by Dick Davis
The most obvious Arab precedent for the conventions of the pederastic lyric in Persian, Abu Nawas (756–814), provides a precedent for another motif that is extremely common in medieval Persian lyric poems, the celebration of wine drinking, often to the point of drunkenness. Again, the fact that these are court poems is significant. Iran had been a Moslem country, nominally since the seventh century, and actually (in the sense that the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants had converted by this time) since at least the tenth century, and wine drinking is of course forbidden by Islam. But the prohibition never really took in the Persian courts. As is clear from many pre-Islamic stories that survived the conquest, the courts were centers of wine drinking, often to excess. Local Persian dynasties in the early Islamic period tended to derive their legitimacy from a claimed descent from pre-Islamic kings or heroes, and at their courts the kings assiduously carried on many ancient traditions, in so far as they were aware of them, and these sometimes included wine drinking. They were saying, in effect, “This is a part of our culture; get over it.” From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, Iran was overrun by successive waves of invaders from Central Asia; many of these came from hard-drinking cultures, and so the courts of the conquerors remained places where wine was flagrantly and often excessively drunk. It may be that the large mass of the populace acquiesced in the Islamic ban on wine, but in general the courts didn’t, and the populace of the towns in which the courts were located, taking their cue from the local aristocracy, often didn’t either. Though there were always exceptions, such as kings who became seriously religious for one reason or another, one gets the impression that for a monarch to ban wine from his court was thought to be a bit of a social faux pas; something a jumped-up brutal parvenu like Mobarez al-din might do.
Wine and boys are associated together in the figure of the wine-server (saqi) or adolescent who serves the wine, who, it is implied, is often also an object of desire to the speaker of a poem (it’s possible that – exceptionally – the wine-server might sometimes have been a young woman). Again there is a precedent in Abu Nawas’s poems, which celebrate the pleasures of both wine and beautiful boys, and associate the two together. And again, ancient and Hellenistic Greek culture provides a parallel and a precedent, going back at least as far as the fourth century BCE, to Plato’s Symposium. The frisson of transgression generated by Islam’s ban both on wine and on boys as lovers could be part of the attraction.3 As the eleventh-century poet Manuchehri puts it:
I like my slave-boy and my wine glass
This is no place for blame or contempt
I know that both are forbidden
It’s this very “forbidden” that makes them so pleasurable.
There is no getting away from the fact that both wine and the love of boys were and are taboo in orthodox Islam, and equally there is no getting away from the fact that medieval Persian poems contain a great many references to both of them. One way of dealing with this was (and is) to say that the poems are not really about wine and boys at all, but about something much more respectable, such as the love of God. Once again, the precedent of Plato comes to mind, Phaedrus in particular (“The love of boys is actually a step towards the divine…”).
This strategy can seem both evasive and casuistic, but in our desire to call a spade a spade we have to tread with caution. The tradition of explaining the secular as an allegory of the spiritual is an ancient one in the Middle East, and it cannot be dismissed out of hand as being inapplicable in this case. The biblical Song of Songs, which at first glance seems to most contemporary readers to be about secular love and desire, was for over a thousand years considered to be, by Jewish and Christian commentators alike, an allegory of divine love (for Israel, for the church, for the human soul). It was only in the sixteenth century that a French writer, Sébastien Castellion, won some support for what to us is the “obvious” literal, secular interpretation. Such an interpretation had not appeared to be “obvious” to anyone before; merely, perhaps, reductively beside the point.
The interpretation of Persian poetry that apparently deals with secular love and wine as being in reality mystical and Sufi in its subject matter was well established by the fourteenth century. In the previous century the Sufi poet Eraqi had written a glossary of the secular terms he had used in his own poetry, explaining what was “actually” – that is, mystically/in Sufi terms – meant by them. A number of other glossaries and commentaries, with the same intention of explaining apparently secular poetry in terms of a Sufi/mystical content, were subsequently written by other poets and mystics, the most famous of which was the poet Shabestari’s Golshan-e Raz (“The Rose Garden of Secrets”), written in 1311, a few years before Hafez was born. If our poets were indeed interested in Sufism, they were heirs to this tradition, and could draw on it at will.
And yet it is undeniable that a great deal of perfectly real wine was drunk in the courts and cities where some of this supposedly Sufi poetry was written, and it’s also undeniable that Sufis periodically got themselves into trouble over their excessive attachment to all too tangibly flesh-and-blood adolescents (including, it seems, Eraqi himself, for all his claims that the boys in his poems were allegorical). The assumption that the wine and the boys were in many cases real wine and real boys, whatever else they might plausibly be in a Sufi context, could not be dismissed as mere obtuseness. And if a poet wished to write a poem that was, simply and plainly, about a sexual partner and wine, what vocabulary was available to him apart from that which the Sufi commentators were insisting must be allegorical? How would a poem that talked about a lover and wine look if it actually was about a lover and wine? A further factor to take into account is that each generation tends to read back into the poetry of the past its own prejudices and presuppositions. In the fourteenth century it was still common practice to write wholly secular poems that utilized vocabulary which in a Sufi poem would be designated as symbolic. In this book, many of Jahan Khatun’s poems, which contain virtually no trace of any serious interest in Sufism (though she jokes about it a couple of times), are examples of this practice. But by the sixteenth century it was understood that virtually all ghazals were to be understood in Sufi, or at least nebulously mystical, terms; virtually every secular reference could be taken as allegorical, symbolic of a “mystical” meaning. Once this became the case, it was all but inevitable that earlier ghazals, such as those written by the three poets in this book, were read in these terms whenever possible.
Persian medieval lyric poetry is, then, often profoundly, and deliberately, ambiguous. An apparent “he” in a poem might equally well signify a “she” or “He.” A poem might address a lover, or a patron, or God, or some combination of these three, and occasionally some other entity altogether. A reference to wine or a lover might be just that, but it might also be part of an allegory of Sufi aspiration towards the divine. Naturally, some poets avail themselves of these strategies of ambiguity more than others. Of the three poets represented in this book Obayd-e Zakani is the most direct and straightforward; the reader very rarely feels unsure of what is being talked about – what you see is more or less what you get. Jahan Malek Khatun draws on the ambiguous possibilities of medieval Persian lyrical rhetoric more than Obayd does, but she too tends to say one thing at a time, and only rarely seems to be asking her reader to consider alternative interpretations. Hafez is the Persian poet who more than any other constantly suggests multiple and shifting possibilities of meaning. This is certainly one of the reasons for his immense reputation, since his poems can be read – perfectly legitimately – in a number of ways, and this has in effect made him, in the Persian-speaking world, the poet who comes closest to being all things to all readers.
HAFEZ
Despite the fact that by the time of his death Hafez’s poems had become famous far beyond their author’s hometown, very little is known about his life. Its course seems to have been fairly uneventful, in so far as the life of anyone living through such turbulen
t times in such a repeatedly contested city could be said to be uneventful. He was born in Shiraz, probably in 1315 (though as late as 1325 has also been suggested), and died in the same city in 1389 or 1390. To get some sense of his life, it’s important to realize what a small city Shiraz was at this time; the town itself probably housed about 60,000 people, and the whole area of which it was the center had a population of perhaps 200,000. Among these 60,000 there was a high concentration of revered religious figures, and there were also many poets; it’s clear that the two groups didn’t always get along very well. Shiraz also had something of a reputation for debauchery, at least among some sections of the population. It was not a monoglot city: the majority spoke Persian, of which there was also a local dialect which had its own poetry, and there were Turkish and Arabic speakers, as well as speakers of Lori, the dialect of western Persia. Nor was it a city of one religion: the great majority were Sunni Moslems, but there were also Jewish and Christian inhabitants, and if Hafez is to be believed there was a Zoroastrian community there too (though it has been suggested that Hafez’s Zoroastrians are more of a nostalgic fantasy than anything else – a way of saying “very Persian, but very heterodox”). As a center of trade, Shiraz had a flourishing bazaar, whose members often took to the streets during political upheavals. So although the city was small, it was also very volatile and varied, in language, religion, and ways of life. It was comparatively wealthy too (partly from its trading advantages, partly from having been spared the Mongol conquest which had devastated northern Iran), and so able to support a relatively rich court life; but this very wealth attracted trouble from outsiders who wished to get their hands on it. And lastly, Shiraz was famous for the purity of its air and the beauty of its gardens and rural surroundings; indeed, no other Persian city has inspired its poets to produce such eloquent and affectionate tributes to its charm.
In his poems Hafez praises the kings of the Inju dynasty, and he is particularly grateful to his patron the Inju king Abu Es’haq, whom he lauds for his generosity, and for the splendor of his court, with which he was clearly familiar. Soon after the Injus were overthrown by the Mozaffarid warlord Mobarez al-din in 1353, Hafez probably left the city, and he may have gone to Baghdad where the Jalayerid prince Sultan Ovays ruled (he mentions this possibility in one of his poems). In 1358, when Mobarez al-din’s son, Shah Shoja, deposed his father, Hafez returned to Shiraz, and became associated with his court. Like Abu Es’haq, Shah Shoja seems to have taken a keen interest in his poets, and there is an account (by Khandamir, the same historian who related the incidents illustrating the brutality of Mobarez al-din) of him discussing Hafez’s poems with their author. We know that at some point in his life Hafez visited Isfahan, as he mentions the river there, and a particular part of the city, with fond nostalgia. By the time that he died, Hafez was the most famous poet in Persia, and his fame had spread to Central Asia and India.
Despite what seems to have been their almost immediate popularity, many of Hafez’s poems are not at all transparent in their meaning. It’s often hard enough simply to understand what a line means, quite literally. Once this has been established there can be other problems. For instance, how does a particular line relate to the lines immediately before and after it? The difficulty of working out how the lines of Hafez’s ghazals connect with one another is said to have been something about which Shah Shoja personally complained to the poet. And then, is the literal meaning the only meaning, or is there an underlying allegorical one? If both literal and allegorical meanings are present, which should we consider to be the primary one, the one carrying the narrative of the poem? Hafez’s poems are packed and dense, with, as Keats says, every rift loaded with ore. It’s perhaps significant that, in a culture in which poets prided themselves on their fecundity, and the facility with which they produced verse, Hafez’s Divan (“Complete Poems”) is a relatively small volume (although still fairly large compared with the collected works of many European lyric poets).4 It’s estimated that he wrote about ten poems a year, a tiny number compared with the output of most of his colleagues; clearly he revised and polished extensively, and the density and frequent obscurity of his verse would seem to be deliberate.5 Two hundred years after Hafez’s death, in the course of his eulogy at the grave of Torquato Tasso, Lorenzo Giacomini commented how the great Italian poet had, “avoided that superfluous facility of being at once understood, and…chose the novel, the unfamiliar, the unexpected, the admirable, both in ideas and in words.” Giacomini meant this as high praise, and if he could have read Hafez’s verse he would have recognized a kindred spirit, someone who, like Tasso, cherished complexity and “the unfamiliar, the unexpected.”
The fact that Hafez “avoided that superfluous facility of being at once understood” meant that his poetry very quickly attracted commentaries. One of the first, written within two generations of Hafez’s death, and certainly the most celebrated, was that by the Turkish commentator Sudi. Sudi was born in Bosnia (an indication of how far Hafez’s fame had spread), which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. He was a brilliant polymath from a small village, a local boy who made good; it’s likely that Persian was his third or fourth language. His commentary, which is a tour de force, is in Turkish; it was written for an audience for whom knowing Persian would be an accomplishment, something they had learned rather than imbibed with their mother’s milk. The fact that it was written for such an audience has had one immense advantage for subsequent generations; Sudi explains virtually everything – every word, every grammatical point, every nuance that he can detect. His temporal proximity to Hafez, and his exhaustive thoroughness, have together given his commentary great authority; but later exegetes of Hafez’s work tended to see Sudi’s interpretations and paraphrases as a starting point for further elaboration rather than as a definitive guide to what the poet is saying. In his commentary, Sudi tends to stick to fairly literal meanings, and when he occasionally suggests mystical or spiritual interpretations this is usually warranted in an obvious way by the vocabulary of the particular poem on which he is commenting – by, for example, a reference to “angels,” or “paradise,” or something similar. But subsequent commentators greatly expanded the number of Hafez’s poems that were interpreted as mystical/Sufi in orientation until virtually all of them were treated in this way, and the predominantly mystical interpretation of his poetry became the standard one.
In general, the further we get from Hafez’s own time the more insistent the commentators become that mystical rather than secular concerns are what the poems are “really” about. But almost from the beginning, it seems, Hafez was a revered figure, and even Sudi, for all his usual adherence to the literal implications of Hafez’s vocabulary, is at pains to defend him against charges of triviality or boorishness. For example, at the end of the poem translated on pp. 82–3, Hafez says that he is “ignorant,” and Sudi’s comment is that this is meant satirically, as a self-deprecating joke, not literally; and then he acidly adds that anyone who concludes from this line that Hafez was ignorant has come to an ignorant conclusion. The desire to preserve Hafez’s reputation from anything remotely reprehensible became standard in later commentaries, and activities such as drinking wine or flirting with pretty wine-servers, which were considered to be unworthy of so important a poet, were routinely explained away as mystical metaphors. Only in the twentieth century was this systematically mystical reading seriously challenged, and then only by a minority of critics and literary historians.
Advocates of the exclusively mystical and Sufi interpretation of Hafez’s verse (“wine” in the poems means mystical doctrine or practice, which brings about the “intoxication” of mystical experience; the “friend” means God; “absence” means absence from the divine; the “wine-shop” means a Sufi meeting place, and so on) must contend with some strong contrary evidence within the poems themselves. Firstly, and very obviously, almost every time that Hafez mentions Sufis, or anything to do with Sufism, he does so with contempt. The great si
n for Hafez is hypocrisy, and, as he frequently indicates, he considers Sufis to be just one more kind of hypocrite. It’s been said that Hafez is deliberately leading the uninitiated astray here, or inviting contempt because the world’s contempt was something that Sufis sought, but many readers will find it hard not to take him at his word. It’s true that quite often Hafez indicates that he has worn the distinctive Sufi cloak himself, but when he says this he also indicates that he wasn’t much of a Sufi underneath the cloak (as he believes many others who make a show of Sufism aren’t either), and that the best thing to do is to shrug off the cloak. If at some point in his life he had been involved with Sufism, he seems to have thought better of it by the time that most of his poems were written.
