G 66 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. OETHE seems from the time of his youth to have been attracted by the imagery of the Old Testament Scriptures, and by the descriptions it contains of Eastern life and manners, particularly with the narrative of the betrayal of Joseph by his brothers, and his subsequent career in Egypt. The intimate knowledge that he had acquired of those Scriptures is referred to by himself in the piece with which the Book of Hâfiz, the second in the West-oestlicher Divan," commences. In this he compares himself with that Persian poet with regard to the knowledge acquired by the latter of the Korân, the Bible of the Mussulmans. It begins by Hâfiz being asked why he, whose real name was Shumsood-deen (the sun of the faith), was called by the former, which signifies Preserver or Guardian in the original Persian, and on his answering that it was because he preserved ever fresh in his memory all the precepts of the Korân, the poet, Goethe, replies that he has done precisely the same with regard to the Scriptures, in spite of all denial and hindrance. He also studied through the medium of translations the Korân, as well as the works of Saadi, Hâfiz, and other Persian poets, and became so fascinated by the peculiar charms of Eastern life and its poetry, that he took to composing at various times short poems based on Oriental ideas found in different writings, sacred and profane. These poems, after going through several incomplete. editions, were finally collected together and arranged, and eventually became the "West-oestlicher Divan," which appears to have assumed its present shape in about 1827. A few selections of this work were included by Mr. Bowring in his translation of Goethe's poems, but the only complete translation ever published appears to have been one by J. Weiss, which was brought out at Boston (U.S.A.) in 1877. A good many notes were added to this translation in an Appendix, and the present translator has availed himself of a few of them in his own notes. The translation, however, is, in his opinion, far too free to give a correct idea of the original, in addition to being inaccurate in some respects. In reality, the various pieces are so full of references to local occurrences of Goethe's own life and times, that it would be quite impossible for a countryman of his own, and much more so for a foreigner, to understand them without the assistance of a commentary. The one that has been used in preparing the present translation is Düntzer's, which, although itself sometimes rather obscure, is remarkably full and useful, especially in its references to the original Arabic and Persian writers, on whose writings the ideas of many of the separate poems were based. These references have enabled the translator to compare most of the passages with the original Persian in the Gulistân of Saadi and the Ghazls of Hâfiz. In some cases German commentators differ greatly as to the meaning of some of the passages, and acknowledge that Goethe himself must have meant them to be ambiguous. The difficulty of translation is enhanced by the ruggedness of the metre in many cases, and by Goethe's having in some imitated the style of the Persian Ghazl, in which the second, fourth, sixth, and the remaining alternate lines throughout a piece end either in the same word or in the same rhyme, a measure which it would of course be impossible to follow in any foreign language. |