Spektrum Iran

Abstract 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 152 in his Divan.

Abstract Franz Kafka’s works can be considered as the epitome of interpretability in the modern fiction. Abandoning the search for the one and only correct meaning of Kafka’s stories makes it possible to gain access to the meanings beneath the surface. The attempt to understand his stories brings out possible interpretations and discovers elements on which the stories are based. One part of Kafka’s literary effort is certainly the processing of concrete events and circumstances of his life; therefore, this article tries to examine the autobiographical element of his stories. Although the biography of the author does not fully unlock the meaning of his texts, it facilitates their partial understanding and development of possible interpretations. As an example, reading Kafka’s novel, The Castle, alongside his autobiographical sources of information (letters and diaries), provides a new interpretation of the fragmented text.