ABSTRACT
Goethe’s awakening is very different from that of the Greek seer, Epimenides, in his cave; with it, and with this play, his period of strict classicism comes to an end. Once more he undergoes a change and dons a new mask. North, South and West are splitting into fragments, thrones are bursting asunder, and so he makes his escape in order to ‘taste the atmosphere of the patriarchs in the purity of the East’, as he writes in the introductory poem to his Westdstlicher Diwan, the great collection of verse which he signs as ‘the occidental author’. Napoleon’s great march to the East in the steps of Alexander the Great is at an end, and his Empire is now reduced to the little island of Elba. Goethe is only just setting out on his own journey to the East. One should really live in a tent, he said some years later under the stress of the constant restlessness of his nature, a restlessness he is only able to curb by the strict regularity of his life in the small triangle of Weimar - Jena - Karlsbad. He is a guest on this gloomy earth - auf der triiben Erde - and now he wants to live in oases as the guest of the herdsmen, riding over the desert by night with ‘only the stars above my head’. The East, which he has never seen, has nevertheless been a familiar landscape since childhood through his reading of the Bible; he has always wanted to write an epic on the passage of the Children of Israel through the desert. He has read parts of the Koran and now the old Persian poet, Hafiz, has come into his hand, translated by a Herr von Hammer of the Court Chancellery in Vienna; Hammer was a many-sided and industrious man who knew ten languages, none of them very thoroughly, and who translated indefatigably from the still more or less unfamiliar Oriental literatures. He edited a beautifully printed serial work called Fundgruben des Orients, which contained contributions from a number of authors; Goethe had looked at it and found it rather too scholarly and difficult. It is Cotta, his publisher, who sends him Hammer’s translation of Hafiz, and in spite of the specialists, who find much to criticize and who point out hundreds of mistakes, Goethe is moved by the old poet; he recognizes him as a kindred spirit, a fellow poet who lived through strangely similar times. He reads of Court life, of empires in flux and collapse, of a meeting with the great conqueror, Tamerlaine; there are songs of the nightingale and the rose, of 433wine and love. There is also, so he is told, a deep mysticism beneath the light sounding verses, and perhaps love really signifies faith and wine the spirit. He can almost believe that half a millennium earlier he had lived and walked in the gardens of Shiraz.
