Towards a New Divan: A Celebration of East and West through Music and Poetry
Last night saw a special occasion at the historic Wilton’s Music Hall in London, featuring the premiere of a new musical composition celebrating the launch of Gingko’s momentous New Divan project, the culmination of which will be a festival of music and poetry hosted in the UK by the Hay and Shubbak festivals in summer 2019 and in Germany by the Berlin-based Barenboim-Said Akademie in the autumn.
A New Divan marks the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819). Bringing together twenty-four leading poets – twelve from the ‘East’ and twelve from the ‘West’ – in a lyrical conversation inspired by the culture of the Other. These poets seek to continue the dialogue which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe started with Hafiz, the fourteenth-century Persian poet he thought of as his ‘twin’, the results of which he published in the West-Eastern Divan.
The concert featured a new musical composition by the London-based Tafahum music ensemble inspired by the Syrian poet Adonis’ especially commissioned contribution to A New Divan, entitled ‘Letter to Goethe’. A New Divan’s editor, Bill Swainson, announced the names of the English-language poets contributing to A New Divan.
‘The twenty-two English-language poets who will render the work of the twenty-four original poets writing in twelve different languages demonstrate the scope and quality of this hugely ambitious project,’ says Bill Swainson, editor of A New Divan. ‘Last year, I was overwhelmed by the quality of each original poem as it arrived. This year, as the English-language versions have begun to arrive, I am thrilled by the immediacy of the translations and how the 22 poets are fashioning new poems from the work of poets they are often engaging with for the first time. When A New Divan is published in 2019, I hope readers will be equally thrilled by the confidence and freshness of these voices and the worlds they evoke.’