Abstract
This essay focuses on the genetic text of Nietzsche’s unpublished poem An Hafis. Frage eines Wassertrinkers in order to establish the development of this poem from preliminary versions to an authoritative version. Through such a detailed philological analysis of the text in Nietzsche’s notebooks, it becomes increasingly clear that the final version of An Hafis constitutes an intertextual answer to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (1819/1827), which itself was inspired by the late-medieval Persian poet Hafez. Developing from different, and open-ended, semantic configurations to a final version, Nietzsche’s An Hafis also allows us to reassess the editorial practices necessary to shed light on Nietzsche’s unpublished lyrical drafts.
The Macquarie Dictionary, its History and its Editorial Practices
