By Farhang Jahanpour, published in Sufism and American Literary Masters, ed. by Mehdi Aminrazavi, SUNY Press, 2014, pp 117-152
Although Emerson’s philosophical and religious ideas were mainly borrowed from Hindu sources, the greatest literary influence from the East was that of Persia, and Hafiz occupied a special place among Persian poets who influenced Emerson. It may not be extravagant to claim that, with the exception of English literature, Persian literature constituted the most important literary influence on Emerson’s work.[1]
Emerson’s biographers and critics early recognised that there was a connection between his literary and mystical works and Persian literature. Emerson’s son, describing the sources of influence on his father’s writings, wrote: “Another influence now came in on the side of grace and finish, the Oriental poetry, in which he took very great interest, especially the poems of Hafiz.[2] Another early critic of Emerson, Joel Benton, discovered the similarity of style in the poems of Emerson and Persian poets, especially translations of the works of Hafiz. He concluded that if the translations seem “a little more like Emerson than it does like Hafiz, the balance is more than preserved by his steeping his own original quatrain in a little tincture of the wine and spirit of Oriental thought. When he translated Hafiz, he was probably thinking of his own workmanship; when he described him, he was simply absorbed in the poet.”[3]
I- Emerson’s familiarity with Persian literature
Many scholars writing on Emerson’s familiarity with Persian literature, however, have wrongly assumed that his first contact with Persian literature started in 1841 when he read Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall’s translations from Persian poetry.[4] However, before immersing himself in Von Hammer’s translations, Emerson had already come across many other translations from Persian poetry and references to Persian poets. A study of Emerson’s Journals, and especially an examination of the often neglected literary journals that he borrowed from various Boston and Harvard libraries, shows that Emerson’s familiarity with Persian poetry goes back to his youth.[5]
Emerson’s acquaintance with Persian poetry started in March 1820, when, as a 17-year-old young man, he read The Asiatick Miscellany, which contained several translations from the poems of Sa’di, Hafiz and Jami.[6] Later on, through the works of Sir William Jones that he read in 1821 and subsequently, he gained more knowledge of Persian poetry.[7] Emerson’s Journals for 1822 also refer to The Thousand and One Nights: Or the Arabian Nights Entertainments,[8] which provided him with a treasure-trove of Persian and Arabic tales. In 1836, Emerson read Anquetil Duperron’s Zendavesta, Ouvrage de Zorostre,[9] which was the complete translation of the Zoroastrian scripture Zend-Avesta, excerpts of which Emerson had already read in 1832. Emerson was clearly interested in Iran’s ancient religion, because a year later he read The Phoenix: A Collection of Old and Rare Fragments.[10] The second section of this book contained “The Oracles of Zoroaster, the Founder of the Persian Magi.” This was prefaced with “An Abstract of the Persian Theology of Zoroaster”. This section seems to have particularly interested Emerson, from which he made several quotations.[11]
In 1840, Emerson borrowed all six volumes of Sir William Jones’s Works[12], which contained a great deal of information about Oriental literature, including translations from Hafiz.[13] Jones’s Works seem to have further stimulated Emerson’s interest in Persian poetry because in the following year, he read Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall’s voluminous anthology of Persian poetry and his translation of the Divan of Hafiz into German.[14] These works marked a watershed in Emerson’s interest in Persian literature, especially in the Divan of Hafiz, which, as we shall see later, lasted to the end of his life. He also read Aleksander Chodzko’s Specimen of the Popular Poetry of Persia[15], which is recorded in his Journals for 1846, and from which he made several quotations.[16] In the same year, he read James Atkinson’s translation of the Shah Nameh of Firdowsi,[17] and James Ross’s translation of the Gulistan of S’adi.[18]
Emerson’s reading lists in later years are full of references to Persian poets, and his Eastern studies between 1845 and 1855 were mainly dominated by Persian literature. Among the most important books on Persian literature that Emerson read during these years were: W. R. Alger’s The Poetry of the East[19]; James Atkinson’s translation of The Shah-Nameh[20]; James Ross’s translation of Sa’di’s Gulistan[21]; the German translation of the Divan of the celebrated Persian mystic Jalal-Ad-Din Rumi[22], David Shea and Anthony Troyer’s translations of The Dabistan, or School of Manners[23], and numerous other English and German translations of the works of Hafiz and Sa’di.
II- Emerson’s writings on Persian literature
Apart from numerous references to different Persian poets, Emerson wrote two long essays and two poems dealing with Persian poetry, and he translated as many as seven hundred lines of Persian poetry, mainly from German sources, more than half of them from the work of Hafiz. One of his essays is “Persian Poetry” in which he spoke mainly about Hafiz and briefly referred to some other Persian poets.[24] The other is the preface that he supplied to the first American edition of Sa’di’s Gulistan translated by Francis Gladwin and published in 1865 by Ticknor and Fields.[25] The two poems dealing specifically with Persian poetry consisted of a long poem under the title of “Saadi”[26], and “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift”.[27]
In his essay on “Persian Poetry”, Emerson commences with a general comment on the work of Von Hammer-Purgstall as a translator. Of the specimens of two hundred Persian poets that this German translator had given to the Western world, Emerson writes:
“That for which mainly books exist is communicated in these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good telescope, – as the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth, – but the one eminent value is the space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues in books, – but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock, by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions, which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.”
But soon after a general account of Persian poetry, Emerson writes about Hafiz and 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 either of these bards. He accounts all topics with an easy audacity.”
Then Emerson approvingly translates a few lines from Hafiz that show his self-reliance, a quality that greatly appealed to Emerson:
I batter the wheel of heaven
When it rolls not rightly by
I am not one of the snivellers
Who fall thereon and die.
and :
Alas! Till now, I had not known
My guide and Fortune’s guide are one
and :
‘Tis writ on Paradise’ gate,
Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate
The other quality that Emerson praises in Hafiz is his frankness and dislike of hypocrisy. Emerson writes: “Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows:
‘Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine!
I will be drunk and down with wine,
Treasure we find in a ruined house!
In Hafiz, Emerson finds the qualities that are the surest signs of greatness to him. He says:
“That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitled the poet to speak with authority, and makes him an object of interest, and his very phrase and syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone. His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. ‘Loose the knots of the heart’, he says.”
Another admirable quality that Emerson finds in Hafiz is his spiritual independence and the power of overcoming his surroundings. He writes:
“The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought… Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz, for the name’s sake. A law or statute is to him what a fence is to a nimble schoolboy – a temptation to jump.
‘We would do nothing but good, else would shame come to us on the day when the soul must hie hence; and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris themselves would forsake that, and come out to us!’
His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader. There is no example of such 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.
Hafiz’s poetry mirrors his mind:
The same confusion of high and low, the clarity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him. From the plain text: –
The Chemist of love
Will this perishing mould,
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold, –
He proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress. The moon though she knew his own orbit well enough, but when she saw the curve on Zuleika’s cheek, she was at a loss;
And since round lines are drawn
My darling’s lips about,
The very moon looks puzzled on,
And hesitates in doubt
If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
Be not her true way to the South
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.[28]
One of the main merits of Persian poets, especially Hafiz, which Emerson admires in them, is their love of beauty and their joy in life. Hafiz was living at one of the darkest periods of Iranian history, when his homeland was attacked by the ferocious and fanatical armies of Tamerlane [Timur Lang] and his descendants, and his native town of Shiraz witnessed the slaughter of a large number of its inhabitants and the downfall of five of its short-lived rulers. But, despite the darkness that surrounded him, Hafiz remained calm and serene in the depths of his soul, and he occupied himself with praising the beauty of nature. Hafiz’s serenity of heart and his boundless search for beauty fascinated Emerson:
“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: –
I am: what I am
My dust will be again.”
Finally, one more device of Hafiz, which pleased Emerson, was his skill in mentioning his name in his poems. Emerson describes that “The law of the ghaselle [ghazal], or shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza. It is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy… But it is easy to Hafiz… He tells us, ‘The angels in Heaven were lately learning his last pieces.’ He says, ‘The fishes shed their pearls out of desire and longing as soon as the ship of Hafiz swims the deep.’
Out of the East and out of the West, no man understands me;
O, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind!
This morning heard I how the lyre of stars resounded,
Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz.
‘When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance.’
Again:
‘O Hafiz, speak not of thy need;
Are not those verses thine?
Then all the poets are agreed,
No man can less repine.’
In his essay on “Persian Poetry”, Emerson concentrated his attention on Hafiz, but in the “Preface to Gulistan“, he dwelt mainly on Sa’di, although he still made frequent references to Hafiz. As its title denotes, Emerson’s poem on “Saadi”, first published in The Dial in 1842, also mainly dealt with Sa’di, whom he chose as an example of a representative poet. Contrary to the assertion of some critics that the poem “Saadi” was merely a device for writing about poets as a whole, there is plenty of evidence to show that he had the Persian poet in mind when writing that poem. Not only do many references to Saadi correspond with what he had written about Sa’di in his Journals [29], but he also clearly states that it was a portrait of the Persian poet. Emerson wrote that poem after reading many translations of the works of Sa’di. A year after writing it, he read the full text of the Gulistan, and in a telling passage in the Journals he declared: “In Saadi’s Gulistan I find many traits which comport with the portrait I drew [in the poem Sa’di]”[30]
In “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift”, Emerson again concentrated on Sa’di (here referred to as Said) and on Hafiz. Both of them were hungry for truth and beauty and went everywhere searching for it:
There are beggars in Iran and Araby,
Said was hungrier than all;
Hafiz said he was a fly
That came to every festival.
In this poem, Emerson mixes the praise of the two poets together, and sometimes what he says of one is more true of the other. At the beginning of the poem, there are some lines about Hafiz, which definitely apply more to Sa’di:
He came a pilgrim to the Mosque
On trail of camel and caravan,
Knew every temple and kiosk
Out from Mecca to Isphahan…
These lines are hardly true of Hafiz, who never visited Mecca and seldom left his beloved Shiraz, but they can refer to Sa’di, who travelled widely and made eight pilgrimages to Mecca.
On the other hand, the following lines attributed to Sa’di are truer of Hafiz:
Said Saadi, ‘When I stood before
Hassan the camel-driver’s door
I scorned the fame of Timour brave’
Timour, to Hassan, was a slave…
When Sa’di was living, Tamerlane was not even born, but Hafiz’s alleged encounter with the Tartar ruler is famous. Emerson himself, in his essay on “Persian Poetry”, relates that story:
“It is told of Hafiz that, when he had written a compliment to a handsome youth, –
Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Shiraz!
I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!
The verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which he had conquered nations. Hafiz replies, ‘Alas, my lord, if I had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!”[31]
It is evident that in the poem “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift”, Emerson refers freely to these two poets, and his descriptions could be true of either of them. He writes about Sa’di:
The Dervish whined to Said,
“Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.”
But Saadi answered,
“Once with manlike love and fear
I gave thee for an hour my ear,
I kept the sun and stars at bay,
And love, for words thy tongue could say.
I cannot sell my heaven again
For all that rattles in thy brain.”
Yet in his Journals, Emerson had praised Hafiz in the same tone: “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.”[32]
Or again, in this poem, Emerson praises Hafiz in similar terms that he had used to praise Sa’di in the poem bearing his name as its title:
His music was the south-wind’s sigh,
His lamp, the maiden’s downcast eye,
And ever the spell of beauty came
And turned the drowsy world to flame.
By lake and stream and gleaming hall
And modest copse and the forest hall,
Where’er he went, the magic guide
Kept its place by the poet’s side
Referring to Sa’di, Emerson wrote in verse what he had written about him in prose in his Journals. He had noted Sa’di’s interest in high and low and, as a result, all people’s interest in him. He wrote: “The human race is interested in Saadi… Saadi is the poet of friendship, of love, of heroism, of self-devotion, beauty, serenity, and the divine Providence.”
Apart from the above sources, wherein Emerson speaks in detail about Persian poets, there are many other references to them scattered in his Works and Journals. Emerson often put Hafiz and Shakespeare in the same category. In one of his poems, he wrote of the two poets as teachers who taught and inspired without preaching:
“A new commandment”, said the smiling Muse,
“I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach; -“
Luther, Fox, Bohmen, Swedenborg grew pale,
And, in the instant, rosier clouds upbore
Hafiz and Shakespeare with their shining choirs.[33]
In his poem on “The Poet”, Emerson speaks about poets in general and does not specify any by name. But there are certain passages in that poem that, in the light of what he had written elsewhere of Hafiz, can be easily distinguished as referring to him. For example, he writes:
He sowed the sun and moon for seeds…
But oh, to see his solar eyes
Like meteors which chose their way
And rived the dark like a new day!
No lazy grazing on all they saw
Each chimney-pot and village picket fence,
But, feeding on magnificence,
They bounded to the horizon’s edge
And searched with the sun’s privilege.[34]
These lines recall what he had written of Hafiz in his Journals: “Hafiz’s poetry is marked by nothing more than his habit of playing with all magnitudes, mocking at them. What is the moon, or the sun’s course or heaven, and the angels to his darling’s mole or eyebrow?”[35] Again, he had written about the same poet: “He is restless, inquisitive, thousand-eyed, insatiable, and as like a nightingale intoxicated with his own music; never was the privilege of poetry more haughtily used.”[36]
There is another passage in “The Poet”, which may refer to Hafiz:
He whom God has thus preferred, –
To whom sweet angels ministered,
Saluted him each morn as brother,
And bragged his virtues to each other…[37]
With these lines are to be compared the following prose translations from Hafiz made by Emerson for the essay on “Persian Poetry”: “When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance.” And, “I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it said in the early morning, I am the disciple of the sweet-voiced Hafiz.”[38]
There is an entry in the Journals, which was written shortly after Emerson read Hafiz: “Expression is what we want: not knowledge, but vent: we know enough; but have not leaves and lungs enough for a healthy perspiration and growth. Hafiz has! … ‘Keep the body open’, is the hygiene precept… Large utterance!”[39]
Emerson was attracted to Hafiz as soon as he came to know him. The very first entry about Hafiz is as follows:
“Hafiz defies you to show him or put him in a condition inappropriate or ignoble. Take all you will, and leave him but a corner of Nature, a lane, a den, a cowshed… he promises to win to that scorned spot the light of the moon and stars, the love of men, the smile of beauty, and the homage of art.”[40]
There are further references in the Journals that show other qualities that Emerson liked in Persian poets, especially Hafiz. One was the inspirational quality of women. In his second series of Essays, there is a striking passage asking:
“Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, she was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will be more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say, her manners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For, though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble.”[41]
Another quality that Emerson admired about Hafiz was his disregard for the material world. He quoted a poem from Hafiz where he says: “Our father Adam sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not if I hold it dear at one grapestone.”[42] Yet another trait of the Persian poet that Emerson admired was his love of beauty and his dislike of religious formalism. He quotes Hafiz approvingly when he addresses the leader of the pilgrims to Mecca that he only sees the surface and the building, while Hafiz sees the Lord of the building: “To the vizier returning from Mecca, he says: – Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy fortune. Thou hast indeed seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the Temple.”[43]
In the notebook called “Orientalist” are the following passages, mostly transcribed from the Journals during his forties when Emerson became familiar with German translations of Hafiz:
“Hafiz has only just arrived as a competitor to our occidental lyricists, as the Pasha of Egypt challenged so lately the English men of the turf, and our theologians left out till now the Bhagavat Geeta. Nothing stops him; he makes the dare-God and dare-devil experiment; he is not to be scared by a name, or a religion; he fears nothing, he sees too far, and sees throughout.
Hafiz’s scepticism is only that of a deep intellect: he pays homage to virtue. Wine stands poetically for all that symbolizes, and not as in Moore’e verse for Best Port. He who sees the horizon may securely say what he pleases of any tree or twig between him and it. He takes his life in his hand, and is ready for a new world… ‘Talk not to me of mosques or of dervishes, God is my witness, I am where he dwells.’ Hafiz does not write of wine and love in any mystical sense, further than that he uses wine as the symbol of intellectual freedom.”
In this passage, Emerson makes a very important statement about Hafiz’s symbolism. Contrary to many who see his use of wine either as a sign of debauchery or purely see it as a symbol for mystical intoxication, Emerson points out that above all, it is a symbol of “intellectual freedom”. At a time of religious fanaticism and bigotry, when drinking wine could result in harsh penalties, Hafiz uses wine as a way of transcending religious strictures and expressing his disgust of hypocrisy and sanctimonious religiosity.
In his Journals for 1846, Emerson wrote: “Hafiz, whom I at first thought of a cross of Anacreon and Horace, I find now to have the best blood of Pindar also in his verses.”
III- Emerson’s Translations from Hafiz
Emerson translated about 700 lines of Persian poetry, about half are translations from the poems of Hafiz. Apart from Hafiz who has the lion’s share of Emerson’s translations, the following poets furnished the sources of Emerson’s other translations: Fereideddin [Farid al-Din] Attar (54 lines), Sa’di (34 lines), Nimatollah [Ni’matullah] of Kuhestan (34 lines), Ibn Jamin [Ibn Yamin] (22 lines), Nizami (21 lines), Enweri [Anvari] (20 lines), Kermani (20 lines), Omar Chiam [Khayyam] (12 lines); and Adschedi [Asjudi], Feizi, Dschami [Jami] and Dscheladdin [Jalaluddin] Rumi (4 lines each).[44] As Von Hammer Purgstall’s German translations of Persian poetry provided the origins for most of Emerson’s translations, he adopts the German spelling of Persian names. For example, he writes Medschnun for Majnun, Dscheladdin for Jalaluddin and Dschami for Jami.
To Emerson should doubtless go the credit for first translating some quatrains from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the United States, and also for introducing the Persian Ruba’i (couplet) into English. His translations of the Rubaiyat preceded those of Fitzgerald by many years. To him also goes the distinction of prophesying that Omar Khayyam deserved and would become better known by Western readers. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly for April 1858, Emerson pointed out: “The seven masters of Persian Parnassus, Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz and Dschami, have ceased to be empty names; and others, like Fereideddin Attar, and Omar Chiam, promise to rise in Western estimation.”[45]
The first category of his translations consists of attempts to render a literal translation of the original. In his translations of Hafiz, Emerson sometimes produced a verbal translation and later improved upon his original rendition. One example is the translation of a few lines of the following ghazal:
See, the chemist of love
Will the dust of the body
Convert into gold
Were it never so leaden.
O Hafiz, churls
Know the worth of great pearls.
Give the high-prized stone
Only to sacred friends alone.
When he came to quote this poem in his essay on “Persian Poetry”, this is how he rendered it:
The chemist of love
Will this perishing mould
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold.
Thou foolish Hafiz! Say, do churls
Know the worth of Oman’s pearls?
Give the gem which dims the moon
To the noblest or to none.
Sometimes Emerson tried to produce exact translations of the original poems, but misunderstood the meaning of the German translations, and as a result changed the meaning of the ideas expressed in the original poems. For example, it is a familiar sentiment in the poems of both Hafiz and Omar Khayyam that one should treasure the moment, as when one leaves this world, one will not come back. Emerson, translating a line expressing this idea, wrote: “When thou goest, come not back”, which has a completely different meaning.
The second category of translations includes selections from different poems, mixed together to form a single poem. An example of this category is a poem which Emerson called “Of Passionate Abandonment”, and which is formed out of two odes of Hafiz:
I know this perilous love-lane
And whither the traveller leads,
Yet my fancy the sweet scent of
Thy tangled tresses feeds.
In the midnight of thy locks,
I renounce the day;
In the ring of thy rose-lips
My heart forgets to pray
Sometimes, we come across some translations that have more than the German text for a source. It is evident that Emerson has made use of the notes of Von Hammer’s translations or has been acquainted with some English versions of those poems. For example, in the following translation, “From Hafiz”, Emerson has exactly rendered the Persian original that had been distorted in the German text:
I said to heaven that glowed above,
O hide yon sun-filled zone,
Hide all the starts you boast;
For in the world of love
And estimation true,
The heaped-up harvest of the moon
Is worth one barley-corn at most,
The Pleiads’s sheaf but two
In fact, E. B. Cowell had already translated that particular ghazal of Hafiz and Emerson might have read it.[46]
The third category of selections includes poems that can hardly be called translations. In this group belong poems that have some Persian source, but Emerson has elaborated on the translation, and many lines have been added to the original. In this category may be included the poems that Emerson wrote about Hafiz, but which were inspired by some of the poems by Hafiz. The similarity is so striking that it is difficult to decide whether to classify them as translations or imitations. For instance, among the “Quatrains” we come across a poem entitled “Hafiz”
Her passions the shy violent
From Hafiz never hides;
Love longings of the raptured bird
The bird to him confides
There is a poem by Hafiz translated by Emerson, which probably suggests the above lines:
By breath of beds of roses drawn,
I found the grove in the morning pure,
In the concert of the nightingale
My drunken brain to cure.
With unrelated glance
I looked the rose in the eye;
The rose in the hour of gleaming
Flamed like a lamp hard-by.
She was of her beauty proud,
And prouder of her youth,
The while unto her flaming heart
The bulbul gave his truth.
The sweet narcissus closed
Its eye, with passion pressed,
The tulips out of envy burned
Moles in their scarlet breast.
The lilies white prolonged
Their sworded tongue to the smell;
The clustering anemones
Their pretty secrets tell.
IV- Echoes of Hafiz’s poems in Emerson’s verse
Through the frequent reading of the poems of Hafiz and other Persian poets, Emerson’s poems were influenced by them, and in some of his most famous poems, the influence is too clear to be missed. The influence is manifest in several ways: in the similarity of style and the use of imagery, the correspondence of thoughts and feelings, and the use of the same material. Emerson’s style has been described as being original among Western writers. His familiarity with and imitation of Persian poetry might provide some of the answers for the unique qualities of Emerson’s verse. Persian poetry served to enrich the store of his imagery and to introduce many new forms of expression to him, but it is not only in Emerson’s use of imagery and language that one can discover the influence of Persian poetry. Many of his ideas were also borrowed from the same source.
One of the poems that was inspired, in part at least, by his reading of Persian poetry is the poem “Days”. This poem is short and may be quoted entirety:
Daughter of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
There is an entry in the Journals for May 24, 1847, as follows: “The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not see the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.”[47] In a note, Edward Emerson has observed that this sentence was later embodied in the poem “Days”.[48] At the time of expressing these sentiments, Emerson was reading Persian poetry, and this sentiment is often expressed in the poems of Hafiz and Omar Khayyam. The interesting point is that the second Journal entry for May 24, 1847, is a translation of a ghazal by Hafiz, in which occur the following lines:
Surely I have no treasure,
Yet am I richly satisfied;
God has given that to the Shah,
And this to the beggar.
Apart from expressing a similar idea to that of “Days”, these lines clearly suggest the line “To each they offer gifts after his will”. In the next line of the poem “Days”, Emerson makes use of a trick of Hafiz, which he had remarked upon in his essay on “Persian Poetry”, namely Hafiz’s habit of “playing with magnitudes”: “Bread, kingdoms, stars and sky that holds them all.”
The term “barefoot dervishes” clearly echoes the use of the term in some Persian poems, which also appear in many of Emerson’s translations of them. But, most important of all, the moral and general idea of the poem is basically Oriental and several poems of Hafiz contain the same thought.
Another poem of Emerson that has a parallel in his translations of Persian poetry is the poem entitled “To J. W.” This poem bears a striking resemblance to a ghazal of Hafiz that Emerson translated in 1847. In order to see the similarity between the two poems, I quote both poems below:
Set not thy foot on graves;
Hear what wine and roses say;
The mountain chase, the summer waves,
The crowded town, thy feet may well delay.
Set not thy foot on graves;
Nor seek to unwind the shroud
Which charitable time
And nature have allowed
To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.
Set not thy foot on graves;
Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament;
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,
His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried;
Go get them where he earned them when alive,
As resolutely dig or dive.
Life is too short to waste
The critic bite or cynic bark,
Quarrel, or reprimand;
‘Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark.
The translation of the poem by Hafiz that Emerson entitled “Ghaselle: From the Persian of Hafiz II” is as follows:
Of Paradise, O hermit wise,
Let us renounce the thought.
Of old therein our names of sin
Allah recorded not.
Who dear to God on earthly sod
No corn-grain plants,
The same is glad that life is had,
Though corn he wants.
Thy mind the mosque and cool kiosk,
Spare fast, and orisons;
Mine me allows the drink-house,
And sweet chase of the nuns.
O just fakeer, with brow austere,
Forbid me not the vine;
On the first day, poor Hafiz clay
Was kneaded up with wine.
He is no dervise, Heaven slights his service,
Who shall refuse
There in the banquet, to pawn his blanket
For Schiraz’s juice.
Who his friend’s shirt, or hem of his shirt,
Shall spare to pledge,
To him Eden’s bliss and Angel’s kiss
Shall want their edge.
Up, Hafiz; grace from high God’s face
Beams on thee pure;
Shy then not hell, and trust thou well,
Heaven is secure.
These two poems have many points in common. Both of them forbid the reader to put his mind on the next life, and teach him to enjoy God’s bounties in the here and now rather than in the hereafter. Both offer wine and roses as sources of pleasure in life, and both end on the optimistic note that a gracious God will overlook the faults of men and will bestow salvation. Apart from similarities in content, there are some similarities in expression as well. “Sage sublime” in the one, and “hermit wise” in the other; in both of them, the closing apostrophe begins with the word ‘Up’.
The third stanza of “Ghaselle”, with its reference to a frequent claim of Hafiz that he had been predestined towards wine from birth, may also have provided the inspiration for the following lines from “May-Day”:
Poets praise that hidden wine
Hid in milk we drew
At the barrier of Time,
When our life was new.
We had eaten fairy fruit,
We were quick from head to foot,
All the forms we looked on shone
As with diamond dews thereon.
Another poem of Emerson, which even more clearly reflects Emerson’s death to Hafiz, is the famous poem called “Bacchus”. Most commentators have readily admitted that this poem was inspired by Persian sources. Emerson himself was aware of the fact and thought “Bacchus” might be taken as a translation of a poem by Hafiz. In July 1846, in a letter to Elizabeth Hoar, he wrote that he had been working on some poems that he felt impatient to show her, “especially some verses called Bacchus… not, however, translated from Hafiz.”[49] But although he rightly points out that the poem is not a direct translation of Hafiz, it shows great resemblance to another translation that he made of a famous poem of Hafiz, called “Sakinameh” [Saqi-Nameh]. Let us first quote Emerson’s poem:
BRING me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffer’d no savour of the earth to ‘scape.
….
We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true,
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curl’d
Among the silver hills of heaven
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well:
….
Wine which Music is,–
Music and wine are one,–
That I, drinking this,
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;
Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.
Quicken’d so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.
I thank the joyful juice
For all I know;
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow,
And seeming-solid walls of use
Open and flow.
Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
….
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the agèd prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.
If one compares the above poem with Emerson’s translation of “Saqi-Nameh” by Hafiz, one will see many common features between the two:
Butler, fetch the ruby wine,
Which with sudden greatness fills us;
Pour for me, who in my spirit
Fail in courage and performance;
Bring the philosophic stone,
Karun’s treasure, Noah’s life;
Haste, that by thy means I open
All the doors of luck and life.
Bring me, boy, the fire-water
Zoroaster sought in the dust.
To Hafiz, revelling ’tis allowed
To pray to Matter and to Fire.
Bring the wine of Jamschid’s glass
That shone, ere time was, in the Néant.
Give it me, that through its virtue
I, as Jamschid, see through worlds.
Wisely said the Kaiser Jamschid,
This world’s not worth a barleycorn.
Bring me, boy, the nectar cup,
Since it leads to Paradise.
….
Give it me, that I storm heaven,
Tear the net from the arch-wolf.
Wine, wherewith the Houris teach
Angels the ways of Paradise.
On the glowing coals I’ll set it,
And therewith my brain perfume.
Bring me wine, through whose effulgence
Jam and Chosroes yielded light:
Wine, that to the flute I sing
Where is Jam, and where is Kauss.
Bring the blessing of old times;
Bless the old departed Shahs;
Bring it me, the Shah of hearts.
….
Give me, boy, the ruby cup
Which unlocks the heart with wine,
That I reason quite renounce,
And plant banners on the worlds.”[50]
Apart from the general tone of the two poems, which is very similar, both of them celebrate wine, and both of them refer to it as something different from the “juice of the grape”. Contrary to the normal tradition of Bacchanalian poems, which celebrate the physical pleasures derived from drinking and getting drunk, both Hafiz and Emerson refer to wine as a metaphor for spiritual and metaphysical intoxication that takes man to levels beyond mere rationality. It is a juice, which in Hafiz’s words with “sudden greatness fills us”, or “Bring me, boy, the nectar cup, Since it leads to Paradise”; and in Emerson’s words “May float at pleasure through all natures; The bird-language rightly spell, And that which roses say so well.” To Hafiz, wine produces a state “That shone, ere time was, in the Néant”, or “Bring the blessing of old times, Bless the old departed Shahs”; while Emerson “Shall hear far Chaos talk with me, Kings unborn shall walk with me, And the poor grass shall plot and plan, What it will do when it is man.”
In the vocabulary of the Sufis, butler, wine, cup-bearer and drunk have symbolic meanings. For instance, the cup-bearer is regarded as the spiritual guide who reveals spiritual secrets. Similarly, by wine is meant the fire of the love of God, which produces intellectual liberation and spiritual ecstasy.[51] A tavern is a retreat where one communicates with the Beloved, and a drunkard has gone beyond the realm of reason and has been initiated into divine mysteries. In Bacchus, Emerson imitates Hafiz and speaks of wine as something which takes him out of himself and beyond time and space: “Pour, Bacchus! The remembering wine; Retrieve the loss of me and mine!” With the help of wine he wishes to unlock “every crypt of every rock”. There are also many similarities of diction in the two poems, and words like heaven, world, unlock, quench, etc, are used in both of them.
Another similarity between Emerson’s Bacchus and Saqi-Nameh is the way that both poets make use of ancient myths and gods to support their arguments in praise of wine. Whereas Hafiz refers to Chosroes, Jamshid, and Kauss to give credibility to his notion of the nobility that he bestows upon wine, Emerson uses certain ancient myths, such as Chaos, Néant, Styx and Erebus and “kings unborn” to strengthen his argument.
After Bacchus, Emerson wrote another poem called “Fragmentary Bachhus”, which again reflects the influence of Hafiz. The “Fragmentary Bachhus”, as appeared in the centenary edition, is as follows:
Pour the wine, pour the wine…
It can cancel bulk and time;
Crowds and condenses
Into a drop a tun…
On a brown grapestone
The wheels of nature turn;
Out of it the fury comes
Wherewith the spondyls burn.
And because a drop of the Vine
Is creation’s heart
Wash with wine those eyes of thine;
Nothing is hid, nor whole nor part.
Wine is translated wit,
Wine is the day of day
Wine from the veiled secret
Tear the veil away.
This poem should be compared with some lines from a poem by Hafiz that Emerson translated in his essay on “Persian Poetry”:
“The Builder of heaven
Hath sundered the earth,
So that no footway
Leads out of it forth.
“On turnpikes of wonder
wine leads the mind forth,
Straight, sidewise, and upward,
West, southward, and north.
“Stands the vault adamantine
Until the Doomsday ;
The wine-cup shall ferry
Thee o’er it away.
The likeness of imagery between “the wheels of nature” and the “turnpikes of wonder” is too clear to miss. To Emerson, “Wine from the veiled secret, Tear the veil away”, and to Hafiz, “wine leads the mind forth, Straight, sidewise, and upward, West, southward, and north.” Also, one might add to the above source the following from the essay on “Persian Poetry”, where Emerson contends that Hafiz thinks that wine “can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that covers it.
To be wiser the dull brain earnestly throbs
Bring bands of wine for the stupid head.”
There is another poem of Hafiz translated by Emerson, which has influenced two of his own poems. The lines from Hafiz are as follows:
If my darling should depart,
And search the skies for prouder friends,
God forbid my angry heart
In other love should seek amends.
When the blue horizon’s hoop
Me a little pinches here,
Instant to my grave I stoop,
And go find thee in the sphere.
The poems of Emerson, which show some resemblance to the above lines, are as follows:
“Hermione”
(The love-sick Arab is advised by the elements…)
“Courage! we are thine allies,
And with this hint be wise,—
The chains of kind
The distant bind;
Deed thou doest she must do,
Above her will, be true;
And, in her strict resort
To winds and waterfalls
And autumn’s sunlit festivals,
To music, and to music’s thought,
Inextricably bound,
She shall find thee, and be found.
Follow not her flying feet;
Come to us herself to meet.”‘
The other poem is “Give All to Love”:
(The lover is urged to be…)
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho’ her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
“Blue horizon’s hoop” used in the poem of Hafiz was a phrase that Emerson liked and used on several occasions. In “Monadnoc”, he writes:
Seen happy from afar,
Above the horizon’s hoop.
In his essay on “Intellect”, Emerson wrote: “I am caught up by a strong wind and so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.”
There is yet another translation from Hafiz that seems to have inspired one of Emerson’s poems.
From Hafiz:
Oft have I said, do not stray from myself.
I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;
What the eternal says, I stammering say again.
Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,
And according to my food I grow and give.
Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl
And am only seeking one to receive it.
The above poem should be compared with “Mithradates” by Emerson:
….
Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes;—
…
Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
…
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!
God I will not be an owl,
But sun me in the Capitol.
Although Hafiz’s poem is more about man being a mirror of the divine and reflecting the light of God or, as he says, being a parrot merely miming what his master has taught him; nevertheless, being made in the image of God, the poet knows that he owns a precious pearl and is willing to share it with whoever is willing to receive it. The poem is essentially about man’s innate worth, despite his seeming weakness or worthlessness. Emerson’s poem also takes those ideas and asserts man’s dignity and spiritual value, despite his mean circumstances. Even a person who is “long shut in strait and few” and “thinly dieted on dew”, nevertheless, he is not content to be an owl, but wishes to sit aloft on the Capitol.
One can find many other examples of similarities between the poems of Hafiz and Emerson, but the above examples are sufficient to show the degree of Emerson’s attachment to Hafiz’s poetry. His most active period of writing poetry coincided with the period when he was studying Persian poets. His use of the images that he found in the poems of Hafiz, his deliberate imitation of Persian models and the use of the same material are so intricately bound with his own poems that the influence is to be felt rather than proved. He was very fond of short sentences – lustres he called them – which he found in the poems of Hafiz, and he used them in a modified form in his own poems.
It is amazing that even through the medium of very mediocre translations, Emerson managed to establish such a strong affinity with the Persian poet and understand the true meaning of his poetry better than many orientalists who had spent a lifetime on Persian literature. Although many Western commentators of Hafiz had praised his poetic genius, no one has ever noticed Hafiz’s great contribution as a religious thinker. Emerson did not read Hafiz’s poetry only for their literary merits, but he also discovered the great campaign that Hafiz had waged against fanaticism, fundamentalism, hypocrisy and literal interpretation of religious texts, very much as Emerson had done at his own time. Seeing Hafiz’s praise of wine as the sign of ‘intellectual freedom’, his denunciation of the seemingly pious who tried to fool the public and his interest in the deeper meanings of religion were remarkable examples of Emerson’s true appreciation of Hafiz’s mission.
Joel Benton, one of the first scholars to make an intense study of Emerson’s poetry, saw the relationship between Emerson’s poems and those of Persian poets, especially Hafiz. He remarked:
“The kinship of the mintage is, in some aspects, curious. Shall we say on account of this homogeneity that the Oriental is but another Yankee? Or is it that the Yankee is merely the Oriental moved further West? At any rate, what Hafiz addresses to himself, and what Emerson says of him are wondrously alike in mode, texture and tune.”[52]
It is interesting to note that even in his chapter on English Literature in his fascinating and highly original book, English Traits, Emerson could not get away from his favourite Persian poets. In this book, he compared and contrasted the works of English poets, including those of Shakespeare, with the poems of Hafiz. After noting that “For two centuries, England was philosophic, religious, poetic,” he attributed even that most glorious period in English literature to a union of Saxon precision and oriental imagination. He wrote: “The union of Saxon precision and oriental soaring, of which Shakespeare is the perfect example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two [subsequent] centuries.” However, Emerson paid the greatest compliment to his favourite Persian poets by noting that even the best of English poets lacked the expansiveness of Hafiz and other Persian poets. He complained:
‘That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic element, they have not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said, “Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms.” A stanza of the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and he does not value the salient and curative influence of intellectual action, studious of truth, without a by-end.’[53]
This is high praise indeed from someone who was steeped in English literature, but there is no more eloquent testimony to Emerson’s interest in Persian poetry than his own words in the Journals, where he declared:
“I suppose every one has favorite topics, which make a sort of museum or privileged closet of 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.”[54]
Footnotes:
[1] For a fuller study of the influence of Hafiz on Emerson’s work, see Farhang Jahanpour’s MA thesis Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the University of Hull, England, June 1965. Also see: John Yohannan, The Persian Poet Hafiz in England and America, MA thesis, Columbia University, 1939. For detailed studies of Eastern influences on Emerson, see: F. I. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge, Mass, 1930); Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York, 1963); John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two-Hundred-Year History (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977).
2 Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston, 1889), p 31
3 Joel E. Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York, 1883), p 29
4 Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, Der Divan von Mohammed Schemseddin Hafis (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812, 2 vols.) Also Geschichte der Schonen Redekunste Persien, mit einer Blutenlese aus Zweihundert Persischen Dichtern (Wien, 1818)
5 To compile a full list of the books and articles that Emerson read from his youth onwards, his Works, Letters and particularly Journals that occasionally made reference to the books that he was reading at the time are most helpful. There have been various attempts to provide a complete list of Emerson’s readings. These include: Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson’s Early Reading List (1819-1824) (New York, 1951) reprinted in Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 28 (1962); Indian Superstitution, edited with a Dissertation on Emerson’s Orientalism at Harvard (Cayuga Press, New York, 1954); and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (Hartford, 1962). Bryer, Jackson R. and Rees, Robert A, “A Checklist of Emerson Criticism (1951-1961), with a Detailed Index. Bibliographical Supplement: Emerson. Fragment from Eight American Authors, p. 424 – 428, “Emerson Society Quarterly”, No. 37 (IV Quarter 1964). Misc. notes found with “A Checklist of Emerson Criticism (1951-1961). These works, however, do not provide a full list of all of Emerson’s readings. Cameron’s book takes the list of Emerson’s readings up to 1924, while the second and the third sources only provide a list of the books that Emerson borrowed from three libraries in Boston. There are a large number of books and articles on Oriental and Persian issues referred to in Emerson’s Journals and Works, Letters, and The Dial, which have not been included in the above sources. Many of Emerson’s friends, such as Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, also possessed collections of Oriental books, and they exchanged these books among themselves. Various volumes of “The Edinburgh Review” that Emerson borrowed also provided a rich source of material on oriental subjects. Indeed, a study of the volumes of “The Edinburgh Review” that Emerson borrowed leads one to assume that articles on Oriental topics seemed to have formed the main attraction to Emerson, as nearly all the editions of the Review that he borrowed contained some articles on Oriental subjects. A study of all these sources shows that his familiarity with Persian literature started much earlier than some scholars have assumed.
6 The Asiatick Miscellany, containing Original Productions, Translations, Fugitive Pieces, etc, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1785-86). Emerson used volume one only, which contained some Indian hymns translated by Sir William Jones, notably the “Hymn to Narayena”, as well as translations from the works of Sa’di, Hafiz and Jami. See Kenneth W. Camerson’s Emerson’s Early Reading List 1819-1824 (New York 1951, pp 4 and 9). For a complete list of Emerson’s Oriental readings, see Farhang Jahanpour, pp 311-346. For a list of periodicals with articles on Eastern topics that he read, see Ibid, pp 347-375.
7 In 1821, Emerson read John Shore Teignmouth’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones (London, John Harchard, 1896). The book dealt with the life and works of Sir William Jones and provided samples of his translations from Oriental poetry. See: Journals, I, 82.
8 Journals, I, 204. It is not clear which edition of The Thousand and One Nights he read, but it could be Edward Forester’s translation (London, 1802)
9 Anquetil Duperron’s Zendavesta, Ouvrage de Zorostre (Paris, Tilliard, 1771), 3 vols. Emerson borrowed two volumes from the Boston Athenaeum Library. See K. W. Cameron’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York 1951), p 54.
10 The Phoenix: A Collection of Old and Rare Fragments: viz. the Morals of Confucius, the Chinese philosopher; the Oracles of Zoroaster, the founder of the religion of the Persian magi; Sanchoniathos’s History of the creation; the Voyages of Hanno round the coast of Africa, five hundred years before Christ; King Hiempsals’ History of the African settlements, translated from the Punic books; and the choice sayings of Publius Syrus. (New York, W. Gowan, 1835).
11 See The Journals, IV, 254.
12 Sir William Jones, Works (London G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799)
13 Emerson borrowed the Works from the Boston Athenaeum Library. See K. W. Cameron’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York 1951), p 42.
14 Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, Der Divan von Mohammed Schemseddin Hafis (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812, 2 vols.) Also Geschichte der Schonen Redekunste Persien, mit einer Blutenlese aus Zweihundert Persischen Dichtern (Wien, 1818)
15 Aleksander Chodzko, Specimen of the Popular Poetry of Persia (London, 1842)
16 For Emerson’s quotations from this book, see The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston, 1909-1914), VII, pp 153, 280, 291.
17 The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, translated and abridged by James Atkinson (London, 1832)
18 The Gulistan or Flower Garden, translated by James Ross from the Persian Text of Gentius, with an Essay on Sadi (London, 1923)
19 William Rousenville Alger, The Poetry of the East (Whittemore, Niles and Hall, Boston, 1856), 2 vols. In a letter to Alger on 18 October 1856, Emerson acknowledges the receipt of the book and adds that he was very pleased to read it. See Stanley T. Williams, “Unpublished Letters of Emerson”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXVI, 483-84.
20 James Atkinson’s translation of The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet, Firdausi, tr. And abridged… by James Wilkinson (Oriental Translation Fund, London, 1832). Emerson borrowed this book from Harvard College Library on September 2, 1846. See: Carpenter, op cit, pp 48 and 72. This was the best translation of the Shah-Nameh, from which Emerson made several quotations.
21 Musli uddin Sadi, The Gulistan or Flower Garden. Tr. By James Ross from the Persian Text of Gentius, with an Essay on Sadi (London, 1823). Emerson borrowed this book from Harvard College Library on November 18, 1846. See Carpenter, op cit, pp 48 and 102.
22 Jalal-Ad-Din, Auswahl aus den Diwanen des größten mystischen Dichters Persiens Mewlana Dschalaleddin Rumi aus dem Persischen mit beigefügten original – Texten und erläuterten Armerkungen von Vicenz von Rosenweig (Vienna, 1836). This book was borrowed by Emerson from the Boston Athenaeum Library on 4 February 1861. See Carpenter, op cit, pp 32, 82.
23 David Shea and Anthony Troyer, The Dabistan, or School of Manners (Oriental Translation Fund, Paris, 1843. See Journal, X, 305.
24 “Essay on Persian Poetry”, R. W. Emerson, Complete Works, edited with a biographical introduction and notes by E. W. Emerson(Centenary Edition, 12 vols. Boston 1903-04) VIII, 236-265. All subsequent quotations from this essay are taken from this source. This essay was first published in “The Atlantic Monthly” in 1858.
25 The Gulistan or Rose Garden by Musle-Huddeen Sheik Saadi, translated from the original by Francis Gladwin, with … a Preface by R. W. Emerson (Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1865)
26 “Saadi”, The Dial, 1842. When quoting passages from Emerson, the spelling that he used to refer to Persian poets is retained.
27 Emerson wrote the first part of “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift” in 1845, published in The Poems (Boston, 1847, dated 25 December 1846)
28 R. W. Emerson, Journals, 1847; quoted in Works, VIII, 417.
29 For a study of Emerson’s views regarding Sa’di, see Farhang Jahanpour’s MA thesis on “Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, the University of Hull, England, June 1965, pp 180-234.
30 R. W. Emerson, Journals, VI, 463
31 R. W. Emerson, Works, VIII, 251
32 R. W. Emerson, Journals, 1847, quoted in Works, VIII, 417
33 R. W. Emerson, Works, IX, 297
34 R. W. Emerson, Works, IX, 310
35 R. W. Emerson, Journals, X, 167
36 Quoted in Works, VIII, 417
37 Ibid., IX, 316
38 Ibid., VIII, 253
39 R. W. Emerson, Journals, VII, 279
40 Ibid., V, 562
41 Essay 16, on “Manners”
42 Ibid., VIII, 244
43 See Emerson’s essay on “Persian Poetry”, Works, VIII, 236-265
44 These translations appear in different places. Some of them were quoted in Emerson’s Works and Journals. For the translations see: Poems (Boston, 1847), pp 209-218; The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston, 1851), pp 78-81 and 156-157; Works (Essay on Worship), VI, 234; Works (Essay on Persian Poetry), VIII, 237-265; Works, IX, 298-305; and Journals, VII, 181; VII, 277-278; VIII, 542; IX, 75; IX, 538-539; IX, 544-545.
45 Reprinted in Works, VIII, 237. It is interesting to note that a few years later, two of the three poets that Robert Fitzgerald chose for translation were exactly those mentioned by Emerson. Fitzgerald translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Language of Birds [Mantiq al-Tayr] by Attar and Salaman and Absal by Jami. Even more interestingly, Fitzgerald compared Omar Khayyam with Emerson and wrote: “I wonder that Persia could have produced anything so like Emerson where Emerson is truest and greatest.” Quoted in J. H. Thonet, “Etude sur Edward Fitz-gerald et la literature persone, d’apres les sources originale” (Bibliotheque de la faculte de philosophie et letters de l’universite de Liege, H. Valliant-Carmann, Paris, Champion, 1929), pp 21-22.
46 E B Cowell, “Hafiz, the Persian Poet”, Fraser’s Magazine, L, 288 ff (September 1854)
47 R. W. Emerson, Journals, VII, 277
48 Ibid., 277
49 R. W. Emerson, Letters, III, 341
50 R. W. Emerson, Poems, “From the Persian of Hafiz I”
51 In his notebook called “Orientalist”, Emerson wrote of Hafiz, “he uses wine as a symbol of intellectual freedom.” In the essay on “Persian Poetry”, he further remarked: “But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics.”
52 Joel E. Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York, 1883), pp 28, 29
53 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson – Volume V – English Traits (1856), chapter XIV
54 R. W. Emerson, Journals, VIII, 488
[1] For a fuller study of the influence of Hafiz on Emerson’s work, see Farhang Jahanpour’s MA thesis Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the University of Hull, England, June 1965. Also see: John Yohannan, The Persian Poet Hafiz in England and America, MA thesis, Columbia University, 1939. For detailed studies of Eastern influences on Emerson see: F. I. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge, Mass, 1930); Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York, 1963); John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two-Hundred-Year History (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977).
[2] Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston, 1889), p 31
[3] Joel E. Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York, 1883), p 29
[4] Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, Der Divan von Mohammed Schemseddin Hafis (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812, 2 vols.) Also Geschichte der Schonen Redekunste Persien, mit einer Blutenlese aus Zweihundert Persischen Dichtern (Wien, 1818)
[5] In order to compile a full list of the books and articles that Emerson read from his youth onwards, his Works, Letters and particularly Journals, which occasionally made reference to the books that he was reading at the time, are most helpful. There have been various attempts to provide a complete list of Emerson’s readings. These include: Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson’s Early Reading List (1819-1824) (New York, 1951) reprinted in Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 28 (1962); Indian Superstitution, edited with a Dissertation on Emerson’s Orientalism at Harvard (Cayuga Press, New York, 1954); and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (Hartford, 1962). Bryer, Jackson R. and Rees, Robert A., “A Checklist of Emerson Criticism (1951-1961), with a Detailed Index. Bibliographical Supplement: Emerson. Fragment from Eight American Authors, p. 424 – 428, “Emerson Society Quarterly”, No. 37 (IV Quarter 1964). Misc. notes found with “A Checklist of Emerson Criticism (1951-1961). These works, however, do not provide a full list of all of Emerson’s readings. Cameron’s book takes the list of Emerson’s readings up to 1924, while the second and the third sources only provide a list of the books that Emerson borrowed from three libraries in Boston. There are a large number of books and articles on Oriental and Persian issues referred to in Emerson’s Journals and Works, Letters, and The Dial, which have not been included in the above sources. Many of Emerson’s friends, such as Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, also possessed collections of Oriental books, and they exchanged these books among themselves. Various volumes of “The Edinburgh Review” that Emerson borrowed also provided a rich source of material on oriental subjects. Indeed, a study of the volumes of “The Edinburgh Review” that Emerson borrowed leads one to assume that articles on Oriental topics seemed to have formed the main attraction to Emerson, as nearly all the editions of the Review that he borrowed contained some articles on Oriental subjects. A study of all these sources shows that his familiarity with Persian literature started much earlier than some scholars have assumed.
[6] The Asiatick Miscellany, containing of Original Productions, Translations, Fugitive Pieces, etc, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1785-86). Emerson used volume one only, which contained some Indian hymns translated by Sir William Jones, notably the “Hymn to Narayena”, as well as translations from the works of Sa’di, Hafiz and Jami. See Kenneth W. Camerson’s Emerson’s Early Reading List 1819-1824 (New York 1951, pp 4 and 9). For a complete list of Emerson’s Oriental readings, see Farhang Jahanpour, pp 311-346. For a list of periodicals with articles on Eastern topics that he read, see Ibid, pp 347-375.
[7] In 1821 Emerson read John Shore Teignmouth’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones (London, John Harchard, 1896). The book dealt with the life and works of Sir William Jones and provided samples of his translations from Oriental poetry. See: Journals, I, 82.
[8] Journals, I, 204. It is not clear which edition of The Thousand and One Nights he read, but it could be Edward Forester’s translation (London, 1802)
[9] Anquetil Duperron’s Zendavesta, Ouvrage de Zorostre (Paris, Tilliard, 1771), 3 vols. Emerson borrowed two volumes from the Boston Athenaeum Library. See K. W. Cameron’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York 1951), p 54.
[10] The Phoenix: A Collection of Old and Rare Fragments: viz. the Morals of Confucius, the Chinese philosopher; the Oracles of Zoroaster, the founder of the religion of the Persian magi; Sanchoniathos’s History of the creation; the Voyages of Hanno round the coast of Africa, five hundred years before Christ; King Hiempsals’ History of the African settlements, translated from the Punic books; and the choice sayings of Publius Syrus. (New York, W. Gowan, 1835).
[11] See The Journals, IV, 254.
[12] Sir William Jones, Works (London G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799)
[13] Emerson borrowed the Works from the Boston Athenaeum Library. See K. W. Cameron’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York 1951), p 42.
[14] Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, Der Divan von Mohammed Schemseddin Hafis (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812, 2 vols.) Also Geschichte der Schonen Redekunste Persien, mit einer Blutenlese aus Zweihundert Persischen Dichtern (Wien, 1818)
[15] Aleksander Chodzko, Specimen of the Popular Poetry of Persia (London, 1842)
[16] For Emerson’s quotations from this book, see The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston, 1909-1914), VII, pp 153, 280, 291.
[17] The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, translated and abridged by James Atkinson (London, 1832)
[18] The Gulistan or Flower Garden, translated by James Ross from the Persian Text of Gentius, with an Essay on Sadi (London, 1923)
[19] William Rousenville Alger, The Poetry of the East (Whittemore, Niles and Hall, Boston, 1856), 2 vols. In a letter to Alger on 18 October 1856, Emerson acknowledges the receipt of the book and adds that he was very pleased to read it. See Stanley T. Williams, “Unpublished Letters of Emerson”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXVI, 483-84.
[20] James Atkinson’s translation of The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet, Firdausi, tr. And abridged… by James Wilkinson (Oriental Translation Fund, London, 1832). Emerson borrowed this book from Harvard College Library on September 2, 1846. See: Carpenter, op cit., pp 48 and 72. This was the best translation of the Shah-Nameh, from which Emerson made several quotations.
[21] Musli uddin Sadi, The Gulistan or Flower Garden. Tr. By James Ross from the Persian Text of Gentius, with an Essay on Sadi (London, 1823). Emerson borrowed this book from Harvard College Library on November 18, 1846. See Carpenter, op cit, pp 48 and 102.
[22] Jalal-Ad-Din, Auswahl aus den Diwanen des größten mystischen Dichters Persiens Mewlana Dschalaleddin Rumi aus dem Persischen mit beigefügten original – Texten und erläuterten Armerkungen von Vicenz von Rosenweig (Vienna, 1836). This book was borrowed by Emerson from the Boston Athenaeum Library on 4 February 1861. See Carpenter, op cit, pp 32, 82.
[23] David Shea and Anthony Troyer, The Dabistan, or School of Manners (Oriental Translation Fund, Paris, 1843. See Journal, X, 305.
[24] “Essay on Persian Poetry”, R. W. Emerson, Complete Works, edited with a biographical introduction and notes by E. W. Emerson(Centenary Edition, 12 vols. Boston 1903-04) VIII, 236-265. All subsequent quotations from this essay are taken from this source. This essay was first published in “The Atlantic Monthly” in 1858.
[25] The Gulistan or Rose Garden by Musle-Huddeen Sheik Saadi, translated from the original by Francis Gladwin, with … a Preface by R. W. Emerson (Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1865)
[26] “Saadi”, The Dial, 1842. When quoting passages from Emerson, the spelling that he used to refer to Persian poets is retained.
[27] Emerson wrote the first part of “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift” in 1845, published in The Poems (Boston, 1847, dated 25 December 1846)
[28] R. W. Emerson, Journals, 1847; quoted in Works, VIII, 417.
[29] For a study of Emerson’s views regarding Sa’di, see Farhang Jahanpour’s MA thesis on “Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, the University of Hull, England, June 1965, pp 180-234.
[30] R. W. Emerson, Journals, VI, 463
[31] R. W. Emerson, Works, VIII, 251
[32] R. W. Emerson, Journals, 1847, quoted in Works, VIII, 417
[33] R. W. Emerson, Works, IX, 297
[34] R. W. Emerson, Works, IX, 310
[35] R. W. Emerson, Journals, X, 167
[36] Quoted in Works, VIII, 417
[37] Ibid, IX, 316
[38] Ibid, VIII, 253
[39] R. W. Emerson, Journals, VII, 279
[40] Ibid, V, 562
[41] Essay 16, on “Manners”
[42] Ibid, VIII, 244
[43] See Emerson’s essay on “Persian Poetry”, Works, VIII, 236-265
[44] These translations appear in different places. Some of them were quoted in Emerson’s Works and Journals. For the translations see: Poems (Boston, 1847), pp 209-218; The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston, 1851), pp 78-81 and 156-157; Works (Essay on Worship), VI, 234; Works (Essay on Persian Poetry), VIII, 237-265; Works, IX, 298-305; and Journals, VII, 181; VII, 277-278; VIII, 542; IX, 75; IX, 538-539; IX, 544-545.
[45] Reprinted in Works, VIII, 237. It is interesting to note that a few years later, two of the three poets that Robert Fitzgerald chose for translation were exactly those mentioned by Emerson. Fitzgerald translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Language of Birds [Mantiq al-Tayr] by Attar and Salaman and Absal by Jami. Even more interestingly, Fitzgerald compared Omar Khayyam with Emerson and wrote: “I wonder that Persia could have produced anything so like Emerson where Emerson is truest and greatest.” Quoted in J. H. Thonet, “Etude sur Edward Fitz-gerald et la literature persone, d’apres les sources originale” (Bibliotheque de la faculte de philosophie et letters de l’universite de Liege, H. Valliant-Carmann, Paris, Champion, 1929), pp 21-22.
[46] E B Cowell, “Hafiz, the Persian Poet”, Fraser’s Magazine, L, 288 ff (September 1854)
[47] R. W. Emerson, Journals, VII, 277
[48] Ibid, 277
[49] R. W. Emerson, Letters, III, 341
[50] R. W. Emerson, Poems, “From the Persian of Hafiz I”
[51] In his notebook called “Orientalist”, Emerson wrote of Hafiz, “he uses wine as a symbol of intellectual freedom.” In the essay on “Persian Poetry”, he further remarked: “But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics.”
[52] Joel E. Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York, 1883), pp 28, 29
[53] The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson – Volume V – English Traits (1856), chapter XIV
[54] R. W. Emerson, Journals, VIII, 488
F Jahanpour 