Wörterbuch zu Goethes West-östlichem Divan (review)

Goethe Yearbook 353 — the creative motion of Goethe's poetry as a microcosm of the creativity of the universe (124). Lemmel concentrates on the political relevance of the poetry, its pedagogic purpose, its unifying objective and its analogous relationship to love. In many ways Lemmel builds upon HiUmann's observations concerning the poetological significance of the Divan poems and the centrality of love — its importance for both poetry in general and the Divan cycles (Hillmann 86). Beyond Hillmann, Lemmel offers a more comprehensive study and illustrates impressively just how many of Goethe's Divan poems have something to say about poetry. University of Rochester Susan E. Gustafson NOTES 1. Ingeborg Hillmann, Dichtung als Gegenstand der Dichtung-. Untersuchungen zum Problem der Einheit des West-östlichen Divan (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1965) 43. 2. Ehrhard Bahr, Die Ironie im Spätwerk Goethes (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1972) 57. 3. Gisela Henckmann, Gespräch und Geselligkeit in Goethes West-östlicher Divan (Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln, Mainz: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1975) 20. Dill, Christa, Wörterbuch zu Goethes West-östlichem Divan. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987. Christa Dill's Wörterbuch is the most comprehensive contribution to Divan scholarship to date. It will without question become an indispensable tool for scholars and critics who have long struggled with the unusual mode of figuration, the lexical eccentricities and the complex poetic structure of Goethe's orientalizing cycle of poems. The Divan dictionary owes its existence at least partially to the special archives of the Akademie der Wissenschaft located in the DDR, Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Tübingen where the writing of articles for the monumental long-term undertaking of the Goethe-Wörterbuch has been in progress since 1963. This is not to say, however, that Christa Dill's dictionary merely repeats more comprehensively the Divan vocabulary already included in the fascicles of the GWb that have been or are yet to be published. There is a marked difference between the orientation and goals of these two enterprises. In an article entitled "Lexika zu einzelnen Schriftstellern" (Forschung und Fortschritt, 33, Heft 11, November 1959) and again in her introduction to the Divan dictionary, Christa Dili articulates the difference between these two projects. The goal of the general dictionary, she notes, is to provide an overview of Goethe's idiolect in its spatial and temporal dimension and development. The GWb features poetic language along with ordinary speech, for the lexical entries are drawn from Goethe's literary as well as non-literary texts. The entries thus record Goethe's own language development and reflect the general linguistic transformations that occurred during his lifetime. 354 Book Reviews With the wealth of material available for each entry, it becomes possible to indicate certain general tendencies in Goethe's development and use of language, but not to concentrate on the poetic and linguistic uniqueness of individual works. That becomes the explicit task of the Divan dictionary: Gerade diese Eigentümlichkeit zu erfassen," Dill emphasizes, "ist das Anliegen des Wörterbuchs" (VIII). Each lexical entry in the Divan dictionary is supported by enough textual evidence to serve also as a concordance. The individual articles generally begin with the literal meaning of the word as it is derived from the context in which it occurs. If a given word moves from the literal to the figurative, or within either of these orders, this shift is duly noted and in turn supported by appropriate citations. At the moment of registering such semantic shifts, the article inevitably becomes involved in an interpretive gesture. Wherever possible the contextual evidence is at this point supplemented by citations from and references to the major source and lexical studies which have preceded the dictionary and, in addition, the article refers the reader to thematically and/or figuratively related entries. In its microscopic focus on the semantic, figurative and structural function of the individual word, the dictionary succeeds in demonstrating that the unique quality one senses in reading the poems, i.e. that which distinguishes the Divan from the western-oriented poetics of Goethe's other works, results more from the nature of its language and its mode of figuration than from its thematic content. In the introduction...