INCONTRI AL CORSO 18

Literature and the Orient: Presentation of the scholarship holder Stefan Weidner – Conversation with Gregor H. Lersch

INCONTRI AL CORSO 18 marks the start of a new series of events organised by the Casa di Goethe: the scholarship holders, who will be living and working in Via del Corso 18 for two months at a time over the next few years, will present the projects they are working on during their stay in Rome. The public is cordially invited to take part in the discussions.

Our first guest is the translator and culturally orientated essayist Stefan Weidner, who has been researching the phenomenon of Orientalism in the past and present for many years. During his fellowship, he is working on the translation of a group of pre-Islamic Arabic poems that have since been forgotten in German-speaking countries, if not in Europe as a whole, but which had a decisive influence on Goethe: The so-called Mu’allaqat (for Goethe and his contemporaries: Moallakat).

The discussion with Gregor H. Lersch and the audience is intended to provide an opportunity to discuss topics such as Oriental poetry and its translation as reflected by German travellers to Rome, such as Goethe, Friedrich Rückert and August von Platen, who were enthusiastic about it. For the Romantics, the ancient Rome and the ancient, pre-Islamic Orient formed an overall complex, so that Rome can also be discussed as a place of the ‘’front‘’ Orient.

The event will be held in German.

© Stefan Weidner

Stefan Weidner (*1967 in Cologne), who lives between Cologne, Berlin and the Middle East, is one of the most important mediators of Arabic culture in Germany. After studying Islamic and German Studies and Philosophy in Göttingen, Damascus, Berkeley and Bonn, he worked as a freelance author in the border area between literature and politics as an essayist, storyteller, translator and cultural journalist. He specialises in the worlds of Islam, post-colonialism, critique of the Enlightenment and anti-racism; he mainly translates poetry, including Adonis, Mahmud Darwish and Ibn Arabi.
His new translation of the Quran builds a bridge from modern poetry to the founding text of culture and religion. The essay Ground Zero. 9/11 und die Geburt der Gegenwart was published in 2021 (Carl Hanser Verlag Munich). Stefan Weidner has translated Goethe’s Roman Elegies into Arabic in collaboration with Sargon Boulus.

We would like to thank the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation for supporting the scholarship programme.