FIFA member Helena Cortés Gabaudan received on February 20 in Zaragoza, from the hands of the King and Queen os Spain the 2021 National Translation Award for her version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s El Diván de Oriente y Occidente. The awards ceremony was postponed due to the Covid pandemic.
A few years ago, the manuscript of Goethe’s work was declared a “world heritage of humanity” by UNESCO, since it is considered an outstanding symbol of the necessary dialogue between cultures, specifically the Western one, represented by Goethe himself, and the oriental, represented by medieval Persian poetry, especially that of Hafiz, Goethe is inspired in or freely versions in his work. The book, of great originality, mixes and blends without saying it the own and the foreign, the verses of Goethe and the oriental verses, in order to put them on the same level, as well as the parts in prose and the parts in verse, the biographical dimension — Goethe’s love affair with a married woman, Marianne de Willemer, of whom there are also hidden poems in the work — and History in capital letters, in a pastiche of surprising modernity and a multitude of registers.
The Spanish translation tries to rescue the various registers of the work as well as the base of medieval oriental poetry that underlies the work, that is, the sonority and freshness of the Persian ‘gazales’, later passed through the filter of modern German and the Goethe’s style in a complex game of mirrors of complex recreation.