Hafiz

Life

Born in Shiraz, in the south-western Iranian province of Fars, around 1325 — the dating is approximate; the early biographies were composed decades after his death and the exact year is unrecoverable. The name he is known by is a title rather than a given name: Ḥāfeẓ — from the Arabic ḥafiẓa, to preserve, to memorise — designates one who has memorised the Qurʾan in its entirety, a discipline he is said to have completed in his youth by listening to his father recite. He spent almost his whole life in Shiraz, with one short and reluctant journey to Yazd and another aborted attempt to travel to Ormuz, and worked at the courts of successive local rulers — the Injuids under Abū Isḥāq, then the Muzaffarids under Mubāriz al-Dīn and his sons — through a politically unstable century during which patrons rose, fell, exiled him, and recalled him as their fortunes turned. He was associated with the Ṭarīqat-i Rūzbihāniyya — the lineage descending from the twelfth-century Shīrāzī Sufi Rūzbihān Baqlī — though the question of his formal initiation into a ṭarīqa is contested. He died in Shiraz in 1390 (or 1389, on some accounts) and was buried in the garden in the city's north-east that became the Ḥāfeẓiyya, the shrine that Persians have visited continuously ever since.

The poetry

The Dīvān-e Ḥāfeẓ contains roughly five hundred ghazals — short rhymed poems of between five and fifteen bayts (couplets) — together with a smaller number of qaṣīdas, rubāʿiyāt and masnavīs. The ghazal as a form is a love poem; in the Sufi§ literary tradition that crystallised in Persian over the two centuries before Hafiz, it had been adapted to carry simultaneously the registers of erotic and divine love, with each surface image — the beloved's face, the wine the sāqī pours, the tavern, the ruined idol-temple, the locks of hair concealing the face — operating as a stable theological cipher. Hafiz's mastery is the unparalleled compression of the form: the ghazal under his hand carries the technical apparatus of orthodox Islamic theology, the heterodox sayings of the early Sufi martyrs (Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj's anā al-Ḥaqq — I am the Real — is referenced repeatedly), the polemical undertone against the zāhid — the dry pietist — and the lyrical evocation of the tavern as the place where the Real shows itself to the disreputable in a single tightly worked structure. The metaphysical scaffolding behind the Dīvān is recognisably the Ibn ʿArabī§-school waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being) Persian Sufism had absorbed by the fourteenth century; Hafiz works the doctrine through the ghazal form rather than through systematic exposition.

The two readings

The poems have been read in two registers, often by the same reader at different moments. The orthodox-Sufi reading takes the wine, the sāqī and the beloved as theological metaphors throughout: the Dīvān is a taṣawwuf manual in lyric disguise, and the question of whether Hafiz drank wine is the wrong question. The other reading — never entirely absent from the Persian tradition and sharpened by the modern critical reception — takes at least some of the wine as wine and some of the beloveds as beloveds, and reads the poems as the work of a fourteenth-century Shīrāzī who lived inside the Sufi orientation without subordinating his lyric to its doctrines. The traditional Iranian practice of fāl-e Ḥāfeẓ — opening the Dīvān at random for guidance on a question — works in either reading and has continued unbroken since at least the Safavid period; the Ḥāfeẓiyya in Shiraz still does steady business in young people consulting the master for love advice. The simultaneous holding of the two readings is closer to how the Sufi§ tradition's literary culture works in general than the choice between them, and reflects the waḥdat al-wujūd doctrine the poems are written inside: the sacred and the profane are not the two halves of a binary but two readings of one reality.

The Western reception

Hafiz reached European letters before Rumi§ did. Sir William Jones's translations from the late 1780s, Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (1819) — composed in direct dialogue with the Dīvān and explicitly modelled on it — and Ralph Waldo Emerson's enthusiastic reception in the 1840s established him in the nineteenth-century European canon as the great Persian lyric voice. The American twentieth-century reception is more troubled. The widely circulated Hafiz of Daniel Ladinsky — The Gift, I Heard God Laughing, The Subject Tonight Is Love — is by Ladinsky's own admission not translation in any conventional sense; Ladinsky has described the poems as transmitted to him in a dream by Hafiz and has acknowledged that no Persian original underlies most of them. The volumes have sold widely and have shaped the Anglophone popular sense of Hafiz almost entirely; Persian scholarship has been near-uniform in describing them as Ladinsky's own free verse using Hafiz's name as authority. The parallel with Coleman Barks's freer English renderings of Rumi§ is exact, and the same reservations apply. The reader interested in Hafiz rather than in his English brand reaches for one of the literal scholarly translations — Gertrude Bell's 1897 selection, Peter Avery's complete 2007 Collected Lyrics — or learns enough Persian to sit with the original.