Inaugural-Dissertation--Universität Leipzig. / Vita.

This paper examines the anecdotes of ʿAttār’s Mosibat-nāmeh as temporal phenomena from the perspective of a reader moving progressively through the text; it is argued that that these anecdotes do not function primarily as carriers of dogmatic information, but as dynamic rhetorical performances designed to prod their audiences into recommitting to a pious mode of life. First, the article shows how the poem’s frame-tale influences a reader’s experience of the embedded anecdotes by encouraging a sequential mode of consumption and contextualizing the work’s pedagogical aims. Next, it is demonstrated that these anecdotes are bound together through formulae and lexical triggers, producing a paratactic structure reminiscent of oral homiletics. Individual anecdotes aim to unsettle readers’ ossified religious understandings, and together they offer a flexible set of heuristics for pious living. Finally, it is argued that ʿAttār’s intended readers were likely familiar with the mystical principles that underlie his poems; he therefore did not use narratives to provide completely new teachings, but rather to persuade his audience to more fully embody those pious principles to which they were already committed.

Eric Hermelin, the translator and mystic who, while being incarcerated at a mental institution outside Lund in Sweden, managed to write himself into the history of literature by translating the Great Persian sufi poets of the Middle Ages, Rumi, Attar and Sadi, to name a few. Amongst his other translations we find the native Emanuel Swedenborg who will be the focus of this study.The purpose for this study is to look upon how the teachings of Swedenborg affected Hermelin through a comparative analysis where the translations of Hermelin will play a key role. By comparing them to the original texts of both Swedenborg and the Persian poets and by putting Hermelin in context with his times we hope to find out in what way Hermelin related to Swedenborg.Analysis is centered around three concepts; the Personality, the Correspondence and Influxus, which mirrors the Hermelin focus regarding Swedenborg. The study shows that Swedenborg is central to Hermelin in helping him finding strength for his massive work. Hermelin knows Influxus by experience and he seems well aware of the mystic and esoteric context in which Swedenborg belongs where the Persian poets also plays an important part. In a way Hermelin relate Swedenborg to the Persian poets using the teachings of Swedenborg as an instrument to point out the similarities of content.

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