by Dick Davis
How many cats and mice were killed that day.)
The cat sprang like a lion, and attacked
The center where the mice were thickly packed –
But one mouse trailed his horse, the cat spun round
And as he spun fell headlong to the ground;
“Allah is with us!” cried the mice. “We’ve won –
Grab him, grab the cats’ doughty champion!”
They beat their war-drums wildly to proclaim
That victory was theirs, and martial fame;
The troops milled round, excited, jubilant,
Mobbing their mouse king on his elephant.
The cat’s front paws were tied and tightly bound,
They forced him as a suppliant to the ground;
The king’s command rang out, “String up that cat,
Hang the abominable black-faced brat.”
But hearing this, his feline pride provoked,
The cat seethed like a cauldron, panted, choked…
Then like a lion he knelt and gnawed to shreds
His captors’ bonds; they snapped like flimsy threads.
He grabbed the nearest mice and glared around
Then flung them with contempt against the ground –
The mice fled squeaking in a mass defection,
Their king fled in the opposite direction:
The elephant, his royal rider too,
His wealth and crown and splendid retinue,
Decamped and disappeared; on that wide plain
Not one of them was ever seen again.
And all that’s left is this peculiar story
Bestowing posthumous, poetic glory
On old Obayd-e Zakani.
My son,
Consider carefully who lost, who won:
Store up this story’s useful implications,
Remember it in tricky situations.
Explanatory Notes
The page numbers in this Explanatory Notes section refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
The reader is referred to the Introduction for a more detailed treatment of the historical background to the poems, such as the rulers of Shiraz, their families, and their rivalries. The poetic conventions of the period – for example, the treatment of gender, the question as to whether poems are to be considered as primarily secular or mystical – are also discussed more fully in the Introduction.
HAFEZ
pp. 2–3, However old, incapable
ancient Zoroastrian…entered in his court: The predominant pre-Islamic religion of Iran had been Zoroastrianism, and the faith retained a strong presence in Iran for a number of centuries after the Islamic conquest, although by Hafez’s time the number of Zoroastrians still living in the country had greatly diminished (many had emigrated to India, where they formed the Parsi community). In medieval Iran, Zoroastrianism survived as a local, non-Islamic indigenous religious tradition; many scholars believe that it had a profound influence on the growth of Iranian Islamic mysticism, particularly through the writings of the twelfth-century illuminationist philosopher Sohravardi, whose teachings combine Islamic, neo-Platonist, and Zoroastrian elements. In Hafez’s poems “Zoroastrian” (or “Magian,” the words have the same meaning) is usually shorthand for a way of looking at or experiencing the world that does not conform to the expectations and requirements of orthodox Islam.
“Ancient Zoroastrian” here translates a phrase, rendered elsewhere in this book as “Magian sage,” that is common in Hafez’s poetry and which has been given two almost diametrically opposed interpretations. The “mystical” interpretation takes the old Zoroastrian to mean a Sufi sheikh, or someone who passes on religious or mystical insights outside of an orthodox Islamic context. Virtually every time this old Zoroastrian appears in Hafez’s verses, wine is also mentioned soon afterwards (as in this poem), and in this mystical interpretation “wine” indicates an insight or knowledge imparted by the sheikh, one that produces the “intoxication” of mystical experience. In support of this interpretation it is pointed out that the word in the phrase for “old”/“ancient” (pir) is also a designation for a Sufi sheikh; however, pir can also mean simply “old man,” without any implications of particular sagacity or mystical expertise. A more literal interpretation of the phrase takes the old Zoroastrian as the keeper of a wine-shop/tavern (as Moslems were forbidden to make or sell wine, these activities were carried out by members of the religious minorities, including Jews and Christians as well as Zoroastrians), and the wine that he sells as actual wine. My own feeling, shared by many but probably still a minority of Hafez’s readers, is that the poet, usually and primarily, intends the literal meaning, although a suggestion of the “mystical” meaning is often there as well. In this more literal interpretation, the Zoroastrian’s “court” would be his wine-shop/tavern.
pp. 6–7, I see no love in anyone
Khezr: a figure in the Qur’an who is a contemporary of Moses. His name means “the green man.” In the Islamic versions of the Alexander romance (a romanticized biography of Alexander the Great, found in both the Christian and Islamic medieval worlds), he is the keeper of the waters of eternal life, and Hafez’s line alludes to this; for Sufis he represents someone who receives direct illumination from God.
The ball of generosity…No rider comes to strike it: The metaphor is from polo, which was very popular in medieval Persian courts, and is often mentioned in poetry of the period.
p. 8, The orchard charms our hearts, and chatter when
Sing, nightingale! Rosebuds unopened yet…your fear – is sweet: The nightingale’s love for the rose, as a metaphor for hopeless human love-longing, is a common trope in medieval Persian poetry. Often the nightingale also represents the poet who speaks the poem. In this poem the nightingale’s fear is of the roses’ departure, when their petals fall, which the nightingale anxiously foresees even before the rosebuds have begun to open. This anxiety produces the nightingale’s song, which is sweet both to the listener and to the nightingale, in the sense that love is bitter-sweet (“your fear – is sweet”).
pp. 10–11, Come, boy, and pass the wine around
Come, boy, and pass the wine around: It was not uncommon for a poet to incorporate a line or half-line by another poet into a poem, as a compliment to the poet in question. The first half-line of this poem (i.e. the first line of the translation) is in Arabic, and used to be traditionally ascribed to the early Omayyad caliph Yazid ibn Mo’awiyeh. The borrowing by Hafez from such a source was thought to be scandalous since Yazid is one of the most hated of the Omayyads, particularly by the Shi’a, as he was responsible for the murder of Hossein, the son of the caliph Ali, who is especially revered in Shi’ism. Even more scandalous was the fact that this is the first poem in Hafez’s Divan, so that Hafez appeared to be opening his collection of poems with something close to blasphemy. Various later poets commented on the borrowing, one saying that it was “A great fault for a lion to snatch a morsel from the mouth of a dog,” and another defending Hafez, recalling how the latter had appeared to him in a dream and said, “It is licit for a believer to take the goods of a heretic.” But the literary scholar Mohammad Qazvini (1874–1949) established that the half-line was not in fact by Yazid at all, and the puzzle as to why Hafez should apparently borrow from (and by implication compliment) such a hated figure was resolved.
And if the wine-seller says wine: See the note to pp. 2–3
pp. 12–13, No one has seen your face, and yet
the Sufi meeting house / And wine-shop are one place: See the note to pp. 2–3.
p. 14, To tell you now my poor heart’s state
And in the darkness of the night, to pierce the pearl / That is so fine and delicate: to a Western reader the obvious meaning here is sexual, and this implication is certainly there in Hafez’s Persian. But piercing
a pearl is a metaphor for a number of things in Persian poetry; one meaning is to speak charmingly (and by extension to write fine poetry), and this is implied by Hafez’s line – piercing the pearl is indulging in the sweet nothings of lovers’ conversation; another meaning, sometimes present in Sufi verse, is to arrive at the essence of something valuable or longed-for, and this meaning is also present here – to know the sweet essence of love. These implications are at least as important as the sexual meaning in the Persian.
p. 15, Thanks be to God now that the wine-shop door
Majnun’s grief, Layla’s curls, Ayaz’s foot…Mahmud’s face: Majnun and Layla, and Mahmud and Ayaz, are lovers celebrated in Persian poetry. The love between Majnun and Layla was fictional (the story is of Arab origin, but was well known in Persian culture; in Arabic the lovers’ names mean Maddened and Night), heterosexual, and unsuccessful/unconsummated. That between Mahmud and Ayaz was historical (Mahmud was the Turkic Ghaznavid king, Mahmud of Ghazni, who ruled from 997 to 1030; Ayaz was a slave whom he loved and whom he made commander of his armies), homosexual, and successful/consummated. So by choosing these two pairs of lovers as representative, Hafez is covering a good number of the possibilities of how love might be.
Your eyebrow’s curve: In a mosque a niche in the wall, called the mehrab, shows the direction of Mecca, towards which the worshippers pray. The beloved’s eyebrow is implicitly compared to the curve at the top of the mehrab, indicating that the speaker of the poem directs his prayers not toward Mecca but to the belovèd. The trope is common in medieval Persian poetry, as is the comparison of the beloved’s eyebrow to other beautiful curved objects, such as the new moon (see lines 19–20 of the poem FROM NOW ON I HAVE SWORN).
p. 16, Wine in my glass, and roses in my arms
I’ll haunt these ruins…treasure of my love: Ruins were quite common in the medieval Persian landscape, for a number of reasons: Iran is a major earthquake zone, and for around two thousand years cities and palaces had been erected there; domestic buildings tended to be made of clay bricks, and these fell into ruin fairly easily; the wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had resulted in the partial or complete destruction of many once flourishing towns and villages.
The association of ruins and treasure is an old one in Persian poetry. Legend had it that ruins might be the site of hidden treasure (and perhaps sometimes they were). In this poem the speaker’s heart is ruined by his longing, and the treasure his heart hides is his love for the poem’s addressee. “Ruins” were also a place for the disreputable to gather and drink (with a suggestion that they too were “ruined”), and for this reason “ruins” became a slang word for a wine-shop, a place to drink and forget one’s sorrows; this meaning too is hovering around the image.
the morals officer: the contemptuous name given by the Shirazis to their conqueror Mobarez al-din, who closed the wine-shops, forbade music, and was generally a royal pain in the neck.
Ramadan: the Moslem month of fasting and abstinence from sensual pleasure.
pp. 18–19 Go, mind your own business, preacher! What’s all
eight heavens: Medieval cosmology was essentially Ptolemaic, with the earth at the center of the universe and surrounded by eight heavens nesting within one another.
My being’s built upon those ruins: See the note to p. 16.
pp. 20–21, Welcome sweet flower, no one’s
sheikh: a religious leader, assumed to be severe in his habits and to abstain from wine drinking.
Sultan Ovays: a Jalayerid prince who ruled in Baghdad from 1356 to 1374. He was an enemy of Mobarez al-din, the conqueror of Shiraz who was hated by Hafez. It’s likely that, during the reign of Mobarez, Hafez sought patronage outside of Shiraz, and Sultan Ovays, as the enemy of a ruler he despised, would be a natural choice for him to offer his services to.
pp. 22–23 Come, so that we can scatter flowers
Kosar’s stream: a stream in paradise, mentioned in the Qur’an.
pp. 24–25 A corner of the wine-shop is
Zoroastrians: See the note to pp. 2–3.
p. 28, Those days when loving friends would meet
Zendehrud: the river that runs through Isfahan.
Karan’s pastoral retreat: Karan was a garden near Isfahan, bordering the river Zendehrud.
p. 29, Lost Joseph will return to Canaan’s land again
Joseph…His grieving father’s house: The story of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, and then rising to the highest honors in Egypt, appears in the biblical Book of Genesis, and in the Qur’an. The Qur’anic version of the tale is greatly admired in the Islamic world, and is referred to as “the best of stories.” The grief of Joseph’s father, Jacob, at the loss of his son is a frequent trope in medieval Persian poetry.
p. 32, What’s all this hiding happiness and wine away?
Jamshid’s skull, and King Qobad’s…Kay Kavus, or Bahman: These four figures are all legendary pre-Islamic Persian kings.
Farhad’s blood-red tears: Farhad was a stone-mason who fell in love with the princess Shirin, who was married to King Khosrow Parviz (a historical king of Sasanid Iran, who ruled from 590 to 628). Farhad’s love was unrequited and he committed suicide.
tulips…like a wine-glass: Small, red, wild tulips are meant. Their shape resembles a wine-glass’s and their red color is like the wine visible through the glass.
Unless these ruins hold a treasure: See the note to p. 16.
Mosalla’s breeze, and Roknabad’s clear stream: Mosalla is a garden near Shiraz (Hafez’s tomb is there); Roknabad is the name given to a stream and its surrounding area near Shiraz.
p. 33, I’ve known the pains of love’s frustration – ah, don’t ask!
You bite your lip at me: that is, in reproach.
pp. 34–35 That you’re a pious prig by nature
My father let his chance of heaven’s grace: Tempting though it is to think that this might refer to Hafez’s own father, the commentators agree that it refers to Adam as the father of mankind.
pp. 36–37, I saw the green fields of the sky
go, climb / Like Jesus through the skies: In Islamic belief, Jesus was not crucified, and did not die, but was rapt straight into heaven by God; the line’s implication is that Hafez too will be taken straight to heaven.
Don’t trust the shining moon: A literal translation would be “star of night,” which suggests the evening star to us, but the commentators agree that the rising moon is meant. The moon is an emblem of both mutability and fate, which together take away earthly sovereignty and glory.
Kay Kavus’s throne…the belt of Khosrow: Kay Kavus and Khosrow are legendary pre-Islamic kings. A particular kind of belt could indicate royalty or nobility (as it could in medieval Europe, too – hence the phrase “belted earl” which turns up occasionally in Victorian literature).
A pawn to make the sun and moon / precipitously yield: An example of the metaphorical use of chess, which is relatively common in the poetry of the period (see also the note to pp. 140–41).
The harvest of the moon’s a grain, / and of the stars but two: The lines imply that all the love in the heavens is less than the love concentrated in “you.” Hafez quite often suggests that heavenly love is a lesser thing than human love (although it is of course possible to take the “you” as referring to a manifestation of the divine). The line contains a lovely untranslatable pun, as the word for “harvest” also means “halo around the moon.”
this Sufi cloak: Virtually every time Hafez mentions Sufis and Sufism, he does so in order to reject them. He quite often refers to himself, as here, as having been a Sufi, but then as thinking better of it.
pp. 38–39, What’s sweeter than a garden and good talk
Garden of Eram: a legendary pre-Islamic garden said to be of great beauty.
Kosar’s stream: see note to pp. 22–23.
p. 40, Last night I saw the angels
the seventy-two competing factions: There was a hadith (saying of the pr
ophet Mohammad) that Islam would split into seventy-two (or seventy-three) sects.
pp. 42–43, For years my heart inquired of me
This is one of the most famous and extensively commented upon of Hafez’s poems. It invokes, or at least alludes to, four religions: the “Magian sage” refers to Zoroastrianism, either literally or as a metaphor (see also the note to pp. 2–3); Moses and Jesus represent Judaism and Christianity respectively, and both figures are of course revered by Islam. The poem also invokes religious heterodoxy in the person of “That friend they hanged”; this refers to Hallaj, a Sufi martyred in the eighth century for saying, among other things, “I am the truth.” Jamshid is a pre-Islamic Persian king; in his cup the secrets of the world could be seen (Hafez implies that it was a wine-cup, either literally or in the mystical sense of a means of insight into hidden truths). Sameri means “the Samaritan” and refers to the person who led the Israelites astray with the golden calf when Moses ascended Sinai. In its mixture of various religious groupings, and its mingling of references to both secular pleasures (the wine, the “beauties” of the poem’s close) and mystical insight (Jamshid’s cup, Hallaj’s martyrdom), and in its recommendation that one look inward for the truth (the pearl the speaker thinks he has lost but in fact possesses), the poem is a concentrated example of Hafez’s most polyphonic poetic strategies.
p. 45 When my love lifts his glass
This is a good example of how even an apparently very simple poem can be read in either a secular or mystical way, with the subject of the poem being either a young man or God. Until the last line, the poem reads as a secular love lyric, but the word translated as “divine” (which refers to the covenant made between man and God at the beginning of time) retroactively rewrites the poem as being about the love of God. This shift in apparent meaning is especially effective because the penultimate stanza, about the police, seems to anchor the poem so firmly in the mundane physical world. But, even with the addition of “divine,” the poem can still be read as being about the speaker’s love for a young man, with the further twist that this love was agreed on at the covenant, so that the poem once again becomes about secular love, but this time with a divine sanction. Or “divine” can be taken simply as a hyperbolic metaphor that means “my love is wonderful and will last for ever.” The ambiguity is deliberate, and the poem is meant to be read as having equivocally secular or mystical meanings. To insist in a reductive fashion on only one of the possibilities is to set aside Hafez’s multiple implications, and to diminish the poem.
