Diwan (poetry)

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Diwan (Persian دیوان), also transliterated as Deewan or Divan, is a Persian word used also into Arabic (Arabic: الدیوان) and Turkish, and was borrowed also at an earlier date into Armenian.^[1] It derives from the Persian dibir, 'writer, scribe', and diwan or divān originally designated a list or register.^[2]

The term derived from Pahlavi referring to a collection of poems by a single author; it may be a 'selected works', or the whole body of work of an Persian, Urdu or Ottoman Turkish poet. Thus Diwan-e Mir, and so on. It is also worth mentioning that the most famous work with this word as its title is actually the fictional collection of poetry called Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi by Rumi, ostensibly by Shams Tabrizi. The introduction of the term is attributed to Rudaki.

The term divan was used in titles of poetic works in French, beginning in 1697,^[3] but was a rare and didactic usage, though one that was revived by its famous appearance in Goethe's West-Östlicher Divan (Poems of West and East), a work published in 1819 that reflected the poet's abiding interest in Middle Eastern and specifically Persian literature.

It has also been applied in a similar way to collections of Hebrew poetry and to poetry of al-Andalus

[edit] References

^ Dīvān Encyclopaedia Iranica, VOLUME 7 FASCICLE 4]
^ Alain Rey et al., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, new ed. (Robert, 1995), vol. 1, p. 617.
^ Alain Rey et al., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, new ed. (Robert, 1995), vol. 1, p. 617.