The Story

“This reimagining of Goethe’s seminal work gives us the opportunity to re-engage with his thoughts – a much needed exercise, given the state of the world today.”

– Daniel Barenboim (from his Foreword to A New Divan)

In honour of the renowned German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the 200th anniversary of the first publication of the West-Eastern Divan, his great poem sequence of 1819 inspired by the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, Gingko presents A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East & West and a new, scholarly translation by Eric Ormsby of the original West-Eastern Divan. A New Divan brings together new poems by 24 leading poets – 12 from the ‘East’ and 12 from the ‘West’ – responding to the original 12 themes of the West-Eastern Divan in a truly international poetic dialogue inspired by the culture of ‘the Other’.

22 outstanding English-language poets have created English versions of these poems, either directly or via bridge or literal translations, and three pairs of essays enhance and complement the poems, mirroring Goethe’s original ‘Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan’. These publications, and the series of accompanying events at festivals across the UK and at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, aim to affirm the famous words from the West-Eastern Divan’s “Gingko Biloba” poem: that “Orient and Occident cannot be parted for evermore.”

The People behind the Story

Dr Barbara Haus Schwepcke

Co-editor of A New Divan

Dr Barbara Haus Schwepcke is the founder of Gingko. After receiving her doctorate from the London School of Economics, she worked as Publisher of Prospect magazine. In 2003, she founded Haus Publishing.

“The ‘Gingko Biloba’ was Goethe’s ode to friendship and symbolised the union between old and young, man and woman, human and the Divine, literature and scholarship, East and West – a union which in his mind was inseparable.”
– Barbara Schwepcke (on Goethe’s poem ‘Gingko Biloba’ in the West-Eastern Divan)

Bill Swainson

Co-editor of A New Divan

Bill Swainson is a freelance editor and literary consultant. Since 1976 he has worked for leading literary publishers, including John Calder, Allison & Busby, Harvill Press and Bloomsbury, where he was Senior Commissioning Editor for fifteen years. In 2015, he was awarded an OBE for services to literary translation.

“Poetry thrives and develops by cross-fertilisation.”
– Bill Swainson (from his Editor’s Note to A New Divan)

Professor Eric Orsmby

Translator and editor of the West-Eastern Divan

Professor Eric Orsmby is a distinguished scholar in the field of Islamic thought. He studied Greek and Latin at Columbia University, NY, and then Classical Arabic and German at the University of Tübingen, West Germany. He received a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and taught at McGill University, Montreal for twenty years, where from 1996 he was Professor and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. In 2005 he moved to London where he took up a post as Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. In addition to his extensive writing on Classical Arabic literature and Islamic thought, and his translations from Arabic and Persian, he has published seven poetry collections and is an essayist and reviewer and the author of two critical works on poetry and translation.

“The West-Eastern Divan represents nothing less than a decisive reconfiguration of German, and indeed European, poetry.”
– Eric Ormsby (from his Introduction to the West-Eastern Divan)

Advisors

The commissioned poets included in A New Divan were chosen with the help of two principal advisors: the Mexican-British poet Michael Schmidt, director of Carcanet Press, and the German poet Joachim Sartorius, formerly director of the Goethe Institut in Germany. The anthology also benefited beyond measure from the detailed advice and constant encouragement of Samuel Shimon and Margaret Obank of Banipal (the magazine of modern Arab literature), Narguess Farzad of SOAS and Sasha Dugdale, former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Grateful thanks also go to Maureen Freely, Professor of Comparative Literature at Warwick University and President of English PEN, to Erica Hesketh, Director of the Poetry Translation Centre, and to Hisham Matar.

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The Story

The People behind the Story

Dr Barbara Haus Schwepcke

Bill Swainson

Professor Eric Orsmby

Advisors