Goethe and Hafiz: Poetry and history in the West-oestlicher Divan

"Poetry and History in the West-oestlicher Divan" investigates Goethe's Divan from both an intellectual-historical and a textual perspective. The Divan, as this study argues, constitutes a turning point in the history of poetic subjectivity in German poetry. By incorporating the imagery and compositional principles of Persian poetry, Goethe invents a new possibility of poetic enunciation. In exploring the intellectual-historical significance of the Divan, this study considers Goethe's conception of history both in relation to Hegel's philosophy of history as well as to the notion of progress throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, this work focuses on Goethe's critical stance toward a linear notion of historical progress. The temporality of the poetic event in Goethe's West-oestlicher Divan, as this study contends, is constituted by the contemporaneousness of memory and the moment, of the past and the present.;The thesis further demonstrates how the rise of the aesthetics and the transition from a theological to a secular-humanistic conception of history and humanity positively influence the reception of non-European literatures at the end of the eighteenth century. This study argues that the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz owes his textual presence in the Divan to a cross-cultural and a cross-temporal poetic vision that has its roots in the European Enlightenment. Hence, poetic appropriation is viewed both as a result of and an alternative to colonial practice. Goethe's affinity with Hafiz, as this study argues, resides both in Hafiz's anti-dogmatic tendencies of thought and his worldliness.;The analysis of the works of Sir William Jones (1746-1794) and Josef Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), translators of Oriental poetry into English and German, elaborates on how translation involves not only the transfer but also the transformation of the 'original'. In addition, by incorporating theories of translation since the eighteenth century and thereby examining the notion of fidelity in translation, this analysis elucidates how the practice of translation affects the language and literary conventions of the translator by affording the possibility of new compositional forms, expanding literary 'modes of signification', and enhancing the flexibility of thought.