Hafiz

Persian poet

• Born: c. 1320
• Birthplace: Shīrāz, Persia (now in Iran)
• Died: c. 1389 or 1390
• Place of death: Shīrāz, Persia (now in Iran)

The premier lyric poet in more than a millennium of literary expression in the Persian language, Hafiz represents the culmination of lyrical styles and modes that began some five centuries before him and remains a model for Iranian poets today.

Early Life

Hafiz (KAH-fehz) was born sometime around 1320. His merchant father, who had emigrated from Eşfahān (Isfahan) sometime earlier, apparently died when Hafiz was young. Hafiz received a traditional education in Arabic, Qur՚ānic studies, science, and literature. His poetry reveals an intimate familiarity with the five centuries of Persian literature that preceded him, as well as his knowledge of Islamic sciences and his special competence in Arabic. His pen name testifies to this last skill, because the word “Hafiz” denotes a person who has memorized the Qur՚ān.

Little specific information is available on the private life of the most acclaimed Persian lyric poet in history. Citations in biographical dictionaries, references in chronicles and other historical sources, and possible autobiographical details in his poems are mostly unverifiable. Information is available, however, about the tumultuous political history of Hafiz’s native province of Fārs and its capital, Shīrāz, during his lifetime.

At the time of Hafiz’s birth, Maḥmūd Shāh Inju ruled Fārs in the name of the Il-Khanid ruler Abū Saՙīd. The latter’s successor executed Maḥmūd in 1335. Anarchy ensued, as Maḥmūd’s four sons strove to gain control over their father’s kingdom. One of them, Abū Isḥāq, took over Shīrāz seven years later and ruled, albeit with opposition, until 1352. During this period, Hafiz composed poems in praise of Abū Isḥāq and one of his viziers; these poems show that he was a seriously regarded court poet by the time he was thirty years of age.

In 1353 came the capture of Shīrāz by the Mozaffarid leader called Mubāriz al-Dīn Muḥammad, who had Abū Isḥāq summarily beheaded in front of the Achaemenid ruins at Persepolis. Mubāriz al-Dīn, whose family was to control Shīrāz until 1393, imposed strict, puritanical Sunni religious observation on the city during his five-year reign, a situation Hafiz bewailed in several poems. In addition, Hafiz’s signature on a manuscript dated 1355 implies that he had to seek work as a scribe at that time, either because he was not yet economically established as a poet or because he was out of favor with the Mozaffarid court. In 1358, Mubāriz al-Dīn was deposed, blinded, and succeeded by his son Jalāl al-Dīn Shāh Shujā. Hafiz, whose lot improved when Shāh Shujā ascended the throne, eulogized this royal patron in a number of poems.

Life’s Work

It was during the long reign of Shah Shujā, between 1358 and 1384, that Hafiz’s fame began to spread throughout the Persian-speaking world, westward to the Arab world and Ottoman Empire, and eastward to Mughal India (Mogul Empire). Altogether, he composed some five hundredghazal poems and a handful of poems in other traditional Persian verse forms. The fourteenth century was the culminating age of the Persian ghazal, and Hafiz was its apogee.

The ghazal is a conventional composition of usually between five and thirteen couplets, the first closed and the others open, resulting in a monorhyme pattern such as aabaca. Each constituent verse exhibits the same quantitative metrical pattern. The poet’s nom de plume generally appears in a ghazal’s final couplet.

The basic subject of these poems was idealized love, treated with conventional, stylized imagery in an equally conventional diction. The Hafizian ghazal, while displaying amatory, mystical, and panegyrical modes typical of the verse form up to his day, is distinctive in its merging of modes, in Hafiz’s creation of an ambivalent lyric world of love in which readers can sense both love of God and passion for a romanticized, this-worldly beloved. An example is the very famous ghazal with which Hafiz’s Dīvān (c. 1368; The Divan, 1891) usually begins.

O cupbearer, pass around a cup and hand it to me;    for love appeared at first easy, but difficulties arose.In hope of the musk pod the zephyr eventually opens     from those tresses, what blood spilt in hearts because     of musky curls.Color the prayer-carpet with wine should the Magian     elder so advise;    for the wayfarer knows the way, and the stages.At beloved’s abodes what security of pleasure can exist?Every second the caravan bells cry out: tie up the loads.Dark night, the fear of the waves, and such a terrifying     whirlpool how can the lightburdened and shore-    bound fathom my state?Everything has dragged me from self-interest to infamy;    how can that secret which inspires gatherings remain     secret?If you desire the beloved’s presence, Hafiz, don’t be     absent;    when you meet whom you desire, let the world go, give     up.

A reader’s first impression of this poem is of polysemy and multiplicity of patterns of imagery, which is another typical feature of the Hafizian ghazal. Once the two levels of the speaker’s emotional state as a lover are discerned, however, one begins to sense the poem’s integrity. A quasi-temporal and physical setting is implied in the address in the opening couplet of the cupbearer. The speaker may be in a tavern, seeking consolation in wine for the pains of love. Those who have not given themselves wholeheartedly to love and who have not done the apparently blasphemous bidding of the Zoroastrian priest who is presumed privy to secrets of the heart cannot understand the lover’s state. The true lover may lose his reputation. Nevertheless, as the speaker advises at the poem’s close, a true lover has to be ready to give up everything.

As for the nature of this love, the seriousness of tone and the religious commitment voiced imply that the speaker is enamored of a romantic beloved but that at the same time he senses the presence of the Creator in the beloved or the potential proximity to God that might be achieved by heeding no calls but love. The translation communicates nothing of the aural force of tight patterns of rhyme, meter, and alliteration of the original Persian or its rhetorical richness in echoing earlier poets and employing conventional figures with touches of novelty. The original is quintessential Hafiz in its thematic ambivalence, powerful imagery, and rich decorativeness.

In 1365, Shah Shujā’s brother Maḥmūd laid siege to Shīrāz along with the Jalāyrid Shaykh Uways. Hafiz may have lived for a year or two in the 1370’s in Eşfahān or Yazd, but he spent most of his life in Shīrāz. In 1384, Zayn al-ՙĀbidīn succeeded Shah Shujā, and internecine feuds continued within the Mozaffarid family. In 1387, Tamerlane, who had massacred seventy thousand people in Eşfahān, reached Shīrāz and brought the Mozaffarid Dynasty under his control. He named Yaḥyā his local ruler. Soon, however, Yaḥyā’s nephew Manṣūr overthrew his uncle, which brought Tamerlane’s wrath down on Manṣūr and the whole Mozaffarid family, all of whom Tamerlane proceeded to execute. Hafiz, who had briefly enjoyed the patronage of Yaḥyā and Manṣūr, died two or three years before Tamerlane’s second invasion of Shīrāz in 1393.

By the end of his life, Hafiz had become the most respected Middle Eastern lyric poet, a reputation that he retains to the present day. Curiously, however, he never authorized or supervised a collection of his poems. Consequently, the first manuscripts containing all of his ghazals were not compiled until a generation after his death, which led to textual problems persisting today with respect to the authenticity of some ghazals, of some of their constituent couplets, of the order of couplets within ghazals, and of verbal variants. Editorial efforts in Iran since the beginning of World War II have brought the text as close to reliability as is possible.

A further difficulty in the critical appreciation of Hafiz’s ghazals is that only in the 1960’s did serious literary criticism and analysis begin to be applied to Hafiz. Still, Hafiz’s popularity has never diminished from his death to the present time.

Significance

It would be difficult to exaggerate the admiration and respect that poetry lovers in the Persian-speaking world feel for Hafiz. Iranians from all walks of life still use verses from Hafiz’s The Divan for prognostication; the Qur՚ān is the only other book so used. Hafiz’s tomb is Shīrāz’s most popular monument. Modernist Iranian poets routinely declare their devotion to him and his relevance as inspiration for them. The recitation of Hafizian ghazals is a common activity at social gatherings.

Dating back to Sir William Jones’s “A Persian Song” (1771), a rendition of the most famous among Hafiz’s ghazals in the West, more attempts at translating his verses into English have been made than with respect to any other Persian poet. These translations, however, have generally failed to capture Hafiz’s spirit and subtlety. Such literary giants as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson have sensed and rightly lauded Hafiz’s poetic genius, but English-speaking readers have only recently experienced convincing evidence in the form of appealing translations.

Part of the explanation for the unfortunate fact that a poet so revered and influential in his own culture should remain almost unknown in the English-speaking world six centuries after his death is that Hafiz’s voice has had no Edward FitzGerald, as Omar Khayyám’s epigrammatic quatrains did, nor a Matthew Arnold, as did Firdusi’s epic Shahnamah (c. 1010; the book of kings) episode about Sohrab (Suhrāb) and his father Rostam (Rustam). In addition, lyric poetry, especially when very culture-specific in form and imagery, seems resistant to translation more than other literary species. The foregoing description of the ghazal verse form highlights two almost insurmountable translation problems: transmission of pervasive aural elements and effects from traditional Persian verse to English, and the communication in English of the textual richness and resonances of conventional images, themes, and vocabulary.

As for the nature of Hafiz’s special appeal, one Iranian view sees him as a combination of the questioning spirit of Omar Khayyám (1048?-1123?), the lyricism and skill at versification of Saՙdi (1200-1291), and the intensity of feeling and spirit exhibited in the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273). From another perspective, Hafiz’s special talent is seen as the ability to create a texture of ambivalence in his poetic world, continually forcing the reader to sense both material and spiritual planes of experience. In addition, above and beyond Khayyamic echoes in carpe diem invitations and assertions to the effect that scientific inquiry will not fathom the point to life, Hafiz’s ghazals have a further appeal to Iranian readers in their frequent images of libertines, scandalous models of behavior who answer only to themselves and who disregard what others think or what those in power bid one to do. As this sort of libertine, Hafiz remains inspirational to readers whose own lives do not often allow for such defiant free-spiritedness. Finally, Hafiz’s persistent joie de vivre and concomitant refusal to be depressed by the difficult times in which he lived have given hope to later readers who have found many reasons to despair.

Bibliography

Browne, Edward G. “Hafiz of Shīrāz.” In A Literary History of Persia. 1926. 4 vols. Reprint. Vol. 3. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969. A review by an eminent Western Persianist of the biographical lore on Hafiz, as well as a commentary on Hafiz translations and attendant problems. Bibliography.

Hafiz. The Divan of Hafez: A Bilingual Text, Persian-English. Translated by Reza Saberi. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Presents a translation of Hafiz’s Divan, with facing Persian-English pages. Hafiz’s life and work are discussed in the introduction. Includes a glossary.

Hafiz. Hafez: Dance of Life. Translated by Michael Boylan. Washington, D.C.: Mage, 1988. Twelve plates by a leading Iranian painter giving a Sufi interpretation to twelve poems, which are translated freely by an American poet who emphasizes their earthbound and romantic elements, followed by an afterword that treats reasons for Hafiz’s special appeal to Iranians. Brief bibliography.

Hafiz. Poems from the “Divan” of Hafiz. 1897. New ed. Translated by Gertrude Lowthian Bell. London: William Heinemann, 1928. Still the most highly regarded English versions of Hafiz, containing forty-three ghazals in translation following a lengthy (and sometimes inaccurate) introduction presenting the historical background, the standard biographical lore, and a recapitulation of the extent of Sufi influence on Hafiz.

Hillmann, Michael C. “Classicism, Ornament, Ambivalence, and the Persian Muse.” In Iranian Culture: A Persianist View. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988. An attempt to discern enduring Iranian cultural attitudes in an examination of aesthetic aspects and criteria discernible in Hafiz’s ghazals, among them appreciation of tradition, formality, and ceremony, a penchant for embellishment and the ornamental, and a capacity for ambivalence in attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and standards. Bibliography.

Hillmann, Michael C. Unity in the Ghazals of Hafez. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1976. A formalist analysis of sixteen Hafizian ghazals in a response to long-standing charges by Iranian scholars and scholars of Asia that Hafiz’s poems lack unity. Includes an extensive list in notes and bibliography of writings on Hafiz in European languages. Bibliography, index.

Meisami, Julie Scott. Medieval Persian Court Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. A medievalist’s attempt to rescue traditional Persian court poetry from the disfavor into which it has fallen, through a demonstration of its similarities with medieval literature in the West. A chapter entitled “Ghazal: The Ideals of Love,” deals with Sanā (1050-1131) and Hafiz, who stand at the beginning and end of the period in which ghazal writing was at its peak. Bibliography, index.

Pourafzal, Haleh, and Roger Montgomery. The Spiritual Wisdom of Haféz: Teachings of the Philosopher of Love. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1998. A good introduction to Hafiz’s poetry. Explores how his work speaks to current scholarship in philosophy, psychology, social theory, and education. Bibliographical references, index.

Yarshater, Ehsan, comp. and ed. Persian Literature. Albany, N.Y.: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988. The first comprehensive overview of Persian literature since shortly after World War II, with an article on medieval lyric poetry and another on Hafiz. Bibliography, index.