poet’s state of consciousness. Beautiful, certainly; troubling at times, particularly when one considers the traumas that the whole of the Middle East and North Africa has been going through in recent years. I think Goethe would have been intrigued, and I hope Hafez would have been proud — knowing that seven centuries after his birth, under the fiery reign of Timur/Tamerlane, his influence persists.’
– Jonathan Fryer
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