In addition to the poems in A New Divan, there are three pairs of essays, which enhance and complement the poems, mirroring Goethe’s original ‘Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan’.

The essays are:

Sibylle Wentker – “Bringing Persian to Germany”
Rajmohan Gandhi – “Goethe and the East of Today”
Robyn Creswell – “Playing a Part: Imru’ al-Qays in English”
Narguess Farzad – “Hafiz and the Challenges”
Stefan Weidner – “The New Tasks of the Translator: The West-Eastern Divan and the problematic legacy of translation theories from Goethe to Benjamin”
Kadhim J. Hassan – “Translating European Poetry into Arabic Culture”

You can read the individual essays by downloading them as pdfs via the links above.