Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

by Leonard Lewisohn

  Samuel Johnson said that while science books might be translated exactly, in translating history books precision is possible except where oratorical passages are concerned, because they are ‘poetical’. He goes on to say that poetry cannot be translated, a consequence of which is that poets ‘preserve languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language, if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.’5 But in Johnson’s time another genre was cultivated, by poets such as Dryden and Pope and himself: poets did not translate but composed what were known as ‘imitations’. Edward Fitzgerald, who, incidentally, was a lover of Dryden’s poetry, did not set out to translate the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. In a letter he remarks ‘God Forbid’ that he should be thought to be translating. He was, in fact, working in the now almost forgotten tradition of the Imitation.6 Since he was possessed of the genius of a poet, his imitation is one of the most successful poems in the English language, but it is not intended to be a translation. Of it Fitzgerald used the coinage ‘transmogrification’.

  If the translator is not a poet but is anxious to convey in his own language what the poet said in his, then prose is the best choice. Sometimes, as in the instance of the Authorized Version of the Psalms, the prose translation takes on a specially exalted quality from the power of the original. Gertrude Bell’s verse renderings of Ḥāfiẓ are a pleasure to read, and Sir William Jones’ A Persian Song amused Byron. It goes:

  Sweet maid, if thou wouldst charm my sight

  And bid these arms thy neck infold;

  That rosy cheek, that lily hand

  Would give thy poet more delight

  Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold,

  Than all the gems of Samarcand.7

  Byron’s coarse parody of it was not published in his complete poetical works until 1980. Dr Loloi describes it as ‘a witty exercise in burlesque which merits detailed comparison with “A Persian Song” ’.8 It is known, however, that Byron admired Jones’ display of skill in poetic technique in this particular translation. Jones’ version is all very well (Byron’s of course has really nothing to do with examination of the Persian original), but Jones is a long way from:

  If that Shīrāzī Turk captures our heart,

  For his Hindu dark mole I would forgive Samarqand and Bukhārā.9

  with its connotation of the allure of cruelty in the Turk.

  There is no need to go further in listing translations of Ḥāfiẓ. In his Classical Persian Literature, Chapter XIII,10 Professor Arberry gives a most useful summary of various Ḥāfiẓ translations; and, more particularly, translations into several tongues are covered in detail in the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Ḥāfiẓ. To this article our colleagues Franklin Lewis and Parvin Loloi, whose essays grace this volume, made valuable contributions. But above all the debt is great that we owe to the latter’s Ḥāfiẓ, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography, with the subtitle English Translations Since the Eighteenth Century.11 In conclusion here, it should be noted that when the aim is to convey what the poet really said, not what the translator thinks he might or ought to have been saying, versions in a kind of jingle, and even the better verse translations, do erect an extra curtain between a reader who does not know Persian and the original.

  It is not only the charm of Ḥāfiẓ’s verses that makes him such an important world poet, and the universality of his appeal to many different kinds of people and the whole gamut of their emotions. It is the way in which his poetry, although it grew out of a great tradition already established by his time, rides above all that preceded it, while it addresses itself to the hearts of everyone. It is as if, in our state of imprisonment beneath the Ptolemaic dome – as the cosmos was seen in Ḥāfiẓ’s time – his purpose was to pierce that dome and reach the clear light of the Empyrean beyond it in a process propelled by love.

  Here it is appropriate to mention the problem of fatalism in Persian literature. The fatalism which haunts the Shāhnāma of Firdawsī (died circa 1020 or 1025 AD) is not the kind reflected in the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ. As Dr Annabel Keeler, in her recently published Sufi Hermeneutics: the Qur’an Commentary of Rashīd al-Dīn Maybudī, makes clear,12 Sufi ‘fatalism’ or concept of predestination should not be related to the idea of predestination as derived from a Zurvanite or pre-Islamic Iranian ethos.13

  Sufism is totally hinged on Islam: for the Sufi, Man’s life was pre-legislated for when God asked Adam, Alastu birabbikum? (Am I not your Lord?), and Adam replied ‘Yes’,14 this was the Covenant between God and Man. It is to this Covenant that Ḥāfiẓ refers when he speaks of, for example, the inevitability of his being a drunkard. It is interesting to see him using the same formula of Firdawsī, on the immutability of the Written Decree, but in a different context. For Ḥāfiẓ says, ‘The Written Decree cannot be erased’, but he begins his couplet with, ‘For me, from the beginning of Eternity, love was written’. Firdawsī has no reference to love. He begins his couplet with the formula, ‘The Written Decree cannot be erased’, but concludes with, ‘For divine business is no light matter’.

  The Sufi concept of predestination in no way militates against the idea of achievement of the ultimate bliss of being with God in the Empyrean beyond the malignant influence of the planets. But the whole question of predestination in Islam has been the subject of much debate and discourse, as – when we remember Jansen, Calvin or, for that matter, James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, he of the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to say nothing of St Augustine – has Christianity. My contention is that, so far as Sufi poetry is concerned, there is no need for us further to flounder in ambiguity or argument.

  As for the universality of Ḥāfiẓ’s appeal for over six centuries, it should be noted that his diction is, in fact, ordinary colloquial Persian, with words and phrases that can be translated into such colloquialisms as the English ‘sure’ and ‘OK’;15 but in Ḥāfiẓ it is colloquial Persian raised to the level of high literary diction. Yet, how far his usage consists of ordinary conversational Persian, as common today as it ever was, must not be forgotten. The Persian language has changed less since the death of the poet Rūdakī in 940–1 AD than has English since that of Chaucer in 1400; Chaucer, of course, was Ḥāfiẓ’s contemporary.

  As for sectarianism, the divisions which can ruin civilizations, Ḥāfiẓ lifts his verses above any such conflicting positions. Whether or not he was a Sufi has been much discussed. His refusal to be identified with any particular sect, one might even say religion, is not at all alien to genuine Sufism. It is probable that he was a Sufi, but of a special kind; of his contempt for false Sufis his verses bear ample testimony. Some years ago it was interestingly suggested by the late 'Alī 'Aṣghār Ḥikmat that Ḥāfiẓ was in fact an Uwaysī Sufi. An Uwaysī Sufi acknowledges no living Pīr or easily recognizable ancestral guide, those guides to whose guidance exponents of Sufism attach such very great importance. He follows a spiritual guide of a more ethereal kind. In the case of the Uwaysī, this guide was Uways al-Qaranī, he who in legend is said to have inspired the Prophet Muḥammad. Hence Ḥāfiẓ’s references to the sacred breath that emanates from the Yemen; that is to say, from the region where Uways al-Qaranī is supposed to have lived. In this context, and in that of Ḥāfiẓ’s being above sectarian divisions – or for that matter any divisions at all,16 including social and sexual – it is to be noted that the Pīr (not necessarily a personal Pīr) of whom he frequently speaks is the Pīr-i Mughān, the Magian Elder; that is to say, a Guide outside the Muslim fold, and who figures dramatically in the five-bait Masnavī cited above:17

  And if the Magian Elder were to spread a fire,

  I don’t know whose lamp would be kindled.

  with its obvious Magian or Zoroastrian associations. In Dr Khānlarī’s version there is no reference to the ‘Magian Elder’, while in a man
uscript dated 846/1442–3, a copy of which is in the author’s possession, the verse does not occur at all. Khānlarī has for his verse 4:

  And if the kindling stick spreads fiery sparks

  I do not know whose lamp it will light,

  with no reference to the ‘Magian Elder’. Given that the 846/1442–3 manuscript does not include this verse at all, the Magian Elder might be a later addition, but it is more likely that it was in the original and later, with a mind to religious prejudices, deleted.

  That his, so to speak, love-based free-ranging outlook aroused suspicion may be considered attested by, among other sources, Khwāndamīr.18 He mentions the objection of Jalāl al-Dīn Shāh Shujā', the ruler of Shīrāz from 1357 to 1384, to a line of Ḥāfiẓ’s to the effect that:

  If Muslimism be of that which Ḥāfiẓ has,

  Woe if today be followed by a tomorrow!

  Shāh Shujā' saw this verse as a denial of the Day of Resurrection. Members of the religious classes who were jealous of Ḥāfiẓ seized the opportunity to propagate this indication of Ḥāfiẓ’s heresy. Ḥāfiẓ was forced to apply to a great religious authority who happened to be passing through Shīrāz and who advised the poet to add another line, putting the offensive words into the mouths of Christian revellers outside a tavern door early in the morning, accompanied by ‘drum and fife’.

  The late Professor Minorsky, on meeting me in my first year at the School of Oriental and African Studies, asked me why I was studying Persian. When I answered, ‘To read Ḥāfiẓ in the original’, he replied, ‘Don’t forget, Mr Avery, that Ḥāfiẓ too was a political animal’. I have not forgotten and have appreciated Qāsim Ghanī’s Bahth dar athār u afkār u ahvāl-i Ḥāfiẓ, with its details of Ḥāfiẓ’s possible or probable political relations with, chiefly, rulers of Shīrāz in his time, and how these relations are reflected in his poetry.19 A salient factor, where his verses are politically coloured, is that they generally take the shape of warnings. Thus they speak to us of tyranny accompanied by that not uncommon feature of oppressive regimes, secret police. On one occasion he says that, ‘the wise bird does not go to the assembly tonight’.20 Guarded against were to be the muḥtasib’s men, the secret agents of the censor of morals and policeman of the city wards. The obverse of this situation is that Ḥāfiẓ belonged to a special coterie; the dowra (‘circle’), has always been and still is a feature of Iranian social and intellectual life, a feature characteristic of societies in which freedom of expression is restrained. Thus like-minded people may meet in the security of privacy, and exchange views. Ḥāfiẓ’s is very much what might be called coterie poetry, taking the form of a code addressed to intimates who would understand allusions – to many of which, alas, we must remain largely blind and deaf.

  In so far as there is any element of non-violence in Ḥāfiẓ’s verses,21 his message might be considered especially appealing in the times in which we are now living. Comparison of his works with those of the troubadours is not only justified by the fact that he too, though in a very different manner, deals with courtly love, but also, and more importantly, because with the flame of his poetry he succeeded in keeping alive a delicate cultural entity and true spirituality in times of cruelty and brutality, as did the troubadours during the European Dark Ages. As for courtly love, in the case of the troubadours it comes across to us as distinctly related to specific human situations: the peasant lass is perfectly real, and the cold and aloof great lady perfectly conceivable. Ḥāfiẓ, on the other hand, is free from the Occidental preoccupation with the human self. His lover and beloved are not represented by identifiable human beings. They appear in symbolic figures: the nightingale and the rose, for example. For him the problem of love is lifted above the mundane, tangible level: the beloved can be spelt with a small or a capital ‘b’.

  Achieved is a sense of exquisite beauty quite outside the everyday human sphere. It is the still loveliness of the miniature, translated into the movement and rhythms of poetry. It is the recollection of a beauty that presents the challenge of what is not to be obtained without the cultivation of a virtue excluding all that is carnal. We are transported from earth to heaven, and, as one or two nineteenth-century European travellers observed, in Iran earth and heaven often seem very close to each other. Iran is a plateau some 4,000 feet above sea level; it is a country where it is possible at four o’clock in the morning to read, during the darkness of night, by the light of the stars alone. The function of poetry as the preserver of cultural refinement in times of cultural degradation is never more evident than it is in the troubadours’ and Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry. They both established – or, in the case of Ḥāfiẓ, continued – a poetical tradition.

  It should be emphasized that Ḥāfiẓ was heir to a great poetic tradition. Many tropes, such as for instance the Shīrāzī Turk, were inherited from predecessors. Sa'dī, it will be remembered, has a ghazal in which he says:

  At the hands of the Cathayan Turk nobody’s endured

  Such cruelty as I have at the hands of the Shīrāzī Turk.

  This is one of the more obvious quarryings in the mines of poetic conventions.

  Nizāmī-i ‘Arūḍī Samarqandī’s statement in the Chahār Maqāla (‘Four Discourses’), where he is speaking about a poet’s training, may be recalled. He says that a poet cannot attain any rank ‘unless in the prime of his life and the season of his youth he commits to memory 20,000 couplets of the poetry of the Ancients, keeps in view (as models) 10,000 verses of the works of the Moderns, and continually reads and remembers the diwans [sic] of the masters of his art, observing how they have acquitted themselves of the straight passes and delicate places of song, in order that thus the different styles and varieties of verse may become engrained in his nature ...’.22

  It can be said that poets are therefore constantly producing variations on themes suggested by their forerunners. Sa'dī gives us to infer that the Shīrāzī Turk’s cruelty was far in excess of that experienced from the Cathayan Turk. As if to echo this theme, Ḥāfiẓ gives us to infer that his Shīrāzī Turk might also be crueller than those of Central Asia, the region of the Shīrāzī Turk’s forebears, in the cities of Bukhārā and Samarqand, the metropolises of Tīmūr where his Turkish soldiers would be concentrated. Tīmūr threatened Shīrāz with those Turks in 1382 and invaded it in 1387, while he completely liquidated the ruling dynasty of Shīrāz in 1393, some three years after Ḥāfiẓ’s demise. There seems to be no doubt that the spectre of Timur (and his Turks) hung over Shīrāz throughout much of Ḥāfiẓ’s later life, but ironically among enlightened people his rigorous regime might have seemed at times to be preferred to the ever-warring Muzaffarid princes whom he eventually eliminated. In comparison with the torment of the Shīrāzī Turk’s attractiveness, those fresh from Bukhārā and Samarqand are to be pardoned.

  As for the various levels of meaning which confront the translator, it should be pointed out that the second hemistich of the Shīrāzī Turk poem is translatable in terms of readiness to barter Bukhārā and Samarqand for the mole on the Shīrāzī Turk’s cheek. This interpretation has given rise to the legend that Tīmūr was vexed by Ḥāfiẓ’s apparent contempt for that ruler’s Central Asian capital cities. Another possibility is that, in the Shīrāzī Turk, Ḥāfiẓ might be alluding to his patron Shāh Shujā‘, of whose maternal Turkish ancestry he frequently speaks.

  The variation might be wide, a long way from the theme that is being played upon, but the fixed point is that of retention of a balance. If Sa‘dī has his Cathayan Turk to some extent exonerated, so Ḥāfiẓ must have the Turks of Bukhārā and Samarqand made less blameworthy than the Turk of Shīrāz. In Persian art, balance is a cardinal principal, between positive and negative, between the ins and outs of arabesque patterns. One of my old teachers of Arabic used to say, ‘It’s all algebra’. He was, in fact, thinking of the Arabic broken plurals, but in poetry it can be said that it is all geometry as well.

  As if to prove the truth of Dryde
n’s comment that ‘it takes a poet to read a poet’s mind’, my collaborator, John Heath-Stubbs, in some translations of Ḥāfiẓ we produced when I was still a student, pointed out that there was observable in Ḥāfiẓ’s poems a pattern of continuing referral to a dominant theme or themes. As so many have done since Ḥāfiẓ’s time, with comments such as ‘orient pearls at random strung’,23 Shāh Shujā‘ criticized Ḥāfiẓ, saying that ‘each of your ghazals fails from beginning to end to stay on one topic. Rather in each lyric three or four verses are in praise of wine and two or three concerning Sufism and one or two describing a beloved. Such a variability in a single lyric is contrary to the rules of rhetoric.’24 Shāh Shujā‘ was wrong: ‘orient pearls’ were never strung less ‘at random’. There was a pattern. It was an arabesque, going in and coming out, dependent on repetitions, both obvious but also suppressed, in alternate verses. We did an analysis on these lines in the introduction to the little book which we published. This book has been reissued both in the USA and the UK.25