Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. 1 I have numbered the poems in the Divan for ease of reference, and in this introduction refer to them by title and number. Untitled poems are referred to by number only.
2. 2 See the notes to Poem 102 for details on how Goethe transformed a prose translation from the Arabic into a powerful original poem.
3. 3 See below pp. 350–5.
4. 4 Karl Otto Conrady, Goethe: Leben und Werk (Munich and Zürich: Artemis und Winkler, 1994), p. 877.
5. 5 Goethe had, of course, expressed this theme, decades earlier, most famously in ‘Mignon’, incorporated in his 1795 novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,/ Weiß, was ich leide!’ (Only he who knows longing/ knows what I suffer).
6. 6 For a good discussion of these concepts, see the classic work by R.C. Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
7. 7 Horace, Odes III:1: ‘I hate the common crowd and keep them away’ (Odi profanum vulgus et arceo…) – a sentiment that Goethe fully shared.
8. 8 Thus, Matthew 10:39, I Corinthians 15:36, and most famously, John 12:24: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’
9. 9 Faust I, line 1112.
10. 10 Cited by Goethe in ‘Notes and Essays’; see below p. 384.
11. 11 For example, by Ferruccio Busoni, Robert Schumann and, especially, Hugo Wolf; for details of these, see Richard Stokes, The Book of Lieder (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 602–9.
12. 12 In the introduction and notes I give his name (and those of other Muslim figures) in the standard transliteration with full diacritics but in the text I follow Goethe in omitting the diacritics.
13. 13 Persian, like Turkish, has no explicit markers of grammatical gender so the beloved may be seen as either male or female; however, it is usually clear from the descriptions that a handsome boy is meant.
14. 14 According to legend, these pre-Islamic odes were written in letters of gold and suspended before the Ka῾ba; there are usually seven such odes in the early anthologies but sometimes ten are given.
15. 15 His own calligraphy appears on the illuminated cartouche he designed for the first edition of the Divan, with his Arabic title: (‘The Eastern Divan by a Western Author’). For examples of Goethe’s exercises in writing Arabic and other scripts (including Hebrew, Syriac and Sanskrit), see Hendrik Birus, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-östlicher Divan (second revised edition; Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2010), vol. 1, pp. 696–711 and vol. 2, pp. 1866–71. [Hereinafter = Birus]
16. 16 The German scholar Katharina Mommsen has devoted her career to illuminating Goethe’s involvement with the Islamic world and its literature; see, among her many other works, Goethe und die arabische Welt (Frankfurt: Insel, 1988) and Goethe und der Islam, ed. Peter Anton von Arnim (Frankfurt; Insel, 2001).
17. 17 As Edward G. Browne, the great historian of Persian literature, aptly notes, ‘of the people of Persia’, that ‘it is common enough to meet with persons who in the course of a single day will alternately present themselves as pious Muslims, heedless libertines, confirmed sceptics and mystical pantheists, or even incarnations of the Deity,’ in A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), vol. 3, p. 299.
18. 18 The meticulous and sometimes fantastical commentary of Sūdī may be read in the English prose translation by H. Wilberforce Clarke, lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers (Bengal), of the Divan-i Ḥāfiẓ, in two volumes (Calcutta: Government of India Central Printing Office, 1891), and available on the internet at archive.org; a paperback reprint is also available. For reliable English translations of Ḥāfiẓ, see the verse translations of Dick Davis, Faces of Love (London: Penguin, 2012) and the prose versions of Peter Avery, The Collected Lyrics of Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz (Cambridge: Archetype, 2007). For an entertaining discussion of the difficulties of translating Ḥāfiẓ, see Dick Davis, ‘On Not Translating Ḥāfiẓ’, The New England Review 25:1–2 (2004), pp. 310–8. As the second citation above shows, Davis has repented of his decision not to translate Ḥāfiẓ.
19. 19 These are Poems 108, 110, 135, 138 and 143; two other poems, 114 and 124, are sometimes ascribed to her as well.
20. 20 Further to this, see footnote 50 in Book 8.
21. 21 Goethe had fun with his rhymes. Among many possible examples, see Poem 121 where he rhymes ‘Rabbi’ with ‘Mutanabbi’ – a linkage that probably would have pleased neither.
22. 22 On this practice, and its condemnation, see Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in the Stories of Farīd al-Dīn ῾Aṭṭār, translated by John O’Kane (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 470–2.
23. 23 For a sense of the complexity of Persian prosody, see the definitive work of Finn Thiesen, A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982).
24. 24 For an overview of early Arabic poetry, see my essay ‘Questions for Stones’ in Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation (Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2001), pp. 211–31.
25. 25 Translated by Gabriel Levin in The Maltese Dreambook (London: Anvil, 2008), pp. 53–8. For a superb discussion of the early Arabic poetry, see also the same author’s essay ‘Who Keened over the Bones of Dead Encampments: On the Hanging Odes of Arabia’ in The Dune’s Twisted Edge: Journeys in the Levant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 67–91.
26. 26 In classical Persian verse, a line (bayt) is divided into two half-lines, or hemistichs.
27. 27 The poem begins ‘In the poorest little fiddle the harmony of the whole lies hidden’ (In der ärmsten kleinen Geige liegt die Harmonie des Alls verborgen) and continues with the rhyme on ‘hidden’ (verborgen) throughout; cf. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ausgewählte Werke in zwei Bänden, edited by Rudolf Hirsch. Bd. 1: Gedichte und Dramen (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1957), p. 7. Von Hofmannsthal also wrote one of the best appreciations of the Divan in his 1913 essay ‘Goethes “West-Östliches Divan”‘ included in the aforementioned Ausgewählte Werke, Bd. 2: Erzählungen und Aufsätze, pp. 563–7.
28. 28 Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (New York: Norton, 2003). The text cited here is from the website www.poetryfoundation.org.
29. 29 On the nature of Semitic languages and on their study in Europe, see S.D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: their Contacts through the Ages (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 19–32, for an illuminating discussion.
30. 30 To get a sense of Goethe’s originality in his conception of the Divan, compare Les Orientales of Victor Hugo, published in 1829, ten years after the first edition of the Divan. Though Hugo makes full use of a panoply of ‘Oriental’ motifs, his poems, however beautiful, have the effect of pastiches rather than of any genuine assimilation, and transformation, of his exotic material; nor does he attempt to strike any balance between East and West, as Goethe does.
31. 31 Goethe’s opinions on orthography and punctuation constitute a some-what vexed subject. In general, he seems to have been studiously indifferent to standard spelling, often (as he himself remarks), spelling a word three different ways in the same text. In the works he dictated this created no particular problems; however, he could be strict and rather arbitrary about orthography when he checked the transcriptions. Punctuation is another matter; he seems to have had a personal aversion to the comma. And in the usage of the day, the semicolon was often understood as a colon, a practice he sometimes observed. His patent inconsistency may account for the marked differences in the editions of 1819 and 1827 with regard to both spelling and punctuation. More than once he cited the dictum of his older contemporary, the poet and novelist Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813): ‘Religion and punctuation are private matters!’

THE BOOK OF THE SINGER

1. 1 Splinter apart: The first two lines of the poem evoke a Europe in turmoil during the Napoleonic wars. Against this Goethe sets his highly idealised vision of a pure and unchanging East to which he will flee in imagination. (Goethe never visited the Middle East.)
2. 2 Khidr: The figure of Khidr, mentioned in Qur’ān, sūra 18 (though not by name), is a prophet in Islamic tradition. The name ‘Khidr’ (related to the word for ‘green’ in Arabic) led to his designation as ‘the Green One’. Grass springs up about his feet in barren lands; he is the keeper of the spring of eternal life. He is sometimes depicted as a young man with a white beard, to emphasise both his everlasting youthfulness and his venerability.
3. 3 Purity and righteousness: These are key concepts in the later Goethe’s thought. He sees the East (by which he generally means Persian and Arab culture) as a repository of traditional values; for Goethe, the East remains connected with the earliest ages and is therefore purer than the West.
4. 4 Heaven’s teachings: An allusion to the Islamic belief that the Qur’ān was transmitted directly to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel and is held to be God’s own word, sacrosanct and immutable.
5. 5 A spoken word: The spoken word enjoyed high prestige in classical Islamic culture, as it had in antiquity. The Qur’ān itself was communicated orally to Muhammad and not committed to written form until a later date; in traditional Muslim belief Muhammad was said to have been illiterate, thus emphasising the miraculous nature of the revelation. Oral communication was considered superior to the written word; an oath or a vow, for example, had to be spoken to be valid. It might seem odd for Goethe to espouse this view since his fame rested on his writings but his emphasis here signals the prominence of song throughout the Divan.
6. 6 The mule-guide: The poems of Ḥāfiẓ enjoy undiminished popularity in Iran. They are often sung to musical accompaniment. Goethe’s evocation of the muledriver is not fanciful. The poems also serve as everyday oracles, the celebrated fāl-i Ḥāfiẓ, whereby a verse is chosen at random as a form of fortune-telling, just as the verses of Virgil were used in the medieval West (the Sortes Virgilianae).
7. 7 Hafiz: The great Persian poet Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz (1326–89 ce), known as Ḥāfiẓ, is the guiding spirit of the Divan.
8. 8 Houris: These are the voluptuous consorts traditionally promised to the faithful in paradise. The curl or ringlet of the beloved’s hair and its wafted fragrance are standard tropes in classical Persian poetry, often evoked by Ḥāfiẓ.
9. 9 Talisman: The word comes from Arabic ṭilasm (Persian ṭilism), derived from Greek télesma, and denotes a charm, usually made of precious stones and engraved with mystical characters to ward off spells.
10. 10 Amulets: These were written on paper, often containing verses from the Qur’ān, and worn as scapulars around the neck and shoulders.
11. 11 Abraxas: These charms were known as ‘Abraxas-stones’. They were inscribed with mystical symbols, reminiscent of ancient Egyptian symbology, and containing the name Abraxas. The name refers to an entity in the thought of the Christian gnostic Basilides (fl. 130 ce) who taught in Alexandria and interpreted the Gospels in mystical and cryptic fashion. Abraxas represented the highest power in his system which was vigorously denounced by such early Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria. The mention of Abraxas in the Divan indicates theological nonsense.
12. 12 Signet Ring: The signet ring (khātim or khātam in Arabic), inscribed with the owner’s personal seal, and used as a mark of identification; the seals are often found on the flyleaf of books as a kind of ex libris. Goethe’s line ‘the highest meaning in the strictest space’ expresses Goethe’s guiding poetic principle.
13. 13 Openmindedness (Freisinn): Liberality in outlook forms a continuing motif in the Divan; it is a trait Goethe prized especially in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ who expressed contempt for ‘those who hug the shore’.
14. 14 The poem echoes certain consistent themes in old Arabic poetry. In the classical ode (qaṣīda), the poet often brags about plunging into the desert on a noble mount. He is scornful of those who keep to their homes.
15. 15 He has set the stars for you: An allusion to Qur’ān 6:97: ‘It is He who made the stars, so that they can guide you when land and sea are dark.’
16. 16 Talismans: Further to ‘Tokens of Blessing’ (Poem 2), these five stanzas are meant to represent the inscriptions incised on charms.
17. 17 To God belongs…: These famous lines allude to Qur’ān 2:142: ‘East and West belong to God. He guides whomever He will to the right way.’
18. 18 Hundred names: In traditional Islamic doctrine God possesses ninetynine ‘most beautiful names’ and Allah makes 100. They are recited when telling the beads on the Muslim ‘rosary’ (misbaḥa).
19. 19 going astray: Allusion to the first sūra of the Qur’ān (1:6): ‘Guide us to the straight path, the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.’
20. 20 breathing: Goethe took this notion from his reading of another great Persian poet, Sa‛dī (c. 1200–90), in von Hammer’s translation. At the very beginning of his Gulistān (Rose Garden), Sa‛dī writes, ‘Every breath that goes in is an extension of life; and when it comes out it is a relief to the individual. Therefore, in every breath there are two benefits, and for each and every benefit thanks are necessary.’ (Wheeler M. Thackston trans., The Gulistan of Sa‛di (Bethesda: Ibex Publishers, 2017), p. 1.)
21. 21 you thank God…: In his Gespräche mit Goethe (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1984), p. 363, Johann Peter Eckermann notes that he recited these last two lines ‘in the stillness of his heart’, on 28 August 1830, after hearing the good news of a friend’s son’s recovery from an accident. It is obvious that Eckermann saw the lines as a form of silent prayer.
22. 22 Four graces: Goethe took the notion of these four graces from his reading of Jean Chardin’s Voyage en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient (1735), in which the French traveller writes, ‘The Arabs say that God has favoured them with four graces above all other peoples: a turban, which creates a better appearance than the crowns of kings, a tent that is more beautiful than any house, swords that protect them better than other people’s castles and fortresses, and finally, poems which far surpass the writings and books of the people around them.’
23. 23 shawl: The shawl is embroidered with floral motifs and the flowers convey a ‘language’ that lovers understand; see Goethe’s discussion in his ‘Notes and Essays’ (p. 422–6). The girl behaves properly despite her eloquent shawl and so is described as ‘hold’, a resonant German word for which there is no single English translation. Goethe’s younger contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin in one of his late lyrics addresses swans by a lake as ‘Ihr holden Schwäne’ and it is hard to know just how to translate this (You gracious swans, You pure and noble swans …)’. And there are Heine’s famous lines: ‘Du bist wie eine Blume,/ so hold und schön und rein’ (You are like a flower, so good and beautiful and pure, as Peter Branscombe translates it; and yet, ‘good’, though correct, doesn’t convey the rich associations of the word).

    Goethe sings the flowers on her embroidered shawl as though reading them like musical notes, as explained in Birus, vol. 2, pp. 913–4.

24. 24 lessons: The poet can offer his listeners not only beautiful flowers but plants that are useful too: his ethical precepts and advice.
25. 25 In these quatrains Goethe sets out a sort of programme for the Divan – and for poetry in general. The number four had special significance for him (as in ‘Four Graces’, Poem 5) and so love, drinking, combat, and hatred of the ugly, make up his privileged quartet. In the first and the final stanzas the criterion for ‘genuine song’ is its ability to give pleasure both to ordinary readers and to connoisseurs, and the four themes are chosen accordingly. The fourth theme is striking: the poet must hate ‘many a thing’. This will be taken up again in the Divan in Book 5, the Rendsch Nameh. The primevally powerful ‘stuff’ of poems – their prime matter – must be compounded of these four elements which make up authentic poetry, just as the right mixture of the natural elements makes up the cosmos.
26. 26 The Persian poet Ḥāfiẓ represents for Goethe the supreme master of this elemental art.
27. 27 This was the first poem of the Divan to be written, on 21 June 1814; it was originally entitled ‘Der Urvater’ (The Primal Father). The form and style are reminiscent of a student drinking song, marked by strong alliteration (Kloß/ Klumpen/ Klang) and comical rhymes (bliesen/ niesen, Klumpen/ Humpen, etc.). It was set to music by Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) in one of his Lieder.
28. 28 Noah: According to Genesis 9:20, it was Noah who first discovered wine: ‘And Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken.’ In the Islamic tradition, both Adam and Noah are regarded as prophets.
29. 29 clink of glasses: The notion that the clink of glasses may bring us to our Creator’s temple is a conceit taken from Ḥāfiẓ who often playfully invokes wine and drinking as avenues to true spiritual awareness.
30. 30 Phoebus is Apollo, the god of light. The image is of the sun shining through a wall of rain and forming a rainbow which appears white through the mist. This prompts the poet to an awareness of his own white hair. Hendrik Birus notes that Goethe’s observations on the rainbow and its symbolism in ‘primitive cultures’ in his Farbenlehre, his theoretical work on colours and light, underlies this lyric (see Birus, vol. 2, p. 933). The appearance of white hair is a favourite theme for Arabic and Persian poets. Thus, the Arab poet al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (d. 1016) can write: ‘Today I found my first white hair./ How could my light be dying when/ my heart is twined by black strands/ to the farthest star?’ This poem was also set to music by Hugo Wolf.
31. 31 The scene of this poem is a field of poppies viewed through morning mist near Erfurt where armies once clashed (at the Battle of Erfurt, on 14 October 1806, between the Prussians and the victorious French). Goethe added the allusions to the vizier’s tent and to Ḥāfiẓ to his first version (originally entitled ‘Bright Fields’).
32. 32 vizier: The highest-ranking official at the court of the caliphs.
33. 33 Shiraz: Once the capital of Persia and the birthplace of Ḥāfiẓ, renowned for its roses (and its wine). Goethe contrasts that imagined Shiraz in all its bright colours with the dreary landscape of his homeland.
34. 34 psaltery: An ancient stringed instrument somewhat like a zither.
35. 35 This short lyric turns on a contrast between something made by hand out of a fixed material, like a statue or figurine, and song itself which is drawn out of the flowing, ever mutable element of water. Goethe’s use of the verb ‘grip’ (greifen) with regard to the Euphrates complicates the contrast; it is as though the song were also something to be grasped from the formless water. There is an implicit contrast between the Greek way of creating – pressing a shape out of clay – and the ‘Eastern’ – catching a song as it flows. But even water takes on a shape when the poet’s hand seizes it. The double sense of Ton (clay or musical note) is echoed in the final stanza.

    In the second stanza the perfect rhymes of the first and last stanza are interrupted; it is no longer a-b-a-b but a-b-c-b, as though to suggest the fluid nature of song as opposed to the more rigid symmetry of shaped clay.

    As Max Rychner notes (Rychner, p. 417), the final image may have been suggested to Goethe by a passage in Jacob Grimm’s preface to his 1815 edition of Der arme Heinrich where Grimm, with reference to an Indian saga, writes of ‘the great poets of all times’ that ‘they … can shape water into a ball with their pure hands but which others must pour into earthen vessels in order to carry.’

36. 36 The poem turns on the contrast, and play, between dust and rain. Both are elements (earth and water). The ‘dust of the threshold’ (khāk-i āsetān in Persian) is a favourite conceit of poets such as Ḥāfiẓ. In the second ghazal of his divan Ḥāfiẓ writes, ‘The dust of your threshold is like the kohl that adorns our sight.’ (Kohl is collyrium, a cosmetic used like mascara to emphasise and brighten the eyes; it figures frequently in Persian and Arabic poetry.)
37. 37 Mahmud: Perhaps Maḥmūd of Ghazna, known as Maḥmūd the Conqueror (d. 1030), often invoked in Persian poetry, though, as Birus suggests (Birus, vol. 2, p. 962), it may very well refer to Ḥāfiẓ’s patron Abū Isḥāq Injū Maḥmūd whom he celebrates in a famous ode. But the reference is perhaps deliberately vague, so that it may apply to other historical figures.
38. 38 Rain has a different significance in Arabic poetry: it is seen as a blessing. The Prophet Muhammad is often described as ‘a raincloud of blessing’. And the early poets beseeched the clouds to rain down on their beloveds – not to ‘rain on their parades’ but to bring life and fruitfulness to them. Thus, the eighth-century Umayyad poet Ṭahmān can write of his beloved Laylā: ‘May a rain-swollen cloud that cries hāb hāb to the necks of companion clouds spill over Laylā’s house in al-Raqashān, a gushing white-streaked cloud of spring …’ (Hāb hāb is the cry drovers use to urge their herds on.) Out of the union of dust and rain life in all its greenness springs forth.
39. 39 Poem 17 is one of the most beautiful lyrics in the entire Divan. The perfection of its form, its measured and hymn-like cadences, make it as sublime as it is mysterious.

    Much commentary has dwelt on its Sufi allusions. For a discusssion, see my Introduction, p. xix.

40. 40 Light, here exemplified by the candle-flame, is a pre-eminent image for God in the Islamic tradition. Qur’ān 24:35 (‘Light’) is the famous verse that has inspired Sufis and Muslim philosophers for centuries: ‘God is the light of the heavens and earth. His light is like this: there is a niche, and in it a lamp, the lamp inside a glass, a glass like a glittering star, fuelled from a blessed olive tree from neither east nor west, whose oil almost gives light even when no fire touches it – light upon light.’
41. 41 Butterfly: Goethe addresses the butterfly (rather than a moth) because it is a symbol of the soul (Psyche) in Greek mythology.
42. 42 Goethe’s injunction to ‘die and become’ is sometimes echoed in later German poetry. In Rilke’s ‘Archaic Bust of Apollo’, for example, the last line, ‘You must change your life’ (Du mußt dein Leben ändern) may be read as a delicate allusion to ‘Holy Longing’.
43. 43 Goethe concludes the first book on a lighter note with this playful quatrain. The reed supplies the material for the reed-pen (qalam), which calligraphers carved to their own specifications but which were also used by scholars and poets for their writings. There may be a distant allusion here to the famous opening of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s Masnavī with its ‘Song of the Reed’, though of course Rūmī invokes the reed as a flute rather than as a writing instrument. It is also, of course, the sugar-cane that ‘sweetens worlds’, as Goethe learned from translations of Sa‛dī.

1. * The Book of the Singer: The title of this first book of the Divan is a Persian compound employing the Arabic word for ‘singer’ (mughannī) with the Persian word for ‘book’ (nāmeh), a common construction in Persian with its many Arabic loan-words (much as Latin permeates English vocabulary). This reflects Goethe’s larger indebtedness to the Persian literary tradition, evident throughout the Divan.
2. † In these prefatory verses Goethe uses the quatrain, the four-line stanza that will occur throughout the Divan and that reflects the influence of the Persian rubā῾ī, or ‘four-liner’, much in vogue among classical Persian poets and familiar to English readers from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859.
3. ‡ Barmekiden: The Barmakids were a powerful family of viziers, patrons of the arts and sciences, under the famous ῾Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd who had them executed, for reasons that remain mysterious, in the year 803.
4. * Hegire: The hijra, or ‘emigration’ in Arabic, which occurred in the year 622, when the Prophet Muhammad and his followers emigrated from Mecca, where they had been persecuted, to Medina, where they were given refuge. For Muslims the year 622 represents Year One in the Muslim calendar. Goethe uses the French transliteration of the word hijra, as was common throughout Europe at the time. In German it would normally be Hidschra. The term had a personal significance for Goethe who had described his abrupt departure for Italy, years earlier, as a ‘Hegira’.
5. † Dienst: Literally ‘service’ but in Goethe’s use it has overtones of ‘sub-servience’ or more broadly, ‘deference to foreign ways’.
6. ‡ Jugendschranke: The earliest historical ages.
7. * Schawl: Goethe uses the English word which has an exotic history. Originally a Persian word (shāl), it was the name for a large shawl, traditionally woven in Kashmir (hence, of what we call cashmere) with bright and intricate patterns. The word, taken up by English and European travellers and merchants, seems to have been lost for a time in Persian but then came back into the language via English.
8. * ergötzt: take delight in, enjoy (ergötzen). See Grimm, Wörterbuch,3:820. (Hereafter, Grimm.)
9. * Lines 3–4: In an earlier version Goethe had written: Auch den Norden wie den Süden/ Hat sein Auge nie gemieden (‘His eye has never neglected the North as well as the South’). The revised lines are among his most celebrated.
10. † Ird’sches: Irdisches. The vowel is elided for the sake of the metre.
11. * Blum’: Blume. The last syllable is elided for the sake of the metre (iambic tetrameter).
12. * Poem 7 uses trochaic metre throughout for a somewhat solemn, even gnomic effect. The rhymes are often slant or purely assonantal (Elementen/ empfinden; viere/ Völker) or absent (tönen/ Trinker in the third stanza). This roughens the texture of the poem a bit so that the more ‘perfectly’ rhyming stanzas, such as the second or fifth, no longer seem simply elegant but take on new power.
13. † gefodert: gefordert.
14. ‡ Trommete: Trompete
15. * Die Elohim: Goethe puts this in the plural, as it is in the original Hebrew (though the name came to denote God alone). This is a playful allusion to Genesis 2:7: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; soul and man became a living being.’ In Goethe’s version, Adam’s response is to sneeze.
16. * Mavors: Mars, god of war.
17. † Kriegesthunder: Thunder is Low German for Donner (thunder).
18. * Sehe (archaic): sight, eyesight
19. † Gescheute: older form of Gescheite (See FaustI,l. 366:‘Zwar bin ich gescheiter als alle die Laffen…’)
20. * Ros: Rose
21. † genießen: The word had a loftier sense in Goethe’s day; it was not merely to enjoy or take pleasure but to apprehend, experience and appreciate something fully in common with others. See, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Wörterbuch (Trier: Universität Trier, 1998).
22. * Wendung: Not simply a turn but a turning point, a change (as well as a turn of speech).
23. † Thon: Ton. Here the word means ‘clay’ but there is a half-hidden play on another sense of Ton: a ‘tone’ or ‘note’ of music.
24. ‡ Euphrat: The Euphrates river in Mesopotamia. For Goethe a symbol of the vast stream of Oriental poetry.
25. § The verb schöpfen means both ‘to create’ and ‘to scoop up’, a double sense Goethe exploits.
26. * höret: hört
27. † Schall: Compare with the preceding poem. Here it is ‘noise’ or sound itself, not water, that rounds itself into a tune (Ton).
28. ‡ The ingenious compound rhymes in Poem 14 deserve mention: überall an/ Schall an, Lauf stört/ aufhört, Erzklang/ Herz bang.
29. * Übermut: High-spiritedness, essential to poetry, as opposed to small-mindedness and philistine conventions of ‘modesty’, lampooned in the poem.
30. † That is, (‘ich) treibe es gern allein (I prefer to pursue it alone); the pronoun is supressed for the sake of the metre.
31. * leeres Was: empty palaver; hackneyed phrases.
32. * Moschus: musk (misk in Arabic).
33. † umhüllt: covered, shrouded, as with mist or rain.
34. ‡ grunelt: to smell of green things, especially after rainfall.
35. § The rhyme schwiegen/ riechen betrays Goethe’s Frankfurt dialect (I am grateful to Professor Hinrich Biesterfeldt for alerting me to this).
36. * Lebend’ge = lebendige. The vowel is elided for the sake of the metre (trochaic tetrameter).
37. † Kühlung: coolness, cooling – an unexpected context for ‘nights of love’. Heinrich Heine (who strove mischievously to emulate Goethe) may have remembered this when he wrote, ‘Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, / Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag’ (Death is the cool night, life is the torrid day.)
38. ‡ Begattung: literally, copulation, sexual intercourse but here, union, consummation, coupling.
39. § schwierig: literally, difficult; here, the sense seems to be ‘No distance complicates, puzzles, discourages’ but a literal translation retains Goethe’s ambiguity: what is ‘difficult’ comes from within.
40. * Liebliches: A key term in Goethe’s poetic lexicon, as shown in Poem 11. It combines the senses of what is lovable as well as charming and delightful; it epitomises Goethe’s unwavering aim in his poetry: always to give delight.
41. † The quatrain that concludes The Book of the Singer continues the trochaic meter of Poem17, creating the effect of an echo.

THE BOOK OF HAFIZ

1. 1 ‘Ḥāfiẓ’ was the pen-name of Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī; as explained above, this is what is known in Arabic and Persian as the takhalluṣ. In the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ the poet addresses himself by this name in the penultimate line of the poem. The name denotes someone who has memorised the Qur’ān in its entirety, as the poet’s reply in the next stanza explains.
2. 2 It was customary for children to memorise the Qur’ān and then be capable of reciting it. Often this memorisation was accomplished by the age of ten. Ḥāfiẓ was celebrated for his memorisation of the Qur’ān which he himself considered the foundation of all his poetry.
3. 3 The ‘sacred books’ of the Bible are for Goethe what the Qur’ān is for Ḥāfiẓ. The image on the ‘shroud of shrouds’ refers to what is known as the Shroud of Turin; according to tradition, Veronica, a follower of Jesus, enshrouded his dead body in a linen cerement that preserved his likeness.
4. 4 According to some commentators, this line refers to scepticism, on the one hand, and the oppressive obstruction of religious bigotry, on the other.
5. 5 The desert was traditionally seen as the abode of predatory demons, including ghouls and evil jinn who lay in ambush for the unwary.
6. 6 Goethe here cites the Qur’ān, sūra 26 (‘The Poets’). The relevant verses (26:221–6) read: ‘Shall I tell you who the jinn come down to? They come down to every lying sinner who readily lends an ear to them, and most of them are liars: only those who are lost in error follow the poets. Do you not see how they rove aimlessly in every valley; how they never follow their words with actions?’
7. 7 This refers to the fact that the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ contain many questionable sentiments, as addressed in ‘Fetwa’, the next poem; though his piety was above suspicion, Ḥāfiẓ’s bold paradoxes disturbed traditional readers.
8. 8 It is not clear which of the several poets named Mirza in Classical Persian Goethe here refers to but he is meant to represent an explosively controversial figure, one who blows apart conventional pieties.
9. 9 This is Abū Su῾ūd Efendi (1490–1574), appointed the (Ottoman Turkish) Grand Mufti by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1545, and known for his scrupulous and commonsensical judicial rulings. The poem is actually a versified verbatim paraphrase of one of this mufti’s rulings on the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ. In the final lines Goethe reproduces the typical ending of such a pronouncement with its obligatory humility (the ‘wretched’ – literally, ‘poor’ – Abu Su῾ūd).
10. 10 The controversial Ottoman poet Misri Efendi, known by his pen-name Niyāzī (1617–94) who wrote in both Arabic and Turkish; Goethe knew of him through von Hammer’s translations. A mufti was asked to render his opinion on the orthodoxy of Misri’s poems. His first reaction was to state that ‘the meaning and the sense of these poems are known only to God and to Misri’. He ordered the book to be burned; he further ruled that anyone who shared Misri’s views should be burned as well. Misri himself was, however, to be spared since, as the mufti put it, ‘No fatwā can be pronounced against those who are caught up in an inspiration.’
11. 11 The ‘high judge’ denotes a qaḍi, a judge empowered to pronounce sentences in such cases.
12. 12 The Fire: a common Qur’ānic term for Hell (al-nār).
13. 13 It was believed from the earliest period that a true poet’s gift was supernaturally inspired, coming to him or her spontaneously from a jinn; hence, the term majnūn, ‘crazy’ but literally, ‘possessed by a jinn’, a description applied to several early Arab poets. Here the poet’s inspiration is seen as coming from God Himself – a notion quite congenial to Goethe. And yet again, as in the preceding poems of this book, an opposition is drawn between the sober guardians of the Law and the poet, inspired beyond the strictures of mere orthodoxy.
14. 14 This poem, and especially its opening stanza, is one of the most sublime and beautiful in the entire Divan, as certain commentators have noted. The stately simplicity of its cadences, as well as the seemingly inevitable fall of its rhymes, reveal Goethe’s mastery even in old age. Though the poem is addressed to Ḥāfiẓ, it apostrophises Song itself, one of the dominant themes of the collection; but it does so in terms that seem applicable to God Himself, as He is often invoked in Persian poetry. But for Goethe it is Song that is seen as primordial, virtually eternal. It is an element that is ever ‘older’ while remaining simultaneously ever ‘newer’. What is ‘older’ is what Goethe has gained from Ḥāfiẓ; what is ‘newer’ is what he now brings to his own poems, in tones not heard before in his verse. Here too he boldly proclaims his twinship – and his rivalry – with Ḥāfiẓ.
15. 15 source, as in a spring of water (Quelle).
16. 16 The German word Schlund can simply mean ‘mouth’ but here Goethe seems to want to evoke something thirstier and more capacious, hence ‘maw’.
17. 17 Though the poem does not follow the formal pattern of the ghazal, here Goethe comes close to evoking its spirit and tone; even the final apostrophe to Song echoes the invocation of the poet’s own name in the traditional ghazal.
18. 18 ‘repetition’, an allusion to the repeating rhymes in a ghazal.
19. 19 An allusion to the burning of Moscow, in 1812, by the Muscovites to thwart the invading army of Napoleon. The metaphor is somewhat elusive: the spark kindles the conflagration of the city which is then whipped by the wind to a blaze while the spark itself disappears into space. So too the spark set alight by Ḥāfiẓ’s poems kindles the poet’s inspiration but then vanishes. He begins in imitation but boldly breaks free, like the blaze itself; he will not follow Ḥāfiẓ, or any other poet, slavishly but will invent new form. This internal complexity – twinship with Ḥāfiẓ along with independence from his example – gives the Divan its particular, often tacit, inner tension.
20. 20 With ‘hollow masks’ Goethe distances himself from the classical measures, such as hexameter, which he had often used in the past.
21. 21 ‘the mystical tongue’ is more usually given as ‘the tongue of the invisible’ (lisān al-ghayb) in encomia of the poet because of the presumed mystical depth of his poetry.
22. 22 For Goethe, in accord with his view of Ḥāfiẓ as a Persian Voltaire, his reputation as a mystic rests only on the incomprehension of his interpreters, not on his own particular insights.
23. 23 The final poem in The Book of Hafiz – strict quatrains in iambic tetrameter – exemplifies Goethe’s attempt to write in the manner of Ḥāfiẓ. He draws on loosely linked clusters of phrases and standard tropes common in Persian poetry (the cypress, the tousled locks, etc.), the sense of which is not always immediately apparent. Such parataxis figures often in Ḥāfiẓ, e.g., in his first ghazal: ‘Dark night and dread wave, whirlpool, how terrible … !’
24. 24 ‘Longing’ (Sehnsucht) is a key theme in the Divan, as already shown in Poem 17.
25. 25 ‘cypress’ is a standard figure for the beloved in all his or her grace.
26. 26 The motif of the locks of the beloved’s hair, much favoured by Ḥāfiẓ. will be further developed in The Book of Love (e.g., Poem 33).
27. 27 This beautiful line (‘unsichtbar wolkig ziehend’), at once dense and evocative, demonstrates just how closely Goethe echoes the particular expressive qualities of Persian poetry.
28. 28 The cup-bearer (sāqī in Arabic and Persian), often evoked in the ghazal, is a standard figure, at once a disciple and an object of desire (as well as a youth eager for instruction).
29. 29 The cup-bearer lingers in the hope of garnering some wisdom from the (increasingly tipsy) poet and sage.
30. 30 ‘down’ signifies the onset of maturity. Sufis often practised a kind of cult of the ‘beardless youth’ that entailed a rapt gaze at a handsome young man in which a sublimated sexual longing sought ‘the beauty of God’ in human form.
31. 31 ‘hints’: Goethe here alludes to the Sufi practice whereby the master taught not only by words but by gestures and hints (ishārāt in Arabic); for example, by casting the glance upwards instead of merely saying ‘heaven’.
32. 32 Rulers and their viziers often summoned Sufi masters to court in order to benefit from their wisdom and perception; and sometimes, too, for the pleasure of being scolded and rebuked by them.

1. * The second book of the Divan is devoted to Ḥāfiẓ, the Persian poet who is the tutelary spirit of the whole book. Here Goethe draws on many images and motifs found in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ and addresses dense and allusive tributes to him. But at the same time he is careful to assert his own European identity and the essential importance of poetic originality, not merely imitating a distant model. Goethe’s ‘twinship’ with Ḥāfiẓ is an intricate and subtle matter, involving a keen sense of his own ‘doubleness’.
2. * Saamen: Samen
3. * hochgelahrte: hochgelehrte
4. * A fatwā in Islamic law is the formal opinion of a jurist on a legal question; such a jurist is known as a muftī, one qualified to deliver such a binding opinion.
5. † Theriak: The word, derived from Greek, denotes an antidote, or theriac. The skill of the ancient physician lay in knowing how to distinguish between a poison and its antidote, both potentially harmful.
6. * The second poem with this title is also based on the fatwā of a Turkish mufti; this time the verdict is stricter even if the poet is ultimately excused. Here Goethe returns to rhyming verses, opening with a quatrain in iambic measure which he then expands in the second stanza.
7. * Loos = Los
8. * Poem 26 is a continuation of, and response to, Poem 25.
9. * Poem 27 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan to form the concluding verses of The Book of Hafiz.
10. † strengen: festen
11. ‡ sich vermessen: sich erkühnen
12. § Ost-Gekos: Ostwind; Oden: Odem, Atem
13. || ahndevoll: ahnungsvoll
14. * Orden: Ordnung
15. * milde: freundlich, freigebig

THE BOOK OF LOVE

1. 1 Wortbild: The compound noun announces the theme. The mere enunciation of the lover’s name forms an image in the mind. The very syllables of the name shed radiance. The mention of each pair of lovers – each of whom is often invoked by Ḥāfiẓ – is preceded by a phrase that encapsulates the story of their love.
2. 2 Rustam is the fabled ‘elephant-bodied’ warrior of pre-Islamic Persia, whose exploits are recounted in the Book of Kings (Shāh-nāmeh) by the eleventh-century Persian epic poet Firdowsī (on whom Goethe comments in the ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 377–9). In fact, Goethe has here conflated Rustam with his father Zāl who fell in love with Rūdāba, as she with him, merely upon hearing each other’s names mentioned.
3. 3 Yūsuf (the Biblical Joseph) is the subject of sūra 12 of the Qur’ān where the attempt by Potiphar’s wife to seduce him is vividly described. The wife is not named in the Qur’ān but in later poetic accounts, she became known as Zulaykhā, admired for her chastity and love of God. For Sufis, Yūsuf is a paragon of manly beauty; he is ‘the moon of Canaan’ and indeed, the human embodiment of the beauty of God. The story was immortalised by the work of the fifteenth-century Persian poet Jāmī (on whom see ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 385–6).
4. 4 Farhad and Shīrīn Farhad was the legendary unrequited lover of Shīrīn from ancient pre-Islamic Persia. The great Persian poet Nizāmī in 1180 wrote his epic Khusraw wa-Shīrīn in which the love triangle is most famously celebrated.
5. 5 Majnūn was a seventh-century Arab poet known popularly as ‘Majnūn Laylā’, or ‘the man driven mad for Laylā.’ Like Jamīl, he was one of the so-called ῾Udhrī poets, who wrote of chaste, unrequited passion. Goethe mentions this couple again in Poem 42 below (‘Most Secret’). Heinrich Heine celebrated this group in his 1851 poem ‘Der Asra’ as ‘jene Asra/ welche sterben, wenn sie lieben’ (those Asra who die when they love).
6. 6 Jamīl, another early Arab poet, fell in love with Buthaynah after a glimpse of her but was prevented by her tribe from pursuing his passion.
7. 7 The Biblical King Solomon who fell madly in love with the Queen of Sheba. Goethe calls her ‘the dark one’ (die Braune), probably with reference to The Song of Solomon (1:5): ‘I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.’ (In the Luther Bible of 1545 the verse reads: ‘ich bin schwartz aber gar lieblich, ihr Töchter Jerusalems.’)
8. 8 The name Wāmiq simply means ‘ardent lover’ in Arabic while ῾Adhrā’ means ‘virgin’. The original story, derived from an early Greek novel about Metiochos and Parthenope by an unknown author, formed the basis of the eleventh-century Persian poet ῾Unsurī’s ‘The Lover and the Virgin’. The original Old Persian text of the tale survives only in fragments. For Goethe what matters is that the lovers’ names are a ‘Wortbild ‘ (word picture) and still radiate with a magical intensity.
9. 9 That is, a book of readings (Lesebuch).
10. 10 Niẓāmī (d. 1180), Persian poet and author of epical romances, is discussed by Goethe in ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 380–1.
11. 11 Poem 31, written spontaneously while the first edition of the Divan was in the press, in 1819, was reportedly inspired by Goethe’s recollection of Marianne von Willemer, his lover and collaborator – and his inspiration for much of the Divan.
12. 12 The poem adopts the motif endlessly elaborated by Persian poets, that of the bewitching and beguiling locks of hair (Locken) that the beloved uses to ensnare the poet; but Goethe introduces a European hair-style as well, that of the braid (Zopf).The two styles are woven together by rhyme (internal as well as end-rhyme: flechten/ fechten in stanza 2) and by contrast: the locks or ringlets are the ‘heavy chains’, an obvious snare, but the lover all too easily runs into the less obvious ‘light snares’ (leichte Schlingen) of the braids, rather humorously seen as helmets donned for battle. This motif occurs also in Western poetry; see, for example (among others), Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, where he writes: ‘Were it not better done, as others use,/ To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,/ Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?’
13. 13 Another poem that plays on the ringlet-motif. Here Goethe approaches the ghazal form more boldly, with his repeated rhymes (a-b-b-a, a-a) only to continue in alternating couplets, all in iambic measure. He also draws more on figurative epithets (‘the five-toothed comb’ for the hand). The sense of touch is paramount; the ear plays a part but it too is something to be fondled amid the hair. His coinage liebeviel has the effect of a familiar adjective (e.g., liebevoll) but is far more suggestive.
14. 14 Three quatrains in trochaic tetrameter, written – not for Marianne – but for a 15-year-old Dutch girl, the baroness Betty Strick van Linschoten, in 1815; it is she who can ‘exert such force’ on the infatuated elderly poet and for whom his praise of silence and discretion is intended (‘Often it is better to keep still’).
15. 15 Goethe was much taken with the supposed healing properties of the emerald, especially when applied to the eyes. In his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) he writes of its soothing and restorative effects. Various occult powers were attributed to the emerald in medieval Muslim sources; for example, it could destroy the eyes of a serpent if brandished in front of it. See the eleventh-century poet and philosopher Nāsir-i Khusraw’s final work, the Jāmi῾ al-Ḥikmatayn, translated as Between Reason and Revelation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) by the present writer, p. 163; see also Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), p. 399.
16. 16 confines: literally, bonds (Bande); the motif of being bound, tied up, shackled, occurs frequently in the Divan (as also in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ).
17. 17 The poem, unrhymed and in variable measures, takes its inspiration from the Book of Job 4:13ff: ‘In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up…’ The title refers to the false comfort Job receives from his censorious and unfeeling friends.
18. 18 Another poem written in 1815. In his draft Goethe had originally inserted the name Hatem but replaced it with ‘the poet’. Hatem was the pen-name he had devised for himself in imitation of Ḥāfiẓ. He will use it later, especially in The Book of Suleika (see Poem 106). In its dialogue form the poem echoes a convention of early Arabic poetry in which a spying busybody chides the love-obsessed poet.
19. 19 Written in short, unrhymed ‘free verse’ lines with variable measures, reminiscent of Goethe’s earlier, very spontaneous poems. The poem also alludes to his abiding interest in matters geological.
20. 20 Hudhud is the word for the hoopoe (Upupa epops) in Arabic, a clever and mischievous bird that plays a big role in Persian poetry; thus, in The Parliament of the Birds (Manṭiq al-Ṭayr) of the Persian mystical poet Farīd al-Dīn ῾Aṭṭār, the hoopoe is both the protagonist and the spokesman for the other birds.
21. 21 Another brief, irregularly rhymed dialogue concluding with a strict quatrain. The image of the candles occurs often in the Persian poets; so too does the conceit that sorrow nests in the lovelorn heart, e.g., Ḥāfiẓ, ‘Sorrow has nested in the narrow heart.’ Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (ed.), Fundgruben des Orients, bearbeitet durch eine Gesellschaft von Liebhabern. 6 vols. (Vienna: A. Schmid, 1809–18), vol. 2, p. 31. Hereafter, von Hammer.
22. 22 Goethe takes the image from Ḥāfiẓ who wrote, ‘Who can order the birds to be still in the field? When I thirst for your sign, where then is patience?’ (von Hammer, vol. 2, p. 87). Goethe had initially entitled this poem ‘Ungeduld‘ (Impatience).
23. 23 The shearer in this conceit is the embodiment of destiny but the poet cannot be gentled for the shears: the need to sing out his love is irresistible, a force of nature.
24. 24 Three quatrains, again in trochaic tetrameter, with alternating rhyme. Goethe took the conceit straight from Ḥāfiẓ: ‘All the unwitting are amazed at my beloved’s glances…’ (von Hammer, vol. 1, p. 368).
25. 25 The ‘most secret’ of the title has nothing to do with matters mystical. In 1810 Goethe had fallen under the spell of the lovely Austrian empress Maria Ludovica, then a mere twenty-three years old, and his affection was reciprocated, especially after she and Goethe performed together in a comedy which he had written for her court. Goethe was sworn to silence about their relationship, hence the oblique references in the poem (‘the imperial throne’). The Empress died in 1816, three years before the Divan was published, and Goethe was grief-stricken.
26. 26 ‘brothers-in-law’ (Schwäger), here in the sense of rivals. For this sense, see Birus, vol. 2, p. 1055.
27. 27 It is not clear which Sufi saint this Shihāb al-Dīn was. It may have been the great thirteenth-century Sufi master Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Ḥafz ‛Umar ibn ‛Abd Allāh al-Suhrawardī; see Birus, vol. 2, pp. 1056–57. Goethe took from von Hammer an anecdote about how the saint stripped off his cloak while on pilgrimage at the station of Arafat as a gesture of humility and thankfulness to God. Goethe seems to have coined the verb entmanteln by analogy with French démanteler or English dismantle.
28. 28 Arafat: This is the plain of ‛Arafāt, some 21 km. east of Mecca, where pilgrims congregate during the hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina; the stop at ‛Arafāt – ‘the Day of ‛Arafat’ – is considered by many the high point of the pilgrimage.
29. 29 For Majnūn and Laylā, see Poem 28 above with its note.

1. * The third book of the Divan is devoted to love, the first of the four essential poetic themes listed in ‘Elements’ in Book 1. This is passionate, erotic love, denoted by the Arabic word ‛ishq (), a word taken over in Persian, Turkish, Urdu and other languages of Islam. The word has strong sexual connotations. When used by Sufis in their love poems and prayers to God, its usage caused scandal. But it was the word favoured also by the philosophers in the Arabic Aristotelian tradition to indicate love of God who is always, in the words of Avicenna, ‘the first Beloved’ (al-ma‛shūq al-awwal).
2. † The epigraph to Book 3 is disputed. Some scholars, such as Erich Trunz (in the Hamburg edition) have argued that it is based on an editorial error and should read: ‘Tell me what your heart desires.’ This would accord better with the theme throughout of exchanges between lovers and I have translated it thus. It was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
3. * Poem 29 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
4. † Gewinst: Gewinn (Grimm).
5. * Poem 31 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
6. * Bogen: die Augenbrauen
7. † wund: verletzt, verwunden
8. ‡ Der fünfgezackte Kamm: die Hand
9. § liebeviel: an adjective coined by Goethe.
10. * Poem 35 was written in 1819, but only included in the 1827 edition of the Divan, inspired presumably by Goethe’s inspection of the freshly printed first edition (like Poem 31 above).
11. * weint’ und schluchzt’: weinte und schluchzte
12. † thörig: töricht
13. * wandl: wandle
14. * This stanza was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
15. * entzwingen: abnötigen
16. * koost: kost

THE BOOK OF REFLECTIONS

1. 1 For this work, see note † to ‘Fünf Dinge’, Poem 44.
2. 2 This rather cryptic lyric addresses Goethe’s many critics over the years, ranging from Frederick the Great to the poet Klopstock and the dramatist Lessing. As Max Rychner (Rychner, p. 454) summarises the poem, ‘they have always made a great stir about my failings and in so doing went beyond the truth while laboriously maintaining its appearance. Had they promoted the good that was in me rather than carping negatively, and strengthened my confidence, they might have shown me the way to what is better. O but I found the best of all without their help, the best that only the elect know. It chose me as a pupil; it teaches me penitence and a turn to what is productive when I go wrong.’
3. 3 Another brief lyric addressed to himself in rhyming couplets. The conflict between knowledge and love was perhaps inspired by I Corinthians 8:1: ‘Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.’ (In the Luther Bible the passage reads: ‘Das Wissen bläst auf, aber die Liebe bessert.’)
4. 4 The poem was inspired by a chance encounter on the way to Karlsbad with the husband of the deceased Empress Maria Ludovica (see ‘Most Secret’, Poem 42, above) whom Goethe had loved. Goethe called the poem ‘a gentle greeting to spirits in infinity, a final echo of vanished and convivial days’ (Rychner, p. 456). There is an echo perhaps of Ḥāfiẓ, ‘why I came and where I have been is still obscure’ (von Hammer, vol. 2, p. 180), as well as of Proverbs 20:24: ‘Man’s goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way?’
5. 5 As Rychner notes (p. 456), Goethe, in a letter from 1775, mentioned a ‘Christian hymn’ that begins ‘Man trägt eins nach dem andern hin’ (One after another is borne away…) and the recollection may have inspired this poem. But the moral Goethe draws is far from Christian resignation in the face of mortality!
6. 6 The ‘goose-game’ is an old board game with numbered squares; each player casts dice and moves his metal goose forward according to the number cast. There are unlucky squares, such as number 58 ‘where no one wants to stop’, designated by a dead goose; whoever lands there is out of the game. The game is still in vogue under various names.
7. 7 Poem 60 was originally written as an inscription in the copy of the Divan that Goethe sent to the Orientalist Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), with thanks for his scholarly assistance, in 1819; it was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan. For Eichhorn, see Goethe’s remarks in his ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 486–7.
8. 8 Shāh Shuja῾ ruled during Ḥāfiẓ’s lifetime. Transoxania – the land beyond the Oxus River – is the region in Central Asia where the Janissaries created their loud and clangorous war-music, rich in drums and brass. Goethe wrote the poem as a tribute to Karl August who was then taking part in the Vienna Congress.
9. 9 Another tribute to the Duke Karl August and his Duchess Louisa. Goethe’s repetition of the rhyme on ‘gefunden’ (‘found’) throughout the poem is meant to suggest the repeating rhymes of a ghazal.
10. 10 The opening couplet is taken from the eleventh-century Persian epic poet Firdowsī, and Goethe’s rejoinder follows. The verses are in dactylic measure, perhaps to suggest Firdowsī’s epic style. For Goethe’s comments on Firdowsī, see his ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 377–9.
11. 11 Goethe was much taken by the great Persian mystical poet, Rūmī; see his ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 381–3.
12. 12 Suleika, as noted earlier, was the name given to Potiphar’s wife who tried to seduce Joseph and in later Islamic tradition, came to be a model of chastity and virtue. For the original story, see Qur’ān, sūra 12.

1. * The fourth book of the Divan is devoted to reflection, or tafkīr (), with an emphasis on ethical advice. In Goethe’s words, the book is ‘devoted to practical morality and life-wisdom in accord with Oriental custom and practice’. Most of the brief edifying lyrics are untitled. Often they represent Goethe’s very personal dialogues with himself.
2. * Schiefohr: ‘one who hears badly or incorrectly’ (Grimm).
3. † Goethe derived this advice from the Pand-nāmeh (The Book of Advice), a work by the Persian poet and mystic Farīd al-Dīn ‛Aṭṭār (c. 1129–1230) in the French translation of Silvestre de Sacy (see ‘Notes and Essays’, p. 510). Hellmut Ritter, the great authority on ‛Aṭṭār, describes this as ‘a moral booklet which has long been popular in the East as a schoolbook’ (Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 1.)
4. * Poem 49, another untitled poem, this time in iambic pentameter, was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan, as were Poems 50–55.
5. † This untitled poem with its strict a-b rhymes is another of Goethe’s approximations of the ghazal, despite obvious formal differences; its alternating long and short trochaic lines echo the musicality of the ghazal. Not an imitation but an attempt to capture something essential about the ghazal in a German – or perhaps, better, a ‘European’ – form.
6. * Gottes Stadt, here to be understood as: die Welt (the world).
7. * An echo of Proverbs 20:24 in the Luther Bible (1545): ‘Jedermanns Gänge kommen vom Herrn. Welcher Mensch versteht seinen Weg?’
8. * Poem 57 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
9. * Poem 59 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
10. † Tand: a trivial object of little value such as a child’s toy or game; cf. Birus, vol. 2, p. 1643.

THE BOOK OF ILL-HUMOUR

1. 1 ‘illusory seas’, i.e., a mirage.
2. 2 antechambers: that is, this attitude is widespread not only among poets and musicians but in the corridors of power.
3. 3 Goethe had an abiding respect for the reformer and poet Ulrich von Hütten (1488–1523) as a liberator of human thought.
4. 4 The brown habits are those of Christian monks, the blue those of the more pious members of Ḥāfiẓ’s circle.
5. 5 As Birus notes (vol. 2, p. 1110) this is Goethe’s way of countering the view of the theorists of the French Revolution that human perfectibility is possible through social egalitarianism. For Goethe, a human being is born good and it is preferable to ‘remain better’ (besser bleiben) rather than to strive to become better by being like everyone else.
6. 6 This, and the following stanzas, represent Goethe’s attack on three of the newspapers of the day; he conveys his scorn by the triple internal rhymes as well (Knitterer, Zersplitterer, Verwitterer).
7. 7 Certain Romantic writers preferred to call themselves Teutsch rather than Deutsch because it sounded more ancient, more primeval.
8. 8 Majnūn, better known as Majnūn Laylā, was the early Arab poet driven mad by his love for Laylā. See above, The Book of Love, Poem 28, note 5.
9. 9 Goethe is addressing his compatriots whom he often accused of Besserwisserei – of being know-it-alls.
10. 10 Goethe here attacks religious belief based on oral tradition, ‘from mouth to ear’. Reason alone can winnow the truth from transmitted knowledge.
11. 11 That is, a chimera.
12. 12 However people dress up their egotism in fashionable foreign manners – whether French, English, Italian or German – they remain imprisoned in blind self-esteem.
13. 13 They recognise no worth in peoples or individuals unless the recognition reflects what they think themselves to be.
14. 14 By ‘three thousand years’ Goethe means the entire span of human history, as it was known in his time.
15. 15 A sūra (an Arabic word literally meaning a ‘fence’) is a chapter of the Qur’ān. It is customary to cite the name of the sūra and the number of the verse.
16. 16 A dervish, from the Persian darvīsh (meaning ‘poor’) was a member of a Sufi confraternity. Here, however, Goethe uses the term ‘new dervishes’ to mean certain Christian theologians of his day.
17. 17 This title was added in the 1827 edition of the Divan.
18. 18 At the beginning of his mission Muhammad encountered fierce opposition from his Meccan compatriots, especially from the members of his own tribe, the Quraysh. Goethe here draws on sūra 22 of the Qur’ān.
19. 19 Timur Lenk (1336–1405) was the Mongol world-conqueror, founder of the Timurid Dynasty, better known to English-language readers as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine (cf. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, 1587). Here, most commentators agree, he serves as a stand-in for Napoleon whom Goethe defended against his detractors until 1814. As in the preceding poem, Goethe uses both Muhammad and Timur as mouth-pieces in his own self-defence.
20. 20 ‘parsons’ (Pfaffen); a term of contempt with Goethe. See Faust I, 366–7, where Faust declares: ‘Zwar bin ich gescheiter als alle die Laffen,/ Doktoren, Magister, Schreiber und Pfaffen’ (True, I’m smarter than all of the fops/ doctors, magisters, writers and parsons).

1. * The fifth book of the Divan deals with displeasing things, as listed in The Book of the Singer, Poem 7 (‘Elements’). The Persian word ranj denotes ‘pain, discomfort, affliction, displeasure’. Goethe uses it to encompass all that is ugly, disagreeable, toilsome in life for these too are essential elements of poetry.
2. * ermuten: beleben, anfachen
3. † Fünkeln: aufglimmen
4. * erbötig: bereit, bereitwillig
5. * fürtrefflich: vortrefflich
6. † saalbadrisch: cf. Salbaderei
7. * Poem 78 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
8. * Poem 81 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
9. * Poem 83 was added to the to the 1827 edition of the Divan.

THE BOOK OF WISDOM

1. 1 The sayings are intended to have the effect of talismans that heal and protect. See ‘Tokens of Blessing’ in Poem 2 above.
2. 2 Taken from an inscription on a caravanserai in Isfahan, as recorded by Chardin.
3. 3 Based on a dictum in the Sayings of the Fathers, a Tatar collection of proverbs ascribed to the legendary Oguz Khan which Goethe knew through Diez’s Denkwürdigkeiten (vol. 1, p. 192) where it is given as ‘Whoever has never experienced good days considers even the bad days good.’
4. 4 Proverb taken from the same source as the preceding poem; see note 3 above.
5. 5 The allusion is to John 9:4: ‘The night cometh, when no man can work.’
6. 6 Here Good Fortune (das Glück) is personified as a young girl.
7. 7 For the great Persian poet Awhad al-Dīn Anvārī (1126–89), see Goethe’s comments in his ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 379–80.
8. 8 Derived from a saying in Sa‛dī ‘s Rose Garden (Gulistān).
9. 9 ‘blunt’: the adjective grob has a wide range of meanings: ‘rough, coarse, crass, tough,’ etc., but the sense here does not seem to be quite so derogatory, and I translate it with reference to the Goethe-Wörterbuch where ‘robust’ is also given.
10. 10 The couplet is taken from a mention in Chardin which Goethe annotated. Even the smallest birds puff themselves up and cheep. See Grimm, Märchen, ‘Der Zaunkönig’ (The Willow-Wren and the Bear).
11. 11 Again taken from Goethe’s reading of Chardin who noted that ‘to speak of a man reduced to beggary they [the Persians] say, “He eats his hunger”(Pour dire un homme réduit à la mendicité, ils disent: il mange sa faim).’
12. 12 Again drawn from Chardin who notes, of falcons, that ‘they are trained to seize hold of all wild beasts except for the wild boar’.
13. 13 On the ‘parsons’ (Pfaffen), see the note to The Book of Ill-Humour, Poem 83.
14. 14 ‘heat and cold’: for this motif see also The Book of Reflections, poem 66. Goethe took the notion from the sixteenth-century Turkish poet Katā’ibī Rūmī, whom he read in translation in Diez’s Denkwürdigkeiten (vol. 2, p. 239): ‘Can anyone who has not suffered heat and cold in this world know the true value of a man?’
15. 15 The same line opens the second verse of Poem 88 above.
16. 16 Based on a saying supposedly ascribed to the Prophet, as well as on the sources of the two preceding poems.
17. 17 Cf. Ecclesiastes 11:1: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days’. As Birus notes (vol. 2, p. 1144), Ḥāfiẓ in his Divan writes (II, 41): ‘The proverb says: “Do good and cast it into the floods.”‘
18. 18 The spider figures in the Qur’ān as the being with ‘the frailest house’ (sūra 29). Sa‛dī uses a similar analogy but with the ant: ‘Don’t you know how it is for an ant when it’s under your foot? The same as you if you were under the foot of an elephant’ (Gulistān, trans. Thackston, p. 33), a reference Goethe took from Olearius.
19. 19 Derived from Sa‛dī’s Rose Garden (Gulistān), ‘The table of His unstinting bounty is laid everywhere’ (trans. Thackston, p. 1); see also Sa‛dī’s Būstān (trans. Wickens, p. 4): ‘So wide He spreads His table’s liberality …’ Goethe found this in Olearius and he also made a note of Chardin’s comment, ‘At God’s table sits both friend and foe.’
20. 20 Autos epha: Greek for ‘he himself has said it,’ a formula used by the disciples of Pythagoras, for his pronouncements which they considered infallible. Goethe’s ironic advice mocks conventional adherence to churchly tradition; or, as Rychner (p. 485) summarises it: ‘Stick with the teachings of authority, like the disciples of Pythagoras, you dear fools.’
21. 21 The literal meaning of Islam in Arabic is ‘submission, surrender’.
22. 22 Inspired by a passage in Chardin and by verses from Sa‛dī’s Rose Garden: ‘Everyone who has come here has built a new structure; each departed, turning over his dwelling to another; and that one also had desires and whims, but no one has completed this structure’ (trans. Thackston, The Gulistān, p. 5).
23. 23 Presumably, an allusion to the songs of Ḥāfiẓ.
24. 24 Perhaps an allusion to the invasion of Spain in 711 by Muslim forces under General Tariq (from whom the name Gibraltar derives: Jabal Tariq, ‘the mountain of Tariq’.). Here, of course, the ‘invasion’ is poetic: Ḥāfiẓ meets Calderón (thanks to Goethe!).
25. 25 Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), the great poet and dramatist of Spain’s ‘Golden Age’, fascinated Goethe who admired his work extravagantly; he read Calderón in A. W. Schlegel’s German translation and on several occasions staged certain of his plays in Weimar.
26. 26 Goethe derived the conceit from Sa‛dī: ‘The first person to put stripes on clothing and to put a ring on his finger was Jamshīd. He was asked, “Why have you relegated all ornamentation to your left hand and left learning to the right?” He replied, “Truth is all the ornamentation the right hand needs” (Gulistān, trans. Thackston, p. 171). Jamshīd was a legendary king of Persia.
27. 27 Another poem derived from Sa‛dī’s Gulistān: ‘If Jesus’s ass is taken to Mecca, when it comes back it will still be an ass’ (trans. Thackston, p. 130).
28. 28 Quark is literally ‘curd cheese’ but here perhaps something like ‘muck’ or ‘slush’ is meant.
29. 29 Pisé (Lehmziegel in German) is ‘rammed earth’ or air-dried, rather than baked, clay, i.e. adobe.
30. 30 Taken from the Pand-nāmeh in de Sacy’s French translation: ‘Two things are the sources of happiness: a good name and accurate discernment; whoever seeks anything beyond these will come to ruin.’
31. 31 The pearl, a recurrent image in the Divan (and a motif much loved by Persian poets) stands for the artistry as well as the hidden essence of a thing in Goethe’s poetic lexicon.

1. * The sixth book of the Divan is devoted to ‘wisdom’, mostly in the form of aphoristic verse. The word hikma means ‘wisdom’ but was also widely used as a term for ‘philosophy’ in both Arabic and Persian. Goethe’s German title literally means Book of Sayings (or Aphorisms).
2. * Poems 85–8 were all added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
3. * Milde: Freigebigkeit
4. * Gesind: Dienstbote, Knecht
5. * Luqmān is the traditional model of the wise man; he figures in sūra 31 of the Qur’ān. He was renowned not only for his wisdom but for his ugliness – in this, akin to Aesop (and probably, Socrates). Goethe took the final verses from Sa‛dī: ‘The delightfulness and glory of sugar do not lie in the cane in which it grows but are to be ascribed to its own nature.’
6. * Poem 100 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
7. * Poem 101, the final poem in this book, was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
8. † bass: besser, mehr, stärker

THE BOOK OF TIMUR

1. 1 Goethe took this poem almost verbatim from William Jones’s Latin translation of an Arabic passage by Abū al-‛Abbās Ibn ‛Arabshāh (1389– 1450), a Mamluk poet who composed a caustic biography of Timur. For Jones’s Latin translation, see Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und die arabische Welt (Frankfurt: Insel, 1988), pp. 480–1. The Arabic original is not a poem but a rhyming prose account that Jones set out as verse. For the Arabic original, see Ibn ‛Arabshāh, ‛Ajā’ib al-Maqdūr fī Nawā’ib Tīmūr, ed. Ahmad Fā’iz al-Himsī (Beirut: Mu‛assasat al-Risālah, 1986); for an English translation, see J.H. Sanders, Tamerlane or Timur the Great Amir (London: Luzac, 1936), p. 227. It has been widely assumed that for Goethe the figure of Timur here camouflages the figure of Napoleon in his disastrous Russian campaign (though Goethe remained a steadfast admirer of Napoleon all his life). As Mommsen notes, this poem in particular puzzled Goethe’s early readers, some of whom were aware of the Arabic original and were unsure how to evaluate other poems in the Divan: Were they translations, free versions, or original compositions? Goethe seems to have intended the puzzlement and taken delight in it.
2. 2 Suleika is the name Goethe gave to Marianne von Willemer, the beloved whom he addresses in The Book of Suleika, and who contributed several poems of her own to the Divan. See Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und die arabische Welt (Frankfurt: Insel, 1988), pp. 542–4, for further details, and the notes in The Book of Suleika.
3. 3 bulbul is the Persian word for nightingale, a beloved figure in Persian verse. In Goethe’s usage the German word ahnden (which nowadays means ‘punish’) is often used interchangeably with ahnen (which means ‘divine’ or ‘foresee’ or ‘prefigure’). See Goethe Wörterbuch.

1. * The seventh book of the Divan contains only two poems and so is the shortest chapter in the collection. The first poem deals with the conqueror Tamerlane, also known as ‘Timur Lenk’ or ‘Timur the Lame’, a favourite cautionary figure in Persian history, while the second poem forms a sort of prelude to The Book of Suleika.
2. * Ahndeten: ahnten

THE BOOK OF SULEIKA

1. 4 Birus (vol. 2, p. 1185) cites one of Goethe’s aphorisms, inspired by the New Testment, to clarify this line: ‘The entire effort of our art consists in giving up our existence in order to exist.’
2. 5 The beloved has the gift of the past, the present and the future, the gift of remembrance and of hope combined.
3. 6 The name later given to Potiphar’s wife in Islamic tradition (see Qur’ān, sūra 12); Goethe gives it to Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860), his beloved, whom he met when she was thirty and married to the Frankfurt banker Johann Jakob von Willemer; she inspired this book of the Divan, and collaborated with him in its composition. Goethe incorporated five of her poems in the collection (though without attribution). Marianne herself identified the poems that she contributed, in a letter to Herman Grimm of 5 April 1856, more than twenty years after Goethe’s death. See poems 108, 110, 135, 138 and 143.
4. 7 Goethe takes the name from the pre-Islamic Arab poet Ḥātim al-Tā’ī, famed for his extravagant generosity. Goethe transliterates the name Ḥātim as though it were Persian (Hatem).
5. 8 In fact, not ‘Ḥātim Zoghrā’ī’ but Mu’ayyad al-Dīn Husayn al-Tughrā’ī (1061–c. 1121), an alchemist and Persian poet who wrote in Arabic and whom Goethe confuses with the previous poet.
6. 9 The carbuncle is a vivid red gem, usually garnet, cut in a convex form and polished. (Not to be confused with the current medical term ‘carbuncle’ for a reddened boil on the skin!)
7. 10 This is the first of the five poems Marianne von Willemer contributed to the Divan. It was written as a response to the preceding poem by Goethe (‘Hatem’). In the third stanza, Marianne had written ‘my whole life’ which Goethe altered to ‘rich life’. Marianne’s authorship of the five poems came to light only in 1849, long after Goethe’s death, when she told Herman Grimm, then a young student, that five of the Divan poems were by her hand; a sixth was later identified (‘I don’t want ever to lose you…’, see below, Poem 124), though it shows signs of Goethe’s interventions. According to Max Rychner, ‘Marianne’s five poems elevate her to being among the first woman poets in the German language.’
8. 11 For this pair of lovers, see The Book of Love, Poem 28 above.
9. 12 The notion is taken from Sa‛dī’s Rose Garden: ‘If Laylā and Majnūn should rise up again, having forgotten about love, they would learn the art of loving from my book.’
10. 13 Rose and nightingale are paired immemorially in Persian verse as the mystical symbol of two lovers. But cf. also Rūmī: ‘The world cannot grasp the rose’s image, imagination cannot encompass the rose’ (cited in von Hammer, Geschichte der schönen Rede-Künste Persiens (1818), p. 186).
11. 14 This is the second poem by Marianne in the Divan.
12. 15 Once a year the Doge of Venice was rowed out to sea in the golden ship of state known as the Bucintoro where he cast a ring into the waters as a symbolic act of marriage between Venice and the sea.
13. 16 The gingko tree has a heart-shaped leaf with two lobes. Goethe took it as an emblem of himself, divided as he was between Ḥāfiẓ, his ‘twin,’ and Hatem, his assumed identity, and yet, in the end, one poet in his doubleness. He sent the poem to Marianne with two Gingko leaves pasted to the page for the leaf is also a symbol of lovers, two beings in one. He is reported to have said, ‘One doesn’t know whether it is one that divides itself into two parts, or two that unite themselves in one.’ A few days later, Goethe and Marianne stood before a Gingko tree in the castle garden of Heidelberg. This is probably the best-loved, and certainly the best-known, poem in the entire Divan.
14. 17 Refers to Shāh ‛Abbās (reigned 1586–1628), founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran. On his birthday, on 28 August 1815, Goethe was presented with a muslin turban topped by a laurel crown, and a basket of fruit, by his admirers; the poem was composed several months earlier, in February (and inspired the birthday gift). The turban made of muslin was a symbol of sovereignty, like a crown.
15. 18 ‘as He’: that is, the Emperor.
16. 19 The Caspian Sea.
17. 20 Samarkand was Timur’s base and residence.
18. 21 Literally, ‘my devoted I’ (mein gewidmetes Ich).
19. 22 The Frank, i.e., the European; the Armenian, i.e., the tradesman.
20. 23 Here to be understood as ‘personal identity’ (and rejected by Hatem in his response).
21. 24 ‘a genuine self’, literally, ‘a worthy I’ (ein wertes Ich). Goethe will find his true self, not in a narrowly defined personal identity, but in his love for Suleika which confers genuine identity on him.
22. 25 Firdowsī – see Poem 65, note 10, and ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 377–9.
23. 26 The celebrated tenth-century Arab poet Abū Tayyib al-Mutanabbī, ‘the self-proclaimed prophet’, often considered the greatest of Arab poets. Note the audacious rhyme on ‘rabbi / Mutanabbi ‘.
24. 27 For Jamīl and Buthaynah see Poem 28, note 6.
25. 28 Goethe seems to describe here a girl with strabismus.
26. 29 Perhaps an allusion to the doubleness Goethe praised in ‘Gingko Biloba’, Poem 113.
27. 30 His praise of Suleika has made her seem a houri, one of the beautiful consorts in the Islamic paradise.
28. 31 This poem is sometimes ascribed to Marianne though there is no definite proof of her authorship.
29. 32 The cup-bearer (sāqī – – in Arabic and Persian) is a stock figure in the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ.
30. 33 For some commentators, this poem marks a turning point and dividing line in The Book of Suleika, the largest and richest book of the Divan. In the preceding poems the emphasis was on the present; many of the poems to follow deal with separation and the transcendent aspects of love.
31. 34 The poem, written in 1815, was inspired by the chestnut trees in the park at Heidelberg.
32. 35 For more on Ḥāfiẓ, Nizāmī, Sa‛dī and Jāmī see ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 380–9.
33. 36 Väter, i.e., the ‘fathers’ or classical masters of poetry, such as Ḥāfiẓ.
34. 37 The poem was composed on 7 October 1815, ten days after Goethe parted from Marianne. She has shown him poems that, with all his knowledge of the masters (the ‘Fathers’), he does not recognise. He fears a rival but Marianne reveals to him that the poems are hers. The poems, she says, are by me but they belong to you; they come as much from you as from me. (This may explain why Goethe incorporated Marianne’s poems in the Divan without acknowledging her authorship.)
35. 38 Bahrām Gūr (406–38 ad) was the fifteenth Sasanian Shah of Persia.
36. 39 Another poem by Marianne which Goethe included in the Divan. He revised stanzas four and five. Years later, Marianne told Herman Grimm that she didn’t know why Goethe had changed her words, adding, ‘I find my own really more beautiful’. She had originally written: ‘Und mich soll sein leises Flüstern/ Von dem Freunde lieblich grüßen,/ Eh noch diese Hügel düstern,/ Sitz ich still zu seinen Füßen.// Und du magst nun weiter ziehen,/ Diene Frohen und Betrübten,/ Dort wo hohe Mauern glühen,/ Finde ich den Vielgeliebten.’ (And its faint whisper brings me a thousand greetings from the friend; even before these hills darken, I sit in silence at their feet. And you may follow your path afar, serve the glad and the downcast, there where the high walls glow, I find the dearly beloved.)
37. 40 The comparison of the beloved’s face to the moon is a favourite trope of Persian poets, and of Ḥāfiẓ in particular.
38. 41 Another poem by Marianne, written on 26 September 1815, in the hope of seeing Goethe once again. It forms a pair with her earlier poem to the East Wind (no. 135 above). In Persian poetry the wind often acts as a messenger, conveying tidings to a distant beloved. According to Sigfried Unseld ‘these are two wonderful poems, in the spirit both of Goethe’s verse and Ḥāfiẓ’s (in which Marianne, wonder of wonders, had so quickly and deeply immersed herself). They are poems equal to Goethe’s in merit and, in this case, perhaps even exceed Goethe’s in their warmth and devotion.’ (Siegfried Unseld, ‘Goethe, Marianne and the Gingko’ in Hafiz, Goethe and the Gingko: Inspirations for the New Divan 2015–2019, p. 111.)
39. 42 The poem is at once a cosmology and a love poem. The opening verses address the moon as an image of Suleika.
40. 43 Possibly an allusion to the Qur’ānic verse, ‘God has only to say to a thing “Be!” and it is’ (Qur’ān 2:117).
41. 44 ‘agonising’ because before creation, all the elements of the universe lay united in ‘God’s eternal breast’.
42. 45 That is, the agony occasioned by the separation of the light from the darkness.
43. 46 The Book of Suleika is itself the mirror wherein the poet sees himself.
44. 47 This is the Turkish Order of the Sun and Moon.
45. 48 This poem, too, is by Marianne.
46. 49 The poem, though by Goethe, is written in Marianne’s voice.
47. 50 Alexander was said to have a mirror in which he could view all the countries of the world.
48. 51 Goethe took this epithet from the Persian dil-gushā (literally, ‘heart-pleasing’, applied to a garden outside Shiraz), as he noted on reading Edward Scott Waring’s awhid ch Sheeraz (1808) in German translation.

1. * The eighth book of the Divan is in many respects the heart of the collection. It was inspired by Goethe’s much younger beloved, Marianne von Willemer, the Suleika of the poems, who also contributed five poems of her own to the book, often in dialogue with the poet. Here Goethe adopts his pen-name Hatem in emulation of Persian poetic practice. The book contains some of Goethe’s most celebrated and best-loved poems (such as ‘Gingko Biloba’).
2. † The epigraph is taken literally from Diez’s translation from the Turkish (translated into German) of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I who was famed as a poet as well as a conqueror. The poet dreamt of the radiance of the moon but when he met the beloved – in Goethe’s case, Marianne von Willemer – he experienced the full blaze of the sun.
3. * keine Kunst: here it means natürlich (quite natural).
4. * The poem, in trochaic tetrameter, uses an alternating monorhyme (on ‘seyn’) throughout, to create the effect of a ghazal.
5. † benamsen: nennen; ‘jemanden mit Namen versehen’ (to furnish someone with a name)
6. ‡ laben: erfreuen, vergnügen
7. § This was the first poem Goethe addressed to Marianne von Willemer, on 12 September 1815, while he was a guest in the Willemer household, near Frankfurt, for two months.
8. * There are three versions of this poem which vary in minor ways, including in the spelling of its title which is sometimes totally omitted.
9. † A variant to this line reads: Schöne Schrift von deiner Hand (‘Beautiful writing in your hand.’) Cf. Rychner, p. 76. In her letter of 1856 to Herman Grimm, Marianne wrote that she may have had this poem too ‘on her conscience’. Her authorship of it is disputed, largely on stylistic grounds; however, see the discussion by Birus in vol. 2, pp. 1208–9.
10. * reizumhangen: apparently Goethe’s coinage (‘charm-laden’). A variant (Rychner, p. 77) reads: ‘Wimpern-Pfeilen, Locken-Schlangen, Hals und Busen reizumhangen...’ (Eyelash-arrows, ringlet-serpents, throat and bosom enhancing with charm).
11. * Badakhshan, historically part of the Persian province of Khorasan and now straddling both Tajikistan and Afghanistan, was famed for its rubies. See Marco Polo, The Travels, trans. by Nigel Cliff (London: Penguin Classics, 2015), p. 48: ‘The precious stones known as balas rubies are produced in this province; they are exquisite and priceless and are formed in the rocks of the mountains.’ The rubies of Badakhshan are mentioned by both Sa‛dī and Ḥāfiẓ in their verses, as Goethe knew from translations of their works.
12. * A village in the Ganges Delta that was a rich source of diamonds, as Goethe learned from a vivid first-person account in Les six voyages… of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (Utrecht, 1712).
13. † Note how the repeated alliteration on ‘g’ suggests the grubbing up and processing of the diamonds, in sharp contrast to the silks and textiles of the preceding verses. This echoes a leading motif throughout the Divan in which harsh elements are juxtaposed and set aclash with the pleasing and exquisite.
14. * A variant of this line reads: ‘Balch, Bochara, Samarkand’; Balkh (now in Afghanistan), an important city of medieval Khorasan, and the supposed birthplace of the prophet Zarathustra.
15. † This poem is written in a free ‘Pindaric’ manner, with short unrhymed lines, reminiscent of Goethe’s earliest lyrics
16. * Jussuf, i.e., Yūsuf (the Biblical Joseph), the paragon of masculine beauty in Islamic tradition.
17. * bewhelmen: überwölben, überdecken (coined by Goethe from English ‘whelm’).
18. * Hatem: to complete the rhyme with Morgenröthe, ‘Goethe’ must be supplied, the doubleness and twinship of the Divan concealed in a single rhyme.
19. * The first stanza of Poem 126 was added in the 1827 edition of the Divan.
20. * Poem 129 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
21. † The square brackets here and elsewhere in the text (especially in the Appendix) indicate that a missing letter has been supplied.
22. * englisch here means engelhaft (that is, ‘angelic’ – not ‘English’!).
23. * Poem 144 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
24. † Augenglass: Brille
25. * The final poem of The Book of Suleika, one of the most beautiful in the Divan, is in six stanzas of alternating iambic and trochaic measures with the recurrent line rhyming on dich in imitation of the repeating monorhyme of the classical ghazal.
26. † Eppich: archaic form for Efeu (‘ivy’).

THE BOOK OF THE CUP-BEARER

1. 1 The question as to whether the Qur’ān was created by God or had existed from all eternity (as God’s speech) was hotly debated over centuries by Muslim theologians. For rationalist theologians the problem lay in the implication that if the Qur’ān were eternal, it would be co-eternal with God Himself and thus compromise His oneness (His awhid), a fundamental article of Muslim faith.
2. 2 Such exaltation of wine is typical of classical Persian verse, and especially that of Ḥāfiẓ who even goes so far as to cry, in his first ghazal, ‘Stain the prayer-mat with wine!’ (beh may sajjādeh rangīn kun!)
3. 3 Literally, ‘it’s perhaps no poem (Gedicht).’
4. 4 Here Goethe anticipates Baudelaire; see his prose-poem ‘Enivrez-vous!’.
5. 5 ‘rot-gut’ i.e., Krätzer, a rough red, usually Tyrolean, wine. Goethe took this advice from Diez’s translation of the Qābūs-nāma or The Book of Qabus: ‘It so happens that wine-drinking is a sin. Hence, if you do commit this sin, do it at least with the best wine; otherwise, you’ll commit the sin, on the one hand, and on the other, you’ll drink bad wine. By God! That would be the sorriest of all sorry things!’ (Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, Buch des Kabus oder Lehren des persischen Königs Kjekjawus für seinen Sohn Ghilan Schach (Berlin, 1811), p. 444.)
6. 6 ‘prize vintage’: literally, the wine known as Eilfer, especially from the 1811 vintage. Goethe praised it in a poem, using the name ‘Eilfer’ as a ghazal-like recurrent rhyme. See below, in the posthumously collected poems of the Divan (Appendix, Poems 21 and 22).
7. 7 This quatrain originally formed the second stanza of the preceding poem.
8. 8 Here again Goethe suggests a ghazal form by the alternating rhyme on ‘drunkenness’ (Trunkenheit/ Betrunkenheit).
9. 9 Goethe took the Persian phrase from Chardin: bī-damāgh būdan, presumably meaning ‘hung over’ (literally, to be brain-dead, brainless). German Katzenjammer has the same sense.
10. 10 Schwänchen: sweets and fruits left over after a meal that are offered to a guest to take home. The second swan is the actual bird; the third swan, said to sing before it dies, is the poet.
11. 11 ‘He’ refers to Muhammad. According to K.E. Oelsner, Mohamed: Darstellung des Einflusses seiner Glaubenslehre auf die Voelker des Mittelalters (Frankfurt, 1810), p. 26, one of Goethe’s sources: ‘… the Prophet seems to have forbidden wine to the faithful only so as to reserve the right to drunkenness for himself.’ Oelsner comments further: ‘The craziness lies solely in the violent commotion that took hold of (Muhammad’s) mind; his mind is otherwise completely clear.’
12. 12 That is, when it is full night.
13. 13 Aurora, the dawn, was wedded to Tithonus, who was granted immortality but not eternal youth; she fell in love with Hesperus, the evening star, who always eludes her when the sun rises. Cf. Tennyson’s poem ‘Tithonus’ for another treatment of this theme.

1. * The ninth book of the Divan is devoted to wine-drinking (a favourite motif in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ) and to the figure of the cup-bearer (the sāqī in Arabic and Persian), conventionally a handsome young boy who not only pours out the wine but hangs on the words of wisdom the bibulous master poet dispenses.
2. * Poems 158 and 159 were added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
3. * Von Streit der Schulen: Academic, and especially theological disputes are meant. The poem derives from Ḥāfiẓ (von Hammer, vol. 1, p. 392): ‘O, O, what a racket there was this morning in the tavern! …’
4. * Bulbul: the nightingale
5. * Poem 165 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
6. * gestängelt: coined by Goethe by analogy with French perché (‘perched’).
7. * Poem 167 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.

THE BOOK OF PARABLES

1. 1 As so often in the Divan, the pearl serves as an analogue of the creative act and particularly, of writing poetry. Goethe took the parable from a variety of sources: from Sa‛dī in Olearius’s translation, from Chardin, and from William Jones’s Latin translations of Arabic and Persian verse.
2. 2 Here Bulbul, the nightingale, represents the soul caged in the body in hallowed Neo-Platonic tradition.
3. 3 The poem is taken by some commentators as an oblique affirmation of the Resurrection of the Body.
4. 4 Taken from Sa‛dī’s Gulistān, translated by Olearius (p. 54): ‘I said to a lovely peacock feather that I found lying between the pages of the Qur’ān, “How does such majesty befall you that you lie so in the Noble Book?”‘ The enthroned peacock is a symbol of imperial might (as in the famed Peacock Throne of Iran).
5. 5 In Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), his autobiography, Goethe writes, ‘The Evangelists may contradict themselves as long as the Gospel does not contradict itself.’ And in a conversation with Eckermann on 11 March 1832 (i.e., a dozen or so years after the Divan was first published) he said: ‘Nevertheless I consider all four Gospels to be utterly authentic for in them the reflection of a majesty is at work that issued from the person of Christ and is of so divine a sort as only the divine has ever manifested on earth.’

1. * Goethe collected moral tales and parables from various sources: Olearius, Chardin, William Jones. This was a time-honoured genre in Arabic and Persian literature, best exemplified perhaps by Sa‛dī, whose works Goethe often drew on. In his announcement of the book in the Morgenblatt of 1816, Goethe wrote: ‘The Book of Parables contains figurative representations that apply to human situations.’ In keeping with Persian tradition, many of the edifying poems are also humorous (see, for example, poem 174).
2. * Bauer: Vogelkäfig
3. * Poem 170 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
4. † geküttet: gekittet
5. * The poem is written in what is called Knittelvers, akin to English doggerel; there is a longstanding German tradition of such verse and Goethe often practised it. Goethe took this anecdote from the Qābūs-nāma in Diez’s translation.
6. * Poem 174 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.

THE BOOK OF THE PARSI

1. 1 Damāvand, the highest peak in the Alborz mountains of Iran, north- east of Tehran, on the Caspian Sea.
2. 2 The Zāyand-i Rūd, the largest river in central Iran.
3. 3 panbeh: cotton (in Persian).

1. * Goethe had great admiration for ancient Persian custom and belief, as he describes it ‘Notes and Essays’ (see pp. 356–60) and in eleventh book of the Divan he pays poetic tribute to the pre-Islamic traditions of Iran. (He had a more sceptical attitude towards Islam itself.) The rituals of purity, the reverence for the elements – and especially fire – in Zoroastrian practice appealed to him instinctively.
2. * This majestic tribute to Zoroastrian practice and belief is composed in quatrains all in solemn trochaic measures; it differs from other quatrains in the Divan because here Goethe makes occasional use of such devices as enjambement, as in stanza 4, and a rhyme scheme of a-a/b-b, which lend a distinct momentum to the lines, forming a sequence of couplets in quatrain form.
3. * Here Goethe evokes the Zoroastrian sense of respect for the earth, again in trochaic measures but with alternating rhyme. There are also perhaps echoes of Virgil’s Georgics; see, for example, Book 2, ll. 405ff: ‘Even now the countryman actively pushes on to the coming/ year and its tasks; attacking the naked vine with a curved/ pruning knife, he shears and trims it into shape’, The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 147.

THE BOOK OF PARADISE

1. 1 Of course, according to Muslim doctrine, God – not Muhammad – is the author of the Qur’ān.
2. 2 The ‘young exemplar’ in the view of the commentators, is an eternally young houri, a figure of continuous rejuvenation.
3. 3 The Battle of Badr, in 624 ce, was the first decisive Muslim victory over hostile Meccan forces. The Muslim warriors who died there were celebrated as heroes and saints.
4. 4 Muhammad here refers to his miraculous Night Journey when God transported him in one night from Mecca to Jerusalem (the so-called Isrā’), and then through the heavens (the mi῾rāj), on the fabulous winged horse Buraq; the journey is mentioned twice in the Qur’ān (e.g., sūra 17:1).
5. 5 Women too have hope of paradise (with reference to Qur’ān 13:23, among other passages).
6. 6 Suleika, in both the Bible and the Qur’ān, lusted after Joseph; in the later Islamic tradition, she renounced her desire and (despite his entreaties) became a paragon of chastity and renunciation.
7. 7 This is, of course, the Virgin Mary, a figure venerated in Islam (and the subject of sūra 19 of the Qur’ān).
8. 8 The reference is to Khadija, the first wife of Muhammad and one of the first to accept his revelations; Muhammad took other wives only after Khadija’s death.
9. 9 Fātima was Muhammad’s daughter and the wife of ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib, his cousin, and the mother of Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, the second and third Shi‛ite imams.
10. 10 In this and the two following poems, the dialogue between the poet and the houri who stands watch at the gate of heaven is set in paradise.
11. 11 Knittelvers: rhyming couplets with a jaunty rhythm, usually satirical and light-hearted, as here.
12. 12 The poet is counting on the houri’s fingers the time that they have been together.
13. 13 As Max Rychner notes, this alludes to I Corinthians 2:10: ‘for the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.’
14. 14 For the Seven Sleepers, see the penultimate poem in The Book of Paradise.
15. 15 Abu Hurayra was a close friend and one of the Companions of the Prophet; reportedly he brought his beloved cat everywhere with him. According to tradition, the Prophet himself was fond of cats and once even sliced his cloak on which a cat was sleeping, so as not to disturb the animal.
16. 16 Goethe here evokes ‘the language of glances’ (Sprache der Blicke) quite literally; it is not only a ‘hidden grammar’ but a ‘rhetoric of such mute conversation’ (Rhetorik solcher stummen Unterhaltung), as Birus notes (vol. 2, p. 1407).
17. 17 As Birus notes (vol. 2, p. 1410), there is an echo here of Dante’s visio beatifica in the final canto of Paradiso (33) with its ‘clarified vision’ of ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ (L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle).
18. 18 An old Christian legend (the ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’), recounted in Syriac sources and taken up in the Qur’ān (‘The Cave’ (al-Kahf), verse 10 ff.) where God says: ‘Then We plunged them into a deep sleep in the cave for many long years. Then We awoke them so as to know which of the two parties could best calculate the exact length of their sojourn…’. In the original legend, the youths with their dog were asleep for 200 or 300 years. In 1814, Goethe had used the theme of the sleepers in a play, Des Epimenides Erwachen. Goethe’s source for this poem was J.C. Rich, The Story of the Seven Sleepers in Fundgruben des Orients, III, pp. 347–81 (Vienna, 1809–18); much of the narrative is taken almost verbatim from Rich.
19. 19 According to legend, the Roman emperor Trajan Decius (reigned 249–51 ad).
20. 20 Satan, the ‘lord of the flies’.
21. 21 It is quite characteristic of Goethe, and consistent with the tone of the entire Divan, to conclude his paradise on a tender note, giving the trusty dog of the Seven Sleepers the final mention.

1. * Goethe described the twelfth, and final, book of the Divan in the Morgenblatt of 1816 thus: ‘The Book of Paradise contains both the exceptional features of the Muhammadan paradise together with the loftiest traits of the devout cast of mind of the believer which pertain to this future serene felicity. Here will be found the legend of the Seven Sleepers, in accord with oriental traditions, along with others which represent the jubilant exchange of earthly happiness for the heavenly. It closes with the poet’s farewell to his people, and the Divan is thereby concluded.’ The Arabic word khuld () literally means ‘eternity’ but is also used to denote paradise, the ‘abode of eternity’.
2. * Poem 180 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
3. * The poem was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
4. * Poem 184 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
5. * Poem 185 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
6. * Poem 186 was added to the 1827 edition of the Divan.
7. * This long narrative poem is written in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter.

NOTES AND ESSAYS FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE WEST-EASTERN DIVAN

1. 1 Ecclesiastes 3:1.
2. 2 This is probably the Wiesbadener Register of 1815 – not translated here – for which see Birus, vol. 1, pp. 453–6.
3. 3 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), an early influence on the young Goethe, had extensive knowledge of Oriental poetry. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Professor of Oriental Studies in Jena and later in Göttingen, built upon Herder’s influence, especially in bringing Goethe to a wider appreciation of Eastern poetry through a closer reading of biblical poetry. For Goethe’s further tribute to Eichhorn, see pp. 486–7 below.
4. 4 Sir William Jones (1746–94). His translation of the Moallakat (i.e., as correctly transliterated, Mu‛allaqāt) was first published in 1783 and inspired Goethe’s life-long fascination with the poems; he was still working to translate them forty years later; cf. K. Mommsen, ‘Goethe und die Moallakat’, Sitzungsberichte der Deutschen Akademie der Wissen- schaften zu Berlin. Klasse für Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst, Jahrgang 1960, no. 2. Goethe here translates Jones’s remarks from his Poëseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex (London: T. Cadell, 1774), pp. 84–5.
5. 5 The original poem is attributed to the pre-Islamic ‘outlaw’ poet Ta’ab- baṭa Sharran. Goethe knew the poem in at least three different translations and he may have drawn on all of them for his version. According to the nineteenth-century poet and translator Friedrich Rückert, Goethe used a Latin translation of 1814 by the Dutch philologist Albert Schultens (1686–1750). Goethe also knew the Latin and German translation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Freytag (1788–1861), contained in the latter’s dissertation (Göttingen, 1814), as well as a prose version by Michaelis in Arpenius’s Arabische Grammatik. On 23 September 1818, he turned for advice to his friend, the Orientalist Hans Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten, who helped him with the revision of his version; see K. Mommsen, Goethe und die arabische Welt (Frankfurt: Insel, 1988), p. 141ff. for details. For the original Arabic, a literal translation and a commentary, see Alan Jones, Early Arabic Poetry (Oxford: Ithaca Press, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 229–47.
6. 6 The Parsis – or Parsees – are the surviving remnants of the Zoroastrians, who maintain the ancient rites and doctrines; today they are mostly centred in Mumbai, formerly Bombay.
7. 7 A derogatory term (from Persian gabr) used especially by Muslims to designate the Zoroastrians who remained in Islamic lands after the conquest; the word has overtones of ‘infidel’.
8. 8 A reference to polo.
9. 9 Smerdis was the brother of the Achaemenid king Cambyses II and usurped his throne; cf. Herodotus, III: 61–80.
10. 10 The Magi were a priestly caste of Medes in ancient Persia.
11. 11 The Sasanian king Chosroes II (590–628 ad); Goethe alludes to their love in the poem ‘Musterbilder’, Poem 28.
12. 12 By this Goethe refers to the Parsi Nameh, the eleventh book of the Divan, which contains the poem ‘Vermächtnis alt persischen Glaubens’ (The Legacy of Old Persian Belief) – Poem 178 above. In these Notes, he refers to himself frequently as ‘the poet’ (der Dichter).
13. 13 I.e., a Zoroastrian priest (from Persian mūbad).
14. 14 The Barmakids were a powerful family of Central Asian origin which supplied a succession of viziers to the early Abbasid Caliphate and exerted great power until they were extirpated by the Caliph Harūn al-Rashīd, for reasons that remain obscure, in 803.
15. 15 Despite much speculation it is not clear to what event Goethe refers here.
16. 16 Darius I (reigned 522–486 BC) established the Achaemenid empire.
17. 17 Darius III (reigned 336–330 BC) was toppled by Alexander the Great.
18. 18 i.e., the Greeks.
19. 19 This is Shāpūr I, the second Sasanian king, who ruled from 241–72 ad. By ‘the poet’ Goethe here refers again to himself.
20. 20 An error on Goethe’s part: the Roman emperor was not Valentinian but Valerian (reigned 253–9 AD) who was besieged by Shapur I in260 ad.
21. 21 Goethe here apparently refers to Hinduism.
22. 22 The ‘Fables of Bidpai’ was translated from Sanskrit into Pahlavi under Chosroes I (reigned 531–79 ad) from the Panchatantra, a ‘mirror for princes’ compiled probably between 300 and 200 bc and attributed to the ancient Hindu sage Vishnu Sharma; in the eighth century it was translated from Pahlavi into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa῾ and became widely known under the title Kalila and Dimna. Goethe had read the Fables in German and French translations.
23. 23 i.e., as is found in the Fables of Bidpai.
24. 24 See Faust II, verses 5573–5: ‘I am extravagance, I am poetry; / I am the poet who fulfils himself/ when he squanders his innermost good’ (Bin die Verschwendung, bin die Poesie;/ Bin der Poet, der sich vollendet,/ Wenn er sein eigenst Gut verschwendet).
25. 25 See Qur’ān II:2-7. Goethe quotes the Qur’ān in Theodor Arnold’s German translation of the 1734 English translation by George Sale; in the verses quoted here I use Sale’s original version.
26. 26 Goethe here quotes from the appendix to Jakob Gohl’s Grammatica Arabica of 1656; this was a revision which Gohl (1596–1667) made of the earlier Arabic grammar by Thomas Erpenius.
27. 27 Abū Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī (915–65 ad), generally considered the greatest of classical Arabic poets, was linked with the radical Carmathian movement.
28. 28 Goethe seems to refer to the well-established practice of naskh (abrogation) in Qur’ānic tradition whereby an earlier verse could be deemed rescinded by a later one.
29. 29 i.e., alluding to the literal meaning of the Arabic word islām, ‘submission, surrender’.
30. 30 This is incorrect. Both Pahlavi and Greek continued to be in official use until well into Umayyad times and the reign of the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (reg. 685–705) when coins were first minted with Arabic inscriptions.
31. 31 Goethe was mistaken in considering the Barmakids of Zoroastrian origin, as his allusion to ‘the sacred fire’ suggests; rather, the family forebears were apparently Buddhists.
32. 32 ‘an oppressive narrowness’: eine dumpfe Beschränktheit. The phrase encapsulates Goethe’s reservations about Islam.
33. 33 This passage figured, improbably enough, in the recent uproar over the German banker Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab: wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (‘Germany abdicates: How we are putting our country at risk’) (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010), with its presumed criticism of Muslim refusal to integrate fully into German society; cf. Sarrazin’s gloating article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 24 December 2010, and the subsequent rebuttal by Necla Kelek (11 January 2011) as well as the particularly vitriolic onslaught on Sarrazin by Thomas Lehr (18 January 2011) in the same newspaper.
34. 34 In seeing ‘vice’ as a kind of mental aberration in Hinduism Goethe oversimplifies the Hindu position; perhaps the Hindu emphasis on the illusory nature of reality and of desire led him to this misconception.
35. 35 The word dīvān originally denoted a ‘register’, as of accounts. It developed into a powerful ministry with a wide mandate with responsibility for taxes, duties, government finances and the like. The word, of Persian origin, came to denote a collection of poems as well and found its way into European languages to indicate border and customs controls, e.g. French douane. See introduction for further details.
36. 36 Zersplitterung (‘fragmentation’), a resonant word for Goethe, as the opening line (of Poem 1) of the Divan shows: ‘North and West and South split apart...’ (Nord und West und Süd zersplittern…), as though he had to shatter an old world in order to create a new one in verse.
37. 37 Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian ruler, was killed by the Arab armies of conquest in 651 ad. For Ahasuerus, see Esther 6:1ff.
38. 38 The Samanids, a Persian dynasty which flourished in eastern Iran and central Asia from 819 to 1005; it was overthrown by the Ghaznavids under Maḥmūd the Conqueror (reigned 998–1030).
39. 39 Goethe here confuses Abu Nasr Ahmed Asadī, the teacher of Firdowsī, with his son ῾Alī Asadī, the lexicographer and poet who composed the Garshāsp-nāmeh, an imitation of the Shāh-nāmeh, in 1066, some thirty years after Firdowsī’s death (cf. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. 2, pp. 272ff.).
40. 40 For Anvārī, see Browne, Literary History, vol. 2, pp. 364–91.
41. 41 Goethe here reacts against the condemnation of panegyric which Joseph von Hammer (on whom he relied for most of his knowledge of Persian poetry) had launched, denouncing it as ‘sheer idolatry’ and ‘lickspittlery’ (Speichelleckerey); cf. the notes to Goethe, Werke (Munich: Hanser, 1998), vol. 11.1.2, p. 772.
42. 42 I.e. his mastery of the game, wildly popular at court.
43. 43 The Seljuqs, of Turkic origin, founded and maintained a vast empire, which endured from 1037 to 1194 in Iran, Iraq and Central Asia.
44. 44 Ganja, in Azerbaijan, was the birthplace of Nizāmī; hence, he is known as Nizāmī Ganjavī.
45. 45 Balkh, a city and province in medieval Khorasan in northwestern Iran (the city is now in Afghanistan); it is the ancient Bactria.
46. 46 Probably an allusion to the Asrār-nāmeh (Book of Secrets) of ‛Aṭṭār; on this, and the supposed acquaintance of Rūmī and ‛Aṭṭār, cf. Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul, pp. 30–3.
47. 47 i.e., Konya in present-day Turkey.
48. 48 Not Genghis Khan in fact but the Great Khan Möngke (died 1259), one of his successors; the destruction of Baghdad, and of the Abbasid Caliphate, occurred in 1258 under his brother, the Mongol leader Hülagü, and it is no doubt this event to which Goethe alludes.
49. 49 Goethe here alludes to the doctrine of tawḥīd (the oneness of God), central to Islamic belief, and to its further elaboration, in the mystical teachings of the Sufi Ibn ‛Arabī, as waḥdat al-wujūd (oneness of being).
50. 50 Goethe seems to be alluding here to the various paradoxical and provocative sayings and deeds of the Sufi masters, whose considerable idiosyncrasies and eccentricities are all lovingly documented in the early literature in both Arabic and Persian. Jāmī’s huge prose work entitled Nafahāt al-Uns (The Breaths of Fellowship) gives biographies of 611 Sufi saints; cf. Browne, Literary History, vol. 3, pp. 435–6.
51. 51 In ‘Hegira’, the first poem of the Divan, Goethe introduces this image:

52. Bösen Felsweg auf und nieder

53. Trösten Hafis deine Lieder,

54. Wenn der Führer mit Entzücken,

55. Von des Maultiers hohem Rücken,

56. Singt, die Sterne zu erwecken,

57. Und die Räuber zu erschrecken.

58. (Up and down on the awful mountain path, your songs,

59. Ḥāfiẓ, comfort when the guide in rapture sings from the mule’s

60. tall back to wake up the stars and scare the robbers off.)

61. 52 Goethe refers to the fact that drama was never cultivated in classical Islamic literature and remained largely unknown until modern times.
62. 53 Goethe engages in a bit of wordplay here, which is hard to convey; the poet, he says, ‘rhymes the unrhymed together’ (‘das Ungereimte zusammenreimt’), i.e., ‘strings together nonsense.’
63. 54 The anecdote is widely cited in Sufi literature; Niẓāmī relates it in his Makhzan al-Asrār (‘Treasure House of Secrets’); cf. Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul (Leiden; Boston: E.J. Brill, 2003), p. 252.
64. 55 No single English word conveys the range of meanings of ‘Geist’, as indeed Goethe here demonstrates; among its many meanings are those of ‘mind’ and ‘intelligence’, as well as ‘wit’ (comparable to French esprit), but it also conveys notions of ‘spirit’.
65. 56 German genialisch.
66. 57 Bahrām Gūr, a Sasanian king (reigned 420–38), and his beloved slave-girl Dilaram were said to have invented rhyme through their amorous conversation which fell into rhyme because of the deep affinity which bound them together. The early eighth-century poet Jamīl was one of the ῾Udhrī poets – who, as Heine wrote, ‘die when they love’ – and Buthayna was the object of his hopeless passion. For Jamīl, see poem 29 in the Divan.
67. 58 The ambassador in question was Abū al-Ḥasan Khān Shīrāzī (born in 1776) who visited St. Petersburg at the beginning of 1816. He was apparently the original model for Hajji Baba in England by James Morier whom he accompanied on his journey to England; he later wrote his Hayrat-nāmeh institutions; cf. Antonino Pagliaro & Alessandro Bausani, La letteratura persiana (Milan, 1968), pp. 536–7.
68. 59 What follows is presumably what the merchant said to the robbers.
69. 60 ‛Umar ibn ‛Abd al-‛Azīz (reigned 717–20 ad) was unique among Umayyad caliphs in being revered for his piety.
70. 61 Buhlūl is a legendary ‘wise fool’, about whom many humorous anecdotes are preserved in folk literature.
71. 62 Fatḥ ῾Alī Shāh, of the Qajar Dynasty, ruled Iran from 1797 until 1834.
72. 63 A bit of anti-Romantic malice on Goethe’s part: the lines (Mir will ewiger Durst nur frommen/ Nach dem Durste) are by his younger contemporary Joseph von Eichendorff and appear in the latter’s novel Ahnung und Gegenwart of 1815; cf. Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke in einem Band (Munich: Hanser, 2007), p. 574.
73. 64 Anvārī’s lines are probably addressed to the panegyric poet Shujā‛ī Nasavī (flourished 12th century).
74. 65 Goethe translated this passage from the English of Sir John Malcolm (1769–1833), The History of Persia (1815), which I here give in Malcolm’s original words.
75. 66 This was Matthäus von Collin (1779–1824), a professor at the universities of Krakow and Vienna, who was also editor of the Viennese Jahrbücher der Literatur in the first volume of which this review appeared in 1818.
76. 67 For Khāqānī (1106–85), see The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2d ed.), vol. 4, pp. 915–16, and Browne, vol. 2, pp. 391–9, who calls him ‘a poet notorious for the difficulty and obscurity of his verse’ (p. 391). For Ẓāhir Faryābī (died 1201), see Pagliaro & Bausani, p. 233. ‘Achestegi’ is Athīr al-Dīn Akhsīkatī (died 1211); cf. Browne, vol. 2, pp. 344, 399, & 425, and Pagliaro & Bausani, p. 233.
77. 68 1 Samuel, 8:10–17 and 19–20 (King James version).
78. 69 An Arabic verse (in praise of the Mongol conqueror Hülagü) which the 14th-century poet and court historian ῾Abd Allāh Ibn Faḍl Allāh Vaṣṣāf of Shiraz, known as ‘the Panegyrist of the Presence’ (Vaṣṣāf-i Ḥaḍrat), inserted into his tedious and florid official history in Persian, a work which Browne calls ‘as important as it is unreadable’ (Browne, vol. 3, p. 68); cf. also The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), vol. 11, p. 174, and Pagliaro & Bausani, p. 519. Goethe cites von Hammer’s translation of his couplet here; for the original, see Vaṣṣāf (Bombay, 1269 ah), vol. 1, p. 51.
79. 70 German Völlerey.
80. 71 For a fuller account of this famous incident, see Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356–323 B.C.: a Historical Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 360–6.
81. 72 German eine Welt von Putz und Pracht.
82. 73 See the verses in the Divan (Poem 117 in The Book of Suleika) which begin, ‘Nur wenig ist’s was ich verlange …’ for Goethe’s own exploration of this conceit.
83. 74 ‘Gaiety’ conveys only one nuance of the German word Heiterkeit which ranges from cheerfulness to serenity, with connotations of gladness, humour, high spirits and hilarity.
84. 75 Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–74), the first German Arabist, a feisty independent scholar and author whose critical observations made him many enemies; Goethe read certain of his works as a student. Johann David Michaelis (1717–91), professor at the University of Göttingen, who taught Semitic philology, Biblical studies and theology; as a young man, Goethe had wanted to study under him.
85. 76 For Goethe’s take on Marco Polo, see below, pp. 464–5.
86. 77 The image is taken from Ḥāfiẓ; cf. also, Goethe’s Divan, Poem 32: ‘Auch in Locken hab’ ich mich/ Gar zu gern verfangen...’ (I have myself all too willingly become entangled in locks of hair).
87. 78 It isn’t clear whether Goethe refers here to the rhyming couplets of the masnavī form, as practised by Rūmī, or to the aa, ba, ca, etc. rhyme-patterns of the ghazal.
88. 79 Goethe here quotes Matthäus von Collin again; cf. note 66 above.
89. 80 Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825), German author noted for his extravagant and inimitable prose style which Goethe had loathed and attacked in print. Goethe knew Richter when the latter lived in Weimar (1798–1800); as this passage shows, Goethe’s opinion of Richter altered for the better in later years.
90. 81 Words and phrases taken from Richter’s ‘10. Hundsposttag’ in the journal Hesperus (1795).
91. 82 German Schöne Redekünste.
92. 83 This refers to Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky’s Güldene Schatzkästlein der Kinder Gottes, deren Schatz im Himmel ist (Golden Treasure-Chest of the Children of God whose Treasure is in Heaven) of 1718, to which Goethe’s mother turned for solace when he was ill.
93. 84 The Persian word fāl means ‘omen’ or ‘augury’ but commonly refers to the practice of divination – still common today – based on the random selection of verses from the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ somewhat like the ancient sortes Virgilianae.
94. 85 Goethe here alludes to his own poem in the Divan which begins, ‘Talismane werd’ ich in dem Buch zerstreuen’ (Poem 85). He himself is, of course, ‘the Western poet’.
95. 86 Goethe provides a list of flowers and other objects which are to be elucidated through the rhymes which the lovers supply, e.g. Amarante = ich sah und brannte (Amaranth: ‘I saw and burned’), Haar vom Tiger = ein kühner Krieger ‘Hair of tiger = a bold warrior’), etc. These are the ‘exchanges’ of his discussion.
96. 87 An allusion to Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) and his ‘organic’ (or ‘animal’) magnetism, which intrigued and influenced Goethe over a long period and played a part in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities).
97. 88 Goethe here gives an example of a cipher-poem which he composed together with Marianne von Willemer, who collaborated with him in writing the Divan; the poem entwines together lines from von Hammer’s translation of Ḥāfiẓ. For examples by Goethe and Marianne, see Birus, vol. 1, pp. 601, 605–7.
98. 89 Goethe was sometimes careless with his own titles. This is a reference to the first book of the Divan, Moganni Nameh or The Book of the Singer.
99. 90 ‘The poet’ is Goethe himself, and the occasion, a masque on 18 December 1818 in Weimar, in the presence of the Empress Mother Maria Feodorovna.
100. 91 This is the second book of the Divan.
101. 92 Poem 27 in The Book of Hafiz, the second book of the Divan.
102. 93 ‘Longing’ (Sehnsucht) is a key theme in the Divan, as already shown in Book 1, Poem 17.
103. 94 ‘Cypress’ is a standard figure for the beloved in all his or her grace.
104. 95 The motif of the locks of the beloved’s hair, much favoured by Ḥāfiẓ will be further developed in The Book of Love (e.g., Poem 33).
105. 96 This beautiful line (Unsichtbar wolkig ziehend), at once dense and evocative, demonstrates just how closely Goethe echoes the particular expressive qualities of Persian poetry.
106. 97 The cup-bearer (sāqī in Arabic and Persian), often evoked in the ghazal, is a standard figure, at once a disciple and an object of desire (as well as a youth eager for instruction).
107. 98 The cup-bearer lingers in the hope of garnering some wisdom from the (increasingly tipsy) poet and sage.
108. 99 ‘down’ signifies the onset of maturity. Sufis often practised a kind of cult of the ‘beardless youth’ that entailed a rapt gaze at a handsome young man in which a sublimated sexual longing sought ‘the beauty of God’ in human form.
109. 100 ‘hints’: Goethe here alludes to the Sufi practice whereby the master taught not only by words but by gestures and hints (ishārāt in Arabic); for example, by casting the glance upwards instead of merely saying ‘heaven’.
110. 101 Rulers and their viziers often summoned Sufi masters to court in order to benefit by their wisdom and perception; and sometimes, too, for the pleasure of being scolded and rebuked by them.
111. 102 This is Poem 29 in The Book of Love of the Divan.
112. 103 This is Tefkir Nameh, the fourth book of the Divan.
113. 104 Rendsch Nameh, the fifth book of the Divan, i.e., ranj, a Persian word meaning ‘care, pain, turmoil, annoyance’, etc.
114. 105 As usual, Goethe refers to himself here as ‘the poet’ or the ‘Western poet’.
115. 106 German Aufschneiderey.
116. 107 The Hikmet Nameh, the sixth book of the Divan.
117. 108 The Timur Nameh, the seventh book of the Divan. Timur (also known as Tamburlaine) may be seen as a surrogate for Napoleon.
118. 109 Nasr al-Dīn Hoja is a clownish figure to whom many jokes and antics are attributed in Turkish popular and folk literature; he was often portrayed as a boon companion or jester to Timur.
119. 110 German nicht geckenhaft zudringlich.
120. 111 Saki Nameh, the ninth book of the Divan.
121. 112 For the original story, which is quite different from Goethe’s version, see The Gulistan of Sa῾dī, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Bethesda: Ibex, 2008), pp. 114–6.
122. 113 In the original tale, it is of course a mosque which the narrator enters.
123. 114 The sentence, in Arabic, is a typical example from a grammar book.
124. 115 In the original, Sa‛dī quotes the following verse, ‘I saw a great one in the mountains who had renounced the world and lived in a cave’ [Buzurgī dīdam andar kūhsārī qinā‛at kardeh az dunyā be-ghārī], which makes more sense than Goethe’s version; cf. Gulistān, p. 116.
125. 116 For the original, see Gulistān, p. 117.
126. 117 The tenth book of the Divan.
127. 118 The eleventh book of the Divan.
128. 119 The twelfth and final book of the Divan.
129. 120 Goethe is referring to Book Four of his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (‘Poetry and Truth’).
130. 121 Referring to the Pentateuch, i.e., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deutoronomy.
131. 122 Goethe here inserts parts of an essay he had written in 1797.
132. 123 Exodus 1:8.
133. 124 Genesis 49:5–7. Goethe here follows the 1545 Luther translation almost verbatim; cf. Die gantze Heilige Schrift (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), vol. 1, p. 118.
134. 125 Exodus 2:16–22.
135. 126 A tributary of the Dead Sea. By ‘the little gulf’ Goethe presumably designates the Gulf of Aqaba.
136. 127 This refers to the uprising of Sicilians against the French occupying forces on 30 March 1282. For Goethe, it was ‘in reverse’ because the Israelites were ‘strangers’ among the Egyptians, unlike the Sicilians under their overlords of Anjou.
137. 128 This seems to be Goethe’s own interpretation of Exodus 12:23–30 since in the biblical account, it is ‘the Lord’ who strikes down the first-born of Egypt, not the Israelites themselves.
138. 129 See Exodus 18:13–27.
139. 130 Gelüstgräber, i.e., ‘the graves of greed’ [qibroth hatta’avah], where ‘they buried the people who had been greedy for meat.’ Cf. Numbers 11:34.
140. 131 See Genesis 13:18.
141. 132 For Oboth and Iyim, see Numbers 33:43–45.
142. 133 The suggestion that Joshua and Caleb murdered Moses, which seems to have sprung from Goethe’s own fevered imagination, has no basis in the biblical texts. Freud later applauded it as an astute insight in his ‘Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion’ in Werke aus den Jahren 1932–1939, ed. Anna Freud (Frankfurt, 1972, pp. 101–246). Moses and Monotheism (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939), p. 144.
143. 134 I have changed the place-names as Goethe gives them to agree with the spellings in The New English Bible, pp. 190–2.
144. 135 Again, by the ‘arabischer Meerbusen’, Goethe presumably refers to the Gulf of Aqaba.
145. 136 A reference to Nicolas Sanson (1600–67), French geographer and the author of Geographia sacra (1652).
146. 137 This is Augustine Calmet (1672–1757), a Benedictine scholar, author of the Dictionarium historicum, geographicum et literale sacrae scripturae (1729).
147. 138 Edward Well (or Wells) (1667–1727), English mathematician, theologian and geographer.
148. 139 Jean-Baptiste Nolin (1686–1762), Parisian cartographer and engraver.
149. 140 Cf. Matthew 4:2.
150. 141 For Michaelis, see note 75 above; for Eichhorn, see note 3 above. Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851) was Eichhorn’s successor and professor of oriental languages at Jena; in his biblical commentaries he was controversial for his vigorous espousal of ‘theological rationalism’. He also published an Arabic grammar. Arnold Heeren (1760–1842) was a professor of philosophy, then of ancient history, in Göttingen, who set great emphasis on the role of economics in history; Goethe owned several of his books and borrowed others from the library in Weimar.
151. 142 According to Marco Polo, the coinage of the Khan was neither of gold nor of silver but of other metals as well as of such materials as tree-bark; cf. his Travels, translated by Nigel Cliff (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 124.
152. 143 This is John Mandeville (1300–72), of obscure nationality, either English or Belgian, whose Voyage d’outre mer was influential and much read.
153. 144 The Volksbuch, or ‘People’s Book’, was a genre of popular historical writing, usually in prose.
154. 145 The allusion is to Judges 14:18.
155. 146 The reference is to Joseph Görres, Die teutschen Volksbücher (Heidelberg, 1807), a book which Goethe owned.
156. 147 He recounted his travels in his Viaggi di Pietro della Valle il Pellegrino, Descritti da lui medesimo in Lettere familiari (Rome, 1650–3). Goethe first read him in 1806 in Italian and then, over the years 1815 to 1819, in German translation.
157. 148 Goethe here uses the word capighi, derived from Turkish kapıcı meaning ‘porter’ or ‘concierge’.
158. 149 ‘The lovely Maani’, who becomes Pietro della Valle’s wife, is learned in pharmacology and medicine.
159. 150 This is important presumably because his wife’s familiarity with the women gives della Valle information about their practices to which as a man he would not have access.
160. 151 Actually, ῾Abbās I ibn Muḥammad Khudābanda (reigned 1587–1629); ῾Abbās II (reigned 1642–66) was his great-grandson.
161. 152 It isn’t clear whether Goethe here means Sir Anthony Shirley (1565– c.1635), whom ῾Abbās the Great (Shāh ῾Abbās) sent as an envoy to Europe in 1599, or his brother Robert (died 1628) who stayed at court as a hostage during his brother’s mission and was later sent on two missions of his own to Europe on behalf of the Persian silk trade.
162. 153 This is the ceremony in the Armenian rite which takes place on 5 January during which the cross is immersed in water for a day in order to provide baptismal water for the coming year. The ‘Sandarud’, which flows through the city of Isfahan, is the Zāyand-i Rūd (or Zanda-rūd) river.
163. 154 Goethe here refers to the fact that at Muhammad’s death in 632, his cousin and son-in-law ῾Alī, his closest male blood relative, was passed over as his successor in favour of three older but unrelated claimants: Abu Bakr, ῾Umar and ῾Uthmān. ῾Alī acceded to the caliphate only in 656. Sunni Muslims consider these the four ‘rightly guided caliphs’, or rashidūn, whereas Shi῾i Muslims reject the claims of the first three, dismissing them as tyrannous usurpers. ῾Alī was murdered in the mosque of Kufa in 661 by a disaffected extremist, thereby becoming the first and foremost of the murdered Imams of the Shi῾a.
164. 155 Adam Olearius (1599–1671), trained as a theologian, accompanied Duke Frederich III of Schleswig-Holstein to Russia and Persia and served as his secretary; during his eighteen months in Persia he learned the language and was the first translator of Sa‛dī’s Gulistān, published in 1654.
165. 156 This was the businessman Otto Brüggemann, originally from Hamburg.
166. 157 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89) made six trips to the East, visiting Turkey, Armenia, Persia and Russia, as well as India where he became a jeweller; he described his experiences in Les six voyages de J. B. Tavernier (Paris, 1676), in two volumes. Jean Chardin (1643–1713) was a Parisian businessman and scholar who travelled frequently to Persia and East India; in Persia, ῾Abbās II appointed him goldsmith to the royal court. His Voyages en Perse first appeared in partial form in London in 1686; the complete work was finally published in 1735 in Holland.
167. 158 Gedrosia was an ancient Persian province corresponding roughly to Baluchistan; Caramania is the ancient name of the south-eastern Iranian province of Kerman. For a map, see Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, p. 352.
168. 159 William Jones (1746–94), whom Goethe cited earlier, see note 4 above.
169. 160 For this work, see above, note 4.
170. 161 Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827) was Professor of Theology and Oriental Languages in Jena; cf. note 3 above. The book Goethe refers to is Eichhorn’s Die hebräischen Propheten, in three volumes (Göttingen, 1816–19).
171. 162 i.e. the Hebrew Prophets.
172. 163 Georg Wilhelm Lorsbach (1752–1816) worked closely with Goethe in the early years of the composition of the Divan, serving the poet as a scholarly consultant until his death in 1816; Goethe admired his erudition but considered his powers of appreciation limited.
173. 164 Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751–1817) served as Prussian envoy to Constantinople from 1784 until 1790, when he was recalled; he was appointed prelate to the cathedral chapter of Kolberg. He had assembled a large collection of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts, from which he was able to extract and translate the Book of Qābūs, published in 1811.
174. 165 The correct title is Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien in Künsten und Wissenschaften (Memorabilia of Asia in the Arts and Sciences) (2 vols., Berlin, 1811–15).
175. 166 The Qābūs-nāma, or Book of Qābūs, was written in Persian around 1082–3 by ῾Unṣūr al-Ma῾ālī Kay-Kā’ūs [more usually, Kay Kāwūs], grandson of Qābūs ibn Washmgīr, Prince of Tabaristan; it is a ‘mirror for princes’, a compilation of ethical precepts and rules of conduct, for which see Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. 2, pp. 276ff. Kay Kāwūs and his son Gīlān Shāh were the last of the Ziyarid rulers in Tabaristan; the line was extirpated by the Nizarī Ismā῾īlīs around 1090; cf. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties, pp. 166–7; The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, pp. 26–7.
176. 167 For a fuller summary of contents, see Browne, Literary History, vol. 2, p. 277.
177. 168 In fact, Kay Kāwūs acceded to power in 1049; he died around 1087 and his son Gīlān Shāh ruled until c. 1090 when the line was overthrown; cf. Bosworth, New Islamic Dynasties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 166.
178. 169 Josef von Hammer (1774–1856) – after 1835, known as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall – was one of the leading scholars of the day. It was through his translations of Ḥāfiẓ, which appeared in two volumes in 1814, that Goethe got to know the work of the Persian poet (who had interested him for years).
179. 170 This refers to von Hammer’s publication Fundgruben des Orients, which served as a scholarly forum on all matters pertaining to the Near East, including numerous translations from Near Eastern languages, and to which leading authorities from all over Europe contributed; it was published in six volumes (Vienna, 1809–18). It was one of the most important sources for Goethe in composing the Divan.
180. 171 A reference to von Hammer’s poem Schirin. Ein persisches romantisches Gedicht nach persischen und türkischen Quellen (‘Shirin: a Persian Romantic Poem after Persian and Turkish Sources’) which appeared in Leipzig in 1809. Notwithstanding this praise, Goethe had no high opinion of von Hammer’s poetic ability. In a posthumously published ‘Invective’, he wrote:

181. Lord Byron ohne Scham und Scheu

182. Hat sich satanischen Pakts beflissen.

183. Von Hammer merkt nun wohl, dass, um Poet zu sein,

184. Er sich dem Teufel hätt’ ergeben müssen.

185. (‘Lord Byron made a satanic pact, without any shame or diffidence. Von Hammer knows very well that to be a poet he’d have to give himself utterly up to the Devil.’ See Birus, vol. 2, p. 159).

186. 172 This section has been previously translated into English by Jörg Waltje and appeared in the on-line journal Other Voices (vol. 2, no. 2, March 2002) under the title ‘Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Translation in the West-Eastern Divan’ (www.othervoices.org/2.2/waltje). I have found this translation very helpful even if I have not followed it throughout. (I am indebted to the Goethe scholar Dr Elizabeth Powers for this reference.)
187. 173 A popular historical work; cf. note 139 above.
188. 174 Goethe is using the word ‘parody’ in its original Greek sense as ‘imitation’.
189. 175 Jacques Delille (1738–1813), poet and translator who published French versions of Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
190. 176 The poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) translated Shakespeare, Horace and Aristophanes into German.
191. 177 Johann Heinrich Voß (1751–1826) was a prolific translator of the classics; his translations of Homer into German hexameters have long been admired.
192. 178 The criticism is directed at the translations by Samuel Friedrich Günther Wahl (1760 –1834), an Orientalist in Halle.
193. 179 This is the drama Shakuntala by the great Indian poet Kālidāsa (c. 400 ce), translated in 1788 from the Sanskrit into English by Sir William Jones and then, in 1791, by Friedrich Georg Forster into German.
194. 180 The Meghadūta, a poem in 111 stanzas, is considered the lyrical masterpiece of Kālidāsa. It was translated into English in 1814 by Horace Hayman Wilson (1786–1860).
195. 181 Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten (1792–1860) was a theologian and Orientalist who had studied in Paris under the great Silvestre de Sacy. He assisted Goethe with the Notes to the Divan.
196. 182 The Persian ambassador was Abū al-Ḥasan Khān Shīrāzī. The empress was the Tsar’s mother, Maria Feodorovna (1759–1828), born the Princess of Wūrttemberg.
197. 183 This poem and the one that follows are given in Persian with the German versions en face. Both appeared in von Hammer’s Fundgruben des Orients, vol. 6, p. 216f. Here Goethe reproduces the Persian text but replaces von Hammer’s German translation with that of Kosegarten. Fath ῾Alī Shāh of the Persian Qajar dynasty ruled from 1797 to 1834. Goethe’s Persian verses contain a number of infelicities but are given here as he wrote them.
198. 184 Fath ῾Alī Shāh had established ‘The Order of the Sun’, of which this is the emblem.
199. 185 Mānī (c. 216–76 ad), the Persian Gnostic who founded Manichaeism and was executed under the Sasanians, was also famed as a painter.
200. 186 Barthélemy d’Herbelot (1625–95), trained as a classicist, turned to the study of Oriental languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and Turkish; his Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel, published posthumously in 1697, contained alphabetically arranged entries on Oriental subjects drawn from Arabic, Persian and Turkish sources. It is no dry work of pedantry but filled with lively anecdotes and character sketches. Goethe borrowed it from the library in Weimar in 1814 several times over a five-year period; it was one of the main sources for the poems in the Divan as well as for his Notes.
201. 187 The word is now transliterated into English as hijra (or hijrah). In German it is now transliterated as Hidschra.
202. 188 In the German text, Kosegarten’s index follows but is not translated here.
203. 189 Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) was easily the greatest Orientalist of his day; he published a number of texts and studies, many of which are still valuable, and he trained several of the leading nineteenth-century scholars. The poem dedicated to him here is given in Arabic followed by the German version which differs considerably. The Arabic verses read literally: ‘O book! Go to our illustrious master/ then greet him with this page/ which is the book’s beginning and its end/ that is, its beginning is in the East and its end is in the West.’
204. 190 The quatrain is given in Persian, then in German. Goethe took the lines from the conclusion of Sa‛dī’s Gulistān (‘Rose Garden’) which reads: ‘We have given advice in its proper place; we spent much time on this labour./ If it is not heard with avidity’s ear, the messenger’s duty is to deliver the message – that’s enough!’ (For the Persian text – and a somewhat different translation – see The Gulistan of Sa‛di, trans. Thackston, p. 173.)

1. 1 An allusion to Hamlet, IV, 5: ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.’
2. 2 The poem was drafted on 26 July 1814. By ‘Vision’ Goethe wants to convey the effect for a traveller that his coach is like ‘a little house’ (Häuschen) which seems to stand still while it is the landscape that appears to move past the window of the coach. He later entitled the poem ‘The New Copernicus’.
3. 3 Goethe here plays on Huren (‘whores’) and houris, those heavenly consorts promised to the Muslim faithful and whose virginity was continually renewed.
4. 4 Another irreverent note: the juxtaposition of the ‘whores’ whose virginity is renewed with the Virgin Mary, who remained a virgin though she bore a son.
5. 5 x + y: mathematical symbols denoting ‘unknowns’ in blasphemous conjunction with Mary’s virginity; as Birus notes (vol. 2, p. 1746), the metre of the poem requires reading ‘x und u’ with the associated idiom ‘ein x für ein u vormachen’, i.e., ‘to deceive someone in the crassest way’.
6. 6 This isolated line probably does not belong in the Divan; cf. Birus, vol. 2: p. 1748.
7. 7 Allusion to Qur’ān 2:26: ‘God is not averse to using a gnat as an analogy or any other being, however large it may be.’
8. 8 A confederation of Germanic tribes, with their own dialect; also known as Swabians. The Swabian dialect spoken today is also known as Alemannic German.
9. 9 The speaker is addressing his father-in-law, the state minister Ḥājjī Ibrāhīm, whose treachery led to the downfall of the dynasty.
10. 10 Staatskalender: this is the official register in which all the officials of the court and state, the civil and military authorities and the servants appointed to them, are listed.
11. 11 The poem alludes to Qur’ān 68:1–9, ‘Do not follow liars and flatterers …’
12. 12 Apparently an attack on the ‘Catholic Nazarenes’ of the time who refused to mourn the suffering and crucifixion of Christ but instead glorified them.
13. 13 This is the draft of a poem written, in dactylic tetrameter, between 21 and 27 May 1815, but never completed or included in the Divan.
14. 14 ‘And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart.’ (1 Kings 10:2).
15. 15 The reference is to i Kings 7:21: ‘And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin: and he set up the left pillar, and called the name thereof Boaz.’
16. 16 ‘the devils’, i.e., Iblīs, or Satan. Goethe puts the word in the plural, perhaps to designate the jinn who are hostile to human beings. For Goethe too the poem is a parable of the fragility and vulnerability of all that purports to be perfect.
17. 17 Eilfer was a Rhine wine that Goethe drank first on October 10, 1815, after the break with Marianne, in an effort to console himself. The vintage of 1811 which he celebrates was considered an exceptional year for Rhine wine. He evokes the same wine in The Book of Hafiz and The Book of the Cup-Bearer. Goethe left the poem untitled in both drafts.
18. 18 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the great philosopher and Goethe’s older contemporary.
19. 19 The friend was Johann Jakob von Willemer, Marianne’s husband.
20. 20 There is presumably a lacuna here in the draft.
21. 21 Eilf.: a pun on elf (‘eleven’ in German, i.e., the vintage year 1811).
22. 22 This is a much more accomplished version of the preceding poem. Goethe retains the ghazal rhyme but also rhymes the alternating lines while the metre has been made less rollicking.
23. 23 ein Römer: a ‘Roman glass’ (Römerglas’) is a small goblet with a coiled green stem, used for white wine, especially Riesling and Mosel.
24. 24 ‘The Armenian’ is a stock figure for a bookkeeper.
25. 25 ‘Men who weep are good.’ Taken from the Adagia of Erasmus (Boni viri lacrimabile), a maxim Goethe also cited in his Wahlverwandtshaften.
26. 26 Briseïs, the lovely woman whom Achilles took as a prize of war but whom Agammemnon confiscated, thus inciting Achilles’s famous wrath in The Iliad.
27. 27 Xerxes wept at the sight of his army in Abydos, and at the brevity of human life; Alexander killed his dearest friend at a drunken banquet in a moment of rage and regretted it ever after.
28. 28 In old Arabic poetry shedding tears in the desert at the memory of a beloved is a standard trope. In this unrhymed poem of variable measures Goethe shows the influence of the pre-Islamic poet Imru’l-Qays whose famous ode William Jones had translated into English and which Goethe then translated into German.
29. 29 Goethe based both drafts of this fragment on an Oguz tale of a cyclops as recounted by Diez in his Der neuentdeckte oghuzische Cyklop verglichen mit dem Homerischen (Halle and Berlin, 1815), later incorporated in his Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien under the title ‘Depé Ghöz oder der oghuzische Cyklop. Aus dem Tatarisch-Türkischen’. On 12 July 1815, Goethe commented, ‘Among other things you will encounter a complete tale of a cyclops from Central Asia which very probably Homer had heard about in order to represent his Polyphemus, in however abbreviated a version, accordingly.’ (For further details, see Birus, vol. 2, pp. 1779–84.)
30. 30 An ocean-going ship is often invoked in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ. For Goethe, the Persian poet wrote under the sign of water while he himself wrote under that of fire, hence the contrast here. And yet (as Rychner notes), he wrote: ‘Alles ist aus dem Wasser entsprungen!!/ Alles wird durch das Wasser erhalten!’ (Everything has sprung from the water!! Everything is sustained by water!) (Faust II: l. 8435)
31. 31 Goethe here uses the classical form of the elegiac couplet, with echoes of Propertius. This consists of a first line in hexameter followed by a shorter pentameter line. A famous example is Coleridge’s translation of a couplet by Schiller: ‘In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column/ In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.’ This couplet reworks a translation of a poem by the Ottoman Sultan Selim which Goethe found in Diez’s Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien, vol. 1, p. 255.
32. 32 This refers to the winding of the turban around the head; the fragment may have been meant to go with the poem Komm, Liebchen, komm! umwinde mir die Mütze… (see Poem 116 above) as it has the same metre.
33. 33 A famous and much-cited saying in Sufi literature.
34. 34 The lines make sense only when connected with Poem 30 and the winding on of the turban. Note, too, the play on the word Stand (place) in both.
35. 35 Ta῾līq, the ‘hanging’ style, is an elegant cursive hand in Arabic and Persian calligraphy. In the next line, naskhī designates the ‘normal’ hand of Arabic calligraphy (which Goethe had learned to read and write).
36. 36 The first two stanzas are in the voice of Marianne, the ‘sick person’; she had sent Goethe an encoded letter which when he deciphered it turned out to be a brief poem complaining of his silence.
37. 37 The Arabic verses were written by Goethe in Arabic script. Khan is a title for a Mongol ruler.
38. 38 This poem follows on the preceding one: the beloved has received a message at last.
39. 39 The speaker of this poem, according to Goethe, is the Sasanian king Chosroes II (590–628), a Zoroastrian whose wife was a Christian. Here, in adopting the attitude of the Sasanian king, Goethe expresses his own complex, and conflicted, attitude towards Christianity, at least in its official versions. It may be recalled that in his Venetian Epigrams he listed ‘the Cross’ among those things, such as tobacco smoke and garlic, that repelled him. For Goethe’s views on Christian belief, see the Introduction below, pp. xix and xxii.
40. 40 For Abraxas, see The Book of the Singer, poem 2, note 11.
41. 41 The young woman is sporting a crucifix.
42. 42 This is the name of the Aztec god of war and of the sun, patron of the city of Tenochtitlan. In German, Goethe’s Vitzliputzli is also a term for the bogeyman or the devil.
43. 43 This refers to the Qābūs-nāma by Kay-Kāwūs, described as ‘a manual of correct behaviour for courtiers’, written in 1082 at the court of Ghazna. See further Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 276–87 and J.T.P. de Bruijn (ed.), A History of Persian Literature (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), vol. 1, pp. 12 and 259.
44. 44 This refers to another work translated by von Diez, the Buch von Reden, welche als Sprüche der Väter unterm Namen, Buch des Oghuz, bekannt sind, aus dem Tatarisch-Türkischen, which appeared (Berlin, 1811) as part of his Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien.
45. 45 Nasr al-Dīn Hoja, the legendary ‘wise fool’ and court-jester of Timur Lenk; see ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 436–7.
46. 46 This is Goethe’s versification of a prose eulogy of St Petersburg by Mirza Abu al-Hasan Khan. The original Persian lines at the end were added by Goethe; for Mirza Abu al-Hasan Khan, cf. also ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 393–6.
47. 47 The poem, written on 19 March 1818, was originally to form part of The Book of Ill-Humour. A hostile reaction to Goethe had set in during his lifetime, to which he responded in several poems.
48. 48 A riddle the answer to which is ‘a comb’ but it only ‘refreshes’ us if it has been consecrated by use. Goethe requested this gift of Marianne in a letter from Karlsbad in 1820.
49. 49 The poem turns on the fact that when Goethe requested the comb, he also asked for a lock of Marianne’s hair but she sent him only the comb.
50. 50 Poems 242 and 243 are both drafts of poems extant in manuscript form – the second in Goethe’s own hand; for details see Birus, vol. 2, pp. 1805–6.
51. 51 The draft of a poem, extant in a manuscript in Goethe’s hand (Birus, vol. 2, p. 615).

1. * The poems in this appendix were written at the same time as those in the Divan but were not included by Goethe (though after his death, his editors did include them in the 1836 edition, distributing individual poems among the different books). Despite Goethe’s exclusion, some of his loveliest, and most musical, lyrics are found here. The German texts and the translations here follow the Birus edition, vol. 1, pp. 585–615, based on manuscripts in Goethe’s hand. I have omitted the ‘cipher poems’ on pp. 596–7 and 601, 605 and 607, since they consist only of lists of numbers, keyed to von Hammer’s translations of Ḥāfiẓ; Goethe and Marianne exchanged these lists as coded messages.
2. * This brief poem, written on 21 June 1814, is in Adonaean metre (— ∪ ∪ — ∪).
3. † Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia in central Germany, was a city which Goethe visited in his youth in the 1770s and where he recalled spending happy days. It was in Erfurt too that he met Napoleon, on 2 October 1808 on the occasion of the Royal Congress. For Goethe’s account of the meeting in his own words, see Peter Boerner, Goethe (London: Haus Publishing, 2005), pp.78–80. This poem was drafted on 25 July 1814 in Erfurt.
4. * gemein is ‘low, rough, common’ but here there is an echo of Gemeinde, ‘congregation’ to reinforce the blasphemous nature of the poem. The poem, written between 26 and 29 July 1814, betrays Goethe’s interest at that time in Muslim conceptions of paradise but perhaps because of its mocking tone it was unsuitable for Book 12 of the Divan (The Book of Paradise) and in any case was left unfinished.
5. * According to Rychner (p. 568), the poem was written in 1814; in Birus (vol. 1, p. 588), it is given as the second stanza of the ‘fragment’ beginning ‘Dass des Hauses Glanz sich mehre…’.
6. * The italicised letters in this and other poems in the Appendix are reconstructions by later editors, mostly inferred from the rhyme scheme and metre.
7. * Fragment of a poem drafted between 23 December 1814 and 1 January 1815 in unrhymed trochaic measure; it is a reworking of a Persian song about the last ruler of the Zand dynasty, Luṭf ‛Alī Khān (reigned 1788– 96), which Goethe took from Edward Scott Waring, Reise nach Sheeraz auf dem Wege von Kazroon und Feerozabad, as translated from the English original (Rudolstadt, 1809), in two volumes; vol. 1, p. 153f. Kerman is a south-eastern province of Iran; Māzandarān a province south of the Caspian Sea. Tubus is the city of Ṭabas in the south of the province of Khorasan.
8. * Dou-Rouy, in Persian do rūy (‘two faces’), a mountain with two contrasting faces but also a flower: someone who is two-faced is said to resemble the flower. Goethe took this reference from a passage in A.L. Chézy’s Medjnoun et Leila (Paris, 1807), his French translation of Jāmī’s Majnūn and Laylā, and especially, the mention of the khālkhāl, the tinkling rings of gold or silver that women wear on their ankles.
9. * From a manuscript in Goethe’s hand, written at the beginning of March 1815. The orthography is Goethe’s (uberschritten: überschritten).
10. * The letters in italics are conjectural readings.
11. † A fragment in trochaic metre drawn from Sa‛dī in Olearius’ translation of 1654, pp. 152ff.
12. * prachern: to bargain aggressively
13. * stöst: stößt
14. † Schmitz: Makel, Befleckung
15. * Text as in Birus (vol. 1, pp. 598–600) with Goethe’s spellings and lack of punctuation.
16. † The poem takes the form of a ghazal with the recurrent rhyme on ‘Eilfer’ but at the same time using a rollicking ballad metre.
17. * ‘S: Es
18. † süs: süß
19. * This poem is Goethe’s reworking of a ‘cipher-letter’ from Marianne von Willemer, dated 18 October 1815, which she composed in response to his cipher-letter of 10 October 1815. Goethe had written (Ṣulayḥatun) in vocalised Arabic at the heading of the letter, mistakenly believing that this was the correct form of Suleika ( in Persian) – a mistake that Marianne repeated in her reply.
20. * ahnden: ahnen
21. * erschriegt (Middle High German): erschreckt. A deliberately archaic usage.
22. * Written on 22 December 1815.
23. * Written to Marianne on 13 March 1816 ‘in the evening at 10:00’, as Goethe notes. He appended the note ‘Im Jahr der Welten II,163.5.8’. The notation was devised by Marianne to denote her and Goethe’s reunion in Heidelberg (but the II can be read also as ‘H’.) The ‘163.5.8’ is a reference to von Hammer’s translation of Ḥāfiẓ, as used by the lovers in their cipher-poems.
24. * This poem, written in March 1815, though not properly one of the posthumous poems, was included in the Manigfaltige Glieder – 1815 but finally excluded from the Divan.
25. * eräugnen: ereignen
26. * Dedicated to Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, whose Buch des Kabus oder Lehren des persischen Königs Kjekjawus für seinen Sohn Ghilan Shach (Berlin, 1811) Goethe drew on in several poems. He pays tribute to von Diez in the ‘Notes and Essays’ as well, praising his translation of The Book of Qabus about which Goethe says, ‘I devoted a great deal of time to it…’ (see ‘Notes and Essays’, pp. 487–93). The two stanzas here represent two drafts of the same poem.
27. † Chadsche (or Chadshah) is Nasr al-Dīn Hoja, Timur Lenk’s jester and holy fool.
28. * Originally meant for inclusion in the 1827 edition, this poem (and the variant of Poem 231) were excluded in the end.
29. * The last line is to be understood as ‘geh und melde dies’.