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Hiwa Michaeli Goethe's Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ

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Hiwa Michaeli Goethe's Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ Hiwa Michaeli Goethe’s Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ Hiwa Michaeli Goethe’s Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ Body and Soul in Pursuit of Knowledge and Beauty D188 This book is published in cooperation with the project DramaNet, funded by the European Research Council ISBN 978-3-11-066156-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066157-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-066164-4 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945583 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Hiwa Michaeli, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover illustration: photodeedooo/iStock/Thinkstock Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgement This undertaking could not be completed without the help and guidance of the scholars and friends to whom I would like to offer my gratitude. I would like to express my deepest thanks to my first supervisor and mentor Prof. Dr. Joachim Küpper. I am indebted to him for his constant support and scholarly guidance since I shared with him my initial plans for this research to the last stages of this project. Without Prof. Küpper’s critical examinations of my manuscript and his evaluations and suggestions, this research could not attain the form and depth it has in its current state. I also extend my deepest gratitude to Prof. Dr. Gesa Dane for her guidance and expert supervision. With her guidance, I deep- ened my knowledge and critical understanding of the intellectual debates and the important texts relevant to Goethe’s Faust, and Goethe’s time. Special thanks are due to Prof. Dr. Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis for his kindness and support to revise and correct the transliterations of this book. I thank Elham Sarikhani for her friendship, kindness and proofreading of my manuscript. I am thankful to Keyvan Sharifi and Yusef Saadat for their friend- ship and our intellectually stimulating discussions. I also want to thank Maryam Palizban and Thomas Engel for their kindness, friendship and support at the first years of my residence in Berlin. I want to express my gratitude to Mahdie and Stefan Krappweis, Sara Assadi and Ali Mazloomian, and Shirin Danesh for their friendship and encouragement that helped me emotionally during the stages of this undertaking. My deepest and most heartfelt thanks go to my dear family. I want to express my gratitude to my mother to whom I dedicate this work, she is the one who has taught me the meaning of love. I thank my dear brother whose emotional support and immense brotherly care made this work possible. Open Access. © 2019 Hiwa Michaeli, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110661576-201 Contents Acknowledgement V Introduction 1 On the Structure of Goethe’s Faust and Ḥāfiẓ’s Divan and the Problem of Genre 9 I Direct Pursuit of Knowledge of the Transcendent Truth 17 I.1 Definitions and Contextualizations 17 I.1.1 The Representation of Knowledge in the Beginning of Faust I 17 I.1.2 Knowledge and Self-knowledge in Faust 19 I.1.3 Knowledge in the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 26 I.1.4 Neoplatonic Views as the Starting Point for the Study of the Relation Between Body and Soul in Goethe’s Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 42 I.2 The Sun, Heavenly Bodies and the Call for Ascent in Faust 51 I.2.1 Direct Approach to the Transcendent: Pain, Escape and Fall 52 I.2.2 The Problematization of a Method 57 I.2.3 Suicide as a Way of Transcending the Body 59 I.2.4 Flying toward the Setting Sun 64 I.3 Direct Approach to Knowledge of the Transcendent Truth in the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 68 I.3.1 Escaping the Cage of the Body 70 I.3.2 The Presence of the Sun in Islamic Neoplatonism 74 I.3.3 The Mote and the Sun 75 I.3.4 Masīḥā (Christ) and the Sun 78 I.3.5 Self-Annihilation as the Last Hope for Ascent and Union 85 I.4 Body and Soul in Direct Pursuit of Knowledge of the Transcendent in Goethe’s Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 87 I.4.1 Direct Negative Pursuit of Transcendent Truth 87 I.4.2 Light Metaphors and the Call for Ascent 87 I.4.3 Suicide as a Failed Method of Ascent 88 I.4.4 A Critical Look into the Method of Seeking Knowledge 89 VIII Contents II Toward Life 90 II.1 The Process of Turning Toward Life in Faust 90 II.1.1 Reevaluations and Modifications 90 II.1.2 Painful Walls of Exclusion 98 II.1.3 The Process of Inclusion or ‘Wie kommen wir denn aus dem Haus?’ 111 II.2 The Turn Toward Life in the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 138 II.2.1 Nature in Persian Poetry of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries 139 II.2.2 The Space of Exclusion in Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ 141 II.2.3 Elements of Exclusion in the Sufi Tradition 148 II.2.4 Spring as a Call for Reevaluation of Exclusion 159 II.2.5 Diving into the Sea of the Wine House 163 II.2.6 Anxiety in the Field of Critique of the Old World 167 II.2.7 Mediation and Going Beyond Exclusion 174 II.3 Toward Life in Goethe’s Faust and Ḥāfiẓ’s Divan 187 II.3.1 Space of Exclusion 188 II.3.2 Elements of Exclusion 189 II.3.3 Influence of Spring in the Turn Toward Life 189 II.3.4 Anxiety and Leaving the Old World Behind 190 II.3.5 Mediation and Inclusion in Paradox 191 III Colorful Reflections 193 III.1 The World of Reflections in Goethe’s Faust 193 III.1.1 The Activity of the Faculty of Appreciation of Beauty 193 III.1.2 Within Life as the Space of Inclusion 207 III.1.3 The Articulations of Faust’s Views in the World of Inclusion 211 III.1.4 Faust’s Rebirth in Anmutige Gegend 223 III.1.5 Turning from the Sun to Its Colorful Reflections 227 III.1.6 Exploring the Reflections in Faust’s Path to Helena 236 III.1.7 Lynceus between the Sun and Helena 243 III.2 The World of Reflections in the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 251 III.2.1 A Historical Account of the Pursuit of Beauty in Sufism 251 III.2.2 Emanation of Beauty 269 III.3 The World of Reflections in Goethe’s Faust and the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ 310 III.3.1 Beauty as the Object of Pursuit 310 III.3.2 The Mediated Immanence of the Infinite 311 III.3.3 The Communicative Aspect of the Infinite 312 Contents IX III.3.4 The World as Diversification of Attributes of the One 313 III.3.5 The Active Presence of the One in the Human Being 314 III.3.6 Veils as the Medium of Disclosure 316 III.3.7 Abandoning the Self and Rejoicing in the Multiplicity 316 Conclusion 320 Bibliography 332 Introduction Goethe (1749–1832) received Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s complete transla- tion of the Divan of Ḥāfiẓ (ca. 1315–1390) in May,1 1814.2 Five years later, Goethe published his poetic work West-östlicher Divan, a text clearly influenced by Ḥāfiẓ’s Divan. Many studies have explored this literary encounter from numer- ous perspectives. Yet the majority of these comparative literary investigations, focusing solely on issues of influence and resemblance, are restricted in scope. They are limited to comparisons between Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan and Ḥāfiẓ’s Divan,3 often against the background of Goethe’s study of the cultural space of the Orient as he explains in Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans. Muḥammad Iqbāl’s productive reception of West-östlicher Divan in his 1923 collection of poems Payām-i mašriqī offers a different approach to understanding the literary encounter of 1814. In his poem Ǧalāl and Goethe, Iqbāl expands the intercultural literary dialogue beyond Ḥāfiẓ and Goethe by widening the textual field of observation beyond the two Divans. Set in paradise, the poem depicts a meeting between MaulānāǦalāl ud- Dīn Balḫī-yi Rūmī (Rumi) and Goethe, in which Goethe reads one of his works aloud to Rūmī. Remarkably, the work in question is not West-östlicher Divan – rather, it is Faust. Goethe’s reading of Faust to the Persian Sufi-poet kindles an 1 In this work, the rules of transliteration as established by the ‘Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft’ (DMG) are followed. This means, Arabic words and phrases are rendered accord- ing to these rules for Arabic. Persian words, even if of Arabic origin, are rendered following the rules for Persian. Arabic names in Persian are rendered according to Arabic rules. Oriental words common in English are rendered according to English rules. Transliterations in older publications are kept throughout in their original form. The names of authors who have pub- lished in Western journals and publications are rendered in their original orthography throughout. I have followed the rules of DMG for differentiation between classical Persian and modern Persian, this is also applied to the names of authors.
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