Persian Literature – Part Six: Hafiz, by Farhang Jahanpour

By Farhang Jahanpour

Hafiz (1315-1390)

Hafiz is the supreme lyrical poet in the Persian language. He is the most popular of Persian poets whose Divan (collected poems) can be found in virtually every Iranian home. There is hardly anyone who cannot recite some of his lines by heart. His fame spread far and wide during his lifetime, and he was even invited by many rulers in Iran and neighbouring countries to grace their courts, but he refused to leave his beloved Shiraz.

In his poems, Hafiz writes about love, ecstasy, the longing for the beloved, wine-drinking and losing oneself in a state of drunkenness. However, beyond these mundane concepts, there lie hidden and much deeper meanings about man’s separation from God and the longing for reunion with God. He uses terms such as wine, tavern, saqi (the cupbearer), magi, etc., in order to refer to deeper mystical meanings. Many Iranians believe that in his poems, Hafiz conveys some profound spiritual meanings that lead the seeker to divine secrets. He has earned the popular soubriquet of lesan al-ghayb, the Tongue of the Unseen.

However, above and beyond anything else, Hafiz is opposed to sanctimonious religion and to religious hypocrisy.

 In most of his poems, he decries the zahed (the pious ascetic), wa’ez (the preacher), sheikh (religious elder), mufti (a cleric who issues religious rulings), qazi (religious judge), faqih (jurisprudent), mohtaseb (religious police in charge of public morals), emam-e jama’at (the leader of congregational prayer), etc. On the other hand, he praises Meikadeh (the tavern), saqi, qalandar (wandering dervishes), pir-e moghan (the Zoroastrian magi), rend (the libertine), etc.

It is often difficult to convey these shades of meaning in translating Hafiz into other languages. As my late friend Peter Avery wrote in the Foreword to Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, Hafiz’s poetry is challenging to translate into other languages due to “the subtle ambiguities, the marvellous wordplay, the several levels on which he can be interpreted”.[1] In fact, it is extremely difficult to translate any great poetry into another language, but in the case of Hafiz, this difficulty is compounded by his subtlety in the use of terms with double meanings.

Hafiz’s poems were first translated into English in 1771 by William Jones and into German by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in 1812. They soon became very popular with Western poets and writers, and influenced the works of Goethe, the British Romantic Poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and many others. Among European poets, the great German poet Goethe was so impressed by Hafiz that he wrote his West-östlicher Divan in honour of the Persian poet. After coming across translations of Hafiz, Goethe diverted his attention to the East and embarked on an imaginary trip to the land of Hafiz. Goethe found that he and Hafiz, who had preceded him by nearly four centuries and whom he called his twin brother, shared a similar outlook on life and social, religious and political issues. In turn, Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan introduced the rest of Europe to Iranian culture.

Three main elements in Hafiz’s poetry impressed Goethe: First, his juxtaposition of worldly feelings and metaphysical and mystical feelings and sensations; secondly, the poet’s oriental style that liberated Goethe from the confines of traditional Western poetic forms; and thirdly, the common values in Iranian culture that traversed geographical boundaries and had a universal appeal.

Hafiz also achieved great popularity among British Romantic poets, and his fame even spread to the United States, where Emerson embraced him as one of his muses. In his essay on “Persian Poetry”, Emerson shows his appreciation of this great Persian poet. He writes:

“Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gift adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at Nature than belongs to eight of these bards. He accounts all topics with an easy audacity.”

A quality that Emerson found very attractive in Hafiz was his spiritual independence. He writes:

“His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader. There is no example of such a facility of allusion, such use of all materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion. He fears nothing; he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or his cupbearer. This boundless character is the right of genius.”

In one of his journal entries, Emerson used similar words to praise Hafiz. He wrote:

“He is not scared by a name or a religion. He fears nothing. He sees too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see and to be. The scholar’s courage is as distinct as the soldier’s or statesman’s, and the man who has it not cannot write for me.” [2]

Contrary to many medieval poets and writers who had a pietistic attitude towards life, despite the fact that Hafiz lived in one of the darkest periods of Iranian history, Hafiz never lost his optimism and sense of joy. As Emerson writes:

“Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, morning and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to make his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence… Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus: – ‘Bring wine: for in the audience-hall of the soul’s independence, what is sentinel or Sultan? What is the wise man or the intoxicated?’ And sometimes his feast, feasters and world are only one pebble more in the external vortex and revolution of Fate: –

Emerson paid the greatest tribute to Hafiz when he wrote:

I suppose everyone has favourite topics, which make a sort of museum or privileged closet of whimsies in his mind, and which he thinks is a kind of aristocracy to know about. Thus, I like to know about lions, diamonds, wine, and Beauty; and Martial, and Hafiz.” [3]

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[1] Leonard Lewisohn, ed. Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (I. B. Tauris, 2010), p xi.

[2] R. W. Emerson, Journals, 1847; quoted in Works, VIII, 417.

[3] R. W. Emerson, Journals, VIII, 488