Content area
Abstract
A particular—Persian—trajectory for the configurations of a certain German orientation and identity-formation from the late Baroque Rococo, past Classicist Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and German Romantics is disserted using Goethe's theory of poetic translation as derived from the endnotes to his West-Eastern Divan, as methodology, and in close readings of the practices of poetic translation not only by eclectic poet-translators, but also idealist philosophers and literary theorists, before ending with Nietzsche and his mobilization of Persian tropes.
We start with Leibniz's reaction in his Theodicy, to a few articles in Bayle's Dictionnaire on a couple of Persians or Orientals (Mani and Zoroaster,)—where the name for the evil spirit in the Zoroastrian tradition, Ahriman, is linked to Arminius, Hermann and Hermes (Trismegistus ), and of course, "Germany"—at the onset of the arrival of Die Aufklärung. In the "Augustan age" of German literature, we find reason applied to all things, and for the first time in German. With Winckelmann there is a shift from Latin onto Greek. But our epigrammatic probes into passages of Wieland and Lessing show Persia used both in a turn away from religious dogma and towards the celebration of reasonable dictatorship, and as the language preferred by the Frankish crusading templar's father, in a play on tolerance.
Next we examine Herder’s arrogant and dismissive, though democratic and anti-Imperialistic-like remarks about the Persians and the Medes (the Iranians) in his grand Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit towards the end of 18th century, where Cyrus is seen as an exception within the otherwise undesirable Persian history, and mobilized for the education, Bildung, of the German as possible relation, Verwandtschaft, of the “Older Persian”. Friedrich Schlegel offers us one consequence of this supposed “relation” between the Persians and Germans, when he declares Persians un-Oriental in his Viennese lectures, Hegel provides for an inbetween place at the origin of Western tradition for Persia, and Heine wants to keep Judah bin Halevy’s papers in Darius’ chest.
From here on there is a fork where on one side the mythical and legendary “relation” with (the Old) Persians achieves popular confidence and philosophical consideration, while at the same time there appears a much smaller movement supported by a German giant, which would just rummage around for empirical evidence for any natural kinship after first reading it in poetry—but more specifically in translation of poetry. Now there comes a call for poetic translation of all texts as an ideal, a universal ideal of world poetry. This call has been just a murmur, but one that is not only heard and relayed by the epigones and late-romantics, but also by our final destination, Friedrich Nietzsche, and his Zarathustra, via a brief caravan ride along the banks of Nilus.
