Roshanak Akrami
Abstract
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea of metamorphosis and metempsychosis, as traceable in his essays “History” and “Poet,” has recently attracted the attention of Emersonians such as Michael Corrigan and Michael Cowan. According to these scholars Emerson has expanded the Indian and ...
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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea of metamorphosis and metempsychosis, as traceable in his essays “History” and “Poet,” has recently attracted the attention of Emersonians such as Michael Corrigan and Michael Cowan. According to these scholars Emerson has expanded the Indian and Greek definition of these notions and has come to give a metamorphic quality to almost every aspect of life and his idea of the ideal poet. Cowan has also traced two metamorphic processes in Emerson’s famous poem “Bacchus,” which according to scholars such as John D. Yohannan is an imitation of Hafiz’s “Saghinameh.” This point allows this article to go back to “Saghinameh” and show that the metamorphic quality attributed to “Bacchus” is rooted in Emerson’s translation of “Saghinameh.” This article also argues that a few other poems of Emerson that have metamorphosis as their main theme are in one way or another related to his translations from the Divan of Hafiz. In this way, on the one hand, this paper is contributing to the discussions about metamorphosis in Emersonian thought; and on the other hand, it is contributing to the studies that address the function of Emerson’s engagement with Persian poetry and its relation to his career as a thinker and a poet. Research Background: Emerson’s respect for Persian thought and poetry is a well known subject to most Emersonians and those interested in transnational studies. The different ways in which Perisan poetry has influenced Emerson’s poetry have been addressed by many esteemed scholars such as F. I. Carpenter, Arthur Christy, and John D. Yohannan. More recently scholars such as Lawrence Buell have come to give a more central place to Emerson’s engagement with Persian poetry and his related translations. For scholars such as Jan Stievermann this aspect of Emerson’s career is best demonstrative of his cosmopolitanism and his openness to World Literature. Finally and more recently, the Doctoral dissertation of Roshanak Akrami: “‘The Sense of a Half-Translated Ode of Hafis’: Emerson’s Translations of Persian Poetry” (2015), which examines Emerson’s poetry notebooks and the drafts of translations he has left, focuses on Emerson’s theory of translation and the different ways in which Persian poetry affects Emerson’s career and is affected by it. Nevertheless, the relationship between Emerson’s idea of metamorphosis and his translations of Persian poetry has not been addressed in any other research. Method: This article examines three original poems of Emerson and looks at his translation of Hafiz’s “Saghinameh.” It traces Emerson’s idea of metamorphosis highlighted by Michael Cowan in Emerson’s “Bacchus” back to Saghinameh and Hafiz’s notion of “wine of awakening.” By examining Emerson’s original poems, his translations, drafts of these translations, and the German and Persian versions of these poems, this study is using a genetic reading method that allows seeing the process of production of these poems and the concepts that have emerged in this process.Conclusion: The metamorphic quality that wine has in Emerson’s “Baachus” is directly taken from Hafiz’s “Saghinameh.” In both poems wine awakens and gives vision and access to the unseen and past and future. In “Proteus” and “Poet of Poets” Emerson employs the Divan’s concept of love in two different ways. That is to say, while in both poems love is used as a metaphor for metamorphosis; in “Proteus” Emerson adopts the Divan’s notion of suffering and loss that follows mystical love and uses it to attribute pain to his idea of metamorphosis. In “Poet of Poets,” on the other hand, wine gives the power of metamorphosis to the poet and makes him a seer and an insider. In this way it can be said the mystical power of love and wine has found a new life in Emerson’s writings.