West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Abstract

Book Reviews Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues. Translated by Martin Bidney. Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishing, 2010. Pp. liii+468. $30.95. Entirely in the ludic mode of the author of the West-dstlicher Divan (1819, revised and expanded, 1827), the American poet Martin Bidney has journeyed east ringing the questing bell of his own caravan, issuing call and response to his brother Goethe and Goethe’s adoptive “twin,” the fourteenth-century Persian ghazalist Hafiz of Shiraz, in both translation and independent verse. This translation sets a new standard for Goethe’s Divan. Set alongside Bidney’s wit and concision, the prosody of John Whaley, whose 1974 bilingual Poems of the West and East: West-Eastern Divan [West-dstlicher Divan] (3rd ed., 1998) had greatly improved upon ear­ lier attempts, often feels stuffily overdressed. One of Goethe’s sauciest, but wisest, strophes: Trunken mussen wir alle sein! Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein; Trinkt sich das Alter wieder zu Jugend, So ist es wundervolle Tugend. Fur Sorgen sorgt das liebe Leben Und Sorgenbrecher sind die Reben. which found its finest musical adequation in Hugo Wolf’s lied bacchanal in ripping 6/8 time, becomes a real party-pooper in Whaley’s hands: To drunkenness all of us must incline! Youth is drunkenness less the wine; Age may its youth in drinking renew, Wonderful virtue so to do. Dear life for cares enough will care, And the grapes will all our cares repair. Bidney blows the dust offthe bottle, and we rediscover a nice 1819 Goethe that dances idiomatically on the happily tipsy English-language tongue: Drunk is what all of us ought to be! Youth’s being drunk without wine, you see? SiR, 52 (Summer 2013) 311 312 BOOK REVIEWS If age can drink itself back to youth, That’s wonder-virtue, too, in truth. Dear life brings worry all the time— A worry-breaker is the vine. (125) This is the tavern scene as Goethe—and Hafiz (“Wine! bring me wine, the giver of mirth!” Hafiz exults in Gertrude Bell’s delightful rendering of “From the Garden of Heaven,” one of his Divan1s early ghazals)— imagined it: the poet’s praise of the Qur’anic wine served up in Prophet Saki’s overflowing flasks, life’s weighty anxieties lifted in the light oenoatmosphere . Gone the ponderous nominal abstractions (“drunkenness”), moralisms (“must incline”), pedanticisms (“so to do”), and archaisms (“all our cares repair”). Enter the naive spirit-consumer in search not of ideas but immediate experience (“drunk”), toasting to jussive verbs (ought to be) and insisting on dialogue with his fellow revelers (“you see?”). The exam­ ples could be multiplied. At 474 pages, this is a brick of a book and includes a good deal more than “only” a translation of Goethe’s Divan. For readers not well ac­ quainted with the Divan, it offers a semester’s worth of instruction, begin­ ning with a thirty-page scholarly essay on Goethe’s relationship with Islam and including reflections on the postcolonialist theory of “Orientalism” of which Goethe has been sometimes unfairly accused. Bidney further offers his own divan in twelve books that imitate and reflect on Goethe, which he calls “Commentary Poems for Goethe’s West-dstlicher Divan” (289—468). He “comments” on the first strophe of the drinking song quoted above as follows: “Enivrez-vous!” urged Baudelaire— Emphatic he, and hortatory— “Get drunk!” On what? He didn’t care, If it but led from gloom to glory. thereby hinting at an apt connection between Baudelaire and Goethe in their use ofprovocative, often erotic or ostensibly heretical, themes and the official bourgeois outcry over it. Several of the poems in Baudelaire’s 1857 Les Fleurs du mal were famously censored by the Ministry of the Interior, Public Safety division, a condition that held for nearly a century in France; Goethe’s Divan was cited in certain quarters as evidence that the seventyyear -old had at last gone senile, a response only somewhat less outraged than at the publication just a few years before of his adulterous, partner­ swapping novel Wahlvenvandtschajicn [Elective Affinities], Sidney’s commen­ tary poems deserve the...