What is Hafiz?
Hafiz (c. 1325–1390) was a Persian poet from Shiraz. His collected Dīvān of around five hundred ghazals is the most-read book of poetry in the Persian-speaking world. The poems carry a double register: a surface of wine, desire, and the tavern, read simultaneously as Sufi theological metaphor for the soul's longing for God. The name Ḥāfeẓ is a title given to one who has memorised the entire Qurʾan.
Hafiz and Rumi
Hafiz is often paired with Rumi in Western spirituality contexts, but the two differ in important ways. Rumi's Masnavi is long and discursive, didactic and narrative in structure. Hafiz's ghazals are short lyric poems; any teaching is embedded in compression of imagery rather than argument or story. Rumi's Mevlevi order kept his work in institutional circulation; Hafiz belonged to no surviving institutional lineage, and the Dīvān spread as a literary classic rather than as Sufi practice material. In the Persian-speaking world, Hafiz is widely rated as the greater poet. Hafiz is also distinct from Ibn ʿArabī: Ibn ʿArabī built his waḥdat al-wujūd doctrine through systematic metaphysical prose, while Hafiz absorbed the same doctrine and expressed it through compressed lyric.
Life
Hafiz was 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, not a given name. Ḥāfeẓ, from the Arabic ḥafiẓa ('to preserve, to memorise'), designates one who has memorised the whole Qurʾan, 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, making one short reluctant journey to Yazd and aborting an attempt to reach Ormuz. He worked at the courts of successive local rulers: the Injuids under Abū Isḥāq, then the Muzaffarids under Mubāriz al-Dīn and his sons. It was a politically unstable century; 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 whether he was formally initiated 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, a shrine 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 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 the registers of erotic and divine love simultaneously. Each surface image operated as a stable theological cipher: the beloved's face, the wine the sāqī pours, the tavern, the ruined idol-temple. Hafiz's mastery lies in the compression of this form. A single ghazal carries 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), a polemic against the zāhid or dry pietist, and the lyrical evocation of the tavern as the place where the Real shows itself to the disreputable. The metaphysical scaffolding is recognisably the Ibn ʿArabī-school waḥdat al-wujūd ('unity of being') that Persian Sufism had absorbed by the fourteenth century. Hafiz works that 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. On this reading the Dīvān is a taṣawwuf manual in lyric disguise, and asking whether Hafiz drank wine is the wrong question. The other reading, never absent from the Persian tradition and sharpened by modern critical reception, takes at least some of the wine as wine and some of the beloveds as beloveds. It 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 with people consulting the master for advice. Holding both readings together is closer to how the Sufi literary tradition generally works than choosing between them. It also reflects the waḥdat al-wujūd doctrine the poems are written inside: the sacred and the profane are not 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 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. A reader interested in Hafiz rather than his English brand should reach for a literal scholarly translation: Gertrude Bell's 1897 selection, or Peter Avery's complete 2007 Collected Lyrics.