West-oestlicher Divan. - [ONE OF GOETHE’S LAST GREAT LYRICAL WORKS, UNITING EASTERN AND WESTERN POETRY]

Stuttgart, Cottaischen Buchhandlung, 1819. 8vo. In contemporary half cloth. Binding with miscolouring, some wear to spine. Title-page with traces of old stamp. Paper-label pasted on to verso of title-page. With come occassional foxing throughout. Housed in a recent slipcase. 556 pp. + frontispiece. Pp 399-400 are counted twice whereas pages 495-496 are skipped so that the final page count remains correct. P. 9 'Talismane' instead of later 'Talisman', indicating the first issue. Housed in a slipcase. Withbound in the back are pp. 7-10, the corrected pages from the second issue.

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A very fine copy of the first edition, first issue, of Goethe’s celebrated cycle of lyrical poems, inspired by the works of the great Persian poet Hafez. Intended as a poetic dialogue between East and West, “Divan” also reflects Goethe’s deep affection for the Austrian dancer Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860) who contributed several poems to the collection. Furthermore it represents one of the most important engagements with Eastern poetry in German Romantic literature and contains some of the finest verses of Goethe’s later years. “The West-Eastern Divan is in many ways a revolutionary book. Goethe himself was no revolutionary – far from it – and yet his book had the effect of capsizing conventional nineteenth-century conceptions of poetry. It represented nothing less than a decisive reconfiguration of poetry.” (…) By 1814, five years before the publication of the Divan, Goethe had come upon the poems of Hafiz in the translation of Joseph von Hammer (later von Hammer-Purgstall), a prolific Orientalist who had rendered the complete Divan of the Persian poet into German. The word divan (diwan in Arabic) is itself of Persian origin originally it meant a kind of register, a record. (The word has passed into European languages to designate border and customs controls, e.g., douane in French or dogana in Italian.) An early Arab philologist could state that ‘poetry is the diwan of the Arabs’. By that he meant that the poems of the pre-Islamic Arabs, with their very specific mentions of places and of tribes, of battles and skirmishes, of blood-feuds and clan rivalries, served as a record of events that would otherwise have been lost. (…) But the word divan also came to designate the collected works of a poet. And it is in conscious imitation of his beloved ?afi? that Goethe chose to use the word Divan for his own collection. Even so, there is a crucial distinction to be noted. Goethe calls his own collection the West-östlicher Divan, the West-Eastern Divan. His Divan is not to be simply an imitation of an Eastern model but a work that holds both East and West in firm but affectionate equipoise.” (From the introduction of Ormsby’s English translation to West-Eastern Divan).Hagen 416