Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Purdy, Daniel

Titel

West-östliche Divan and the “Abduction/Seduction of Europe”: World Literature and the Circulation of Culture

Ist Teil von

• Goethe yearbook, 2015, Vol.22 (1), p.203-226

Ort / Verlag

Rochester: North American Goethe Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Napoleon's military acquisition of art from across Europe and its eventual repatriation after his defeat were widely discussed as Goethe was writing the West-östliche Divan.6 He wrote a report on the subject to the governor of Prussia's newly acquired Rhineland territories and dedicated the first volume of Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity, 1816) to the dispersal of artworks along the Rhineland.7 The horrors of war, the plunder of art, and Goethe's poetic escape into the Orient are intimately connected on a biographical level, for Goethe starts to compose the Divan during the same trips in the summers of 1814 and 1815 during which he revisited his childhood places to forget the war, read Hammer-Purgstall's translations of Hafez, and gather his thoughts for a report to the Prussian authorities on how to organize the return of stolen art.8 These historical circumstances produced a series of relations that Goethe disguised as mythic and Oriental topics within the West-östliche Divan and that filter into his discussion of Weltliteratur (world literature). First rendered into German in 1739 as Der merkwürdige Haar-Locken-Raub des Herrn Pope, a string of translations competed with each other to provide an adequate German expression of Pope's mock epic.27 Goethe claimed to have known the poem in its English original and even conceded that he, like so many other poets at the time, took a turn at imitating its style.28 Pope's poem was itself a fashion, even as it depicted the machinations of stylish society, which allowed Goethe to reflect later on the poem's reception as an early manifestation of world literature-the curiosity of an entire nation trying to imitate one single, very popular poem.29 For North Germans such as Goethe, eighteenth-century London would have been a most densely packed center of international commerce. The works of Moschus were common currency among eighteenth-century humanists, so much so that Ludwig Christoph Hölty submitted a translation of Moschus, Der Raub der Europa, aus dem Griechischen des Moschus, in order to gain admission into the Göttinger Deutsche Gesellschaft.32 Herder cites the ravings of Aphrodite in Moschus's First Idyll as proof that the Greeks did not always depict their gods in beautiful composure.33 Goethe would certainly have encountered him early in his career, as he started reading Theocritus under Herder's guidance in 1771.34 With their Xenien, Schiller and Goethe became embroiled in a polemic against Johann Kaspar Manso, who had published a German translation of Bion and Moschus in 1784.35 Imitating, retelling, and translating the Greek idyllic poets has of course been a massive tradition in the West,36 but eighteenth-century German translators also recognized their own efforts as directly conjoined with Weimar classicism, while underscoring the subtle, often-coded terms with which contemporary writers referenced the idyllic tradition. By the time he writes the West-östliche Divan, however, he has exhausted these familiar territories and does feel the urge to travel far afield. [...]he writes enthusiastically to his old friend Karl Ludwig von Knebel about his own Hegire-flight into the Orient: Meine Schatzkammer füllt sich täglich mit mehr Reichthiimern aus Osten; wie ich sie ordnen und aufstützen kann, muß die Zeit lehren.