Hafez

 

The great lyric poet of Iran is Hafez (c. 1320-1388), whose ghazals fuse multiple layers of meaning and are unlike anything in European literature. Little is known about the man, who lived quietly as a Koranic teacher in Shiraz. Like Dante, his inspiration was a woman of unapproachable beauty, but he married and survived local politics, religious censure and Tamberlane's invasion. After Arabic, Persian is the chief literary language of the medieval Islamic world, and its poetry is rich and varied – as can be see by sampling these epics, romances, ghazals, and others.

Persian is now spoken throughout the world, and is possibly more easily learned than Arabic, at least sufficiently to appreciate some aspects of Iranian culture. Hafez's style is intensely felicitous and musical, but also simple, subtle and fluid, which makes for difficulty in translation and appreciation. Despite innumerable 19th century efforts, and excepting Omar Khayyam, classical Persian poetry has not been adequately translated into English, and the praised translations of Gertrude Bell will seem dated to many readers.

Ghazals are poems of 6 to 15 couplets linked by unity of subject and symbolism rather than by a logical sequence of ideas. Traditionally the ghazal had dealt with love and wine, motifs that, in their association with ecstasy and freedom from restraint, lent themselves naturally to the expression of Sufi ideas. Hafiz's achievement was to give these conventional subjects a freshness and subtlety that relieves his poetry of any tedious formalism.

Hafez may well have been a Sufi mystic, and many readers approach him for his philosophy. Some indeed make their own personal interpretation of Sufism, translating Hafez into contemporary equivalents. The results are not usually poetry, and certainly nothing like the original. Hafez's aim seems to have been to recreate the world in a web of symbols drawn with great aptness and ingenuity from Islamic culture. The poems are architectonic tours de force, each image being fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech: an astonishingly refined integration of image with thought and musical expression. The closest parallels to western poetry may be with Symbolism (though Hafez has wider imagery) and with Postmodernism (though Hafez does make reference to sensed and inward realities).

Since Hafez cannot really be appreciated without a deep understanding of Islamic culture, start with general introductions to the history of period, which is fascinating enough. For the literature, try as always the bibliography in the The New Princeton Encyclopedia section on Persian Poetry, E. Browne's A Literary History of Persia (1902-24: Indian reprints are affordable), A. Schimmel's A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry(1992: good bibliography), and J. Hadidi's De Sa'di à Aragon (1999: French and Persian references).

Our suggestion: A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry Wheeler M. Thackstone. Ibex Publishers. 1994. $25.00

Poems by Firdawsi, Farrukhi, Anvari, Khaqani, Nizami, Attar, Rumi, Sadi, Hafiz, Jami, Saib, and others in the original Persian. Metre, themes and other matters are fully explained, and a Vocabulary gives nearly all the words. You will need some grammar — try A.K.S. Lambton's Persian Grammar — to get the most from this representative selection of a major literature, but the effort will be well rewarded.

 

Persian language resources are here. Pages on Persian poetry are here.

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Hafez

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