Literature as medium for intercultural understanding: Opportunities and Challenges

Living in our global world, with its daily increasing encountering, or meanwhile mutual penetrating, different cultures requires a permanent intercultural confrontation with the Other, the Foreign and the Non- familiar; an attempt to understand and recognize the Other in his being and so-being. This attempt aims at providing a possibility of horizon extension and thinking together, rather than discovering merely commonalities and differences,. Hereby is literature, as the general substrate, which exceeds the boundaries of all disciplines, the most important medium, of this encountering. Among all the literary genres is poetry, as an „eminent” text in turn, the most significant genre, which leads us to the deep roots of thoughts, feelings, views and beliefs of cultures. This attempt for mutual understanding, however, is accompanied by difficulties, obstacles, incomprehensions and misunderstandings. These disturbances emerge by trying to translate and interpret poetry, especially lyric poems, in foreign languages, which makes them almost untranslatable. We notice these barriers in the attempt of German authors in transmitting the Ghazals of the great Iranian poet Hafiz. This essay tries to show briefly, as an example, the various facets of these difficulties, taking to account a number of German translations of the Ghazal ۱۵۲ in his Divan.

کلیدواژه ها:

Literatur ، interkulturelle Verständigung ، Lyrik ، deutsche Übersetzungen ، Hafiz