Hafez

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The name is a credential before it is a name. Hafez — more strictly hafiz — is the title given to one who has committed the entire Qur’an to memory, and the man the Persian world calls by it, Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad of Shiraz, took it as his pen-name with a claim folded inside: a hafiz who had learned the Book by all seven of its canonical readings, the scripture held whole in a single skull. From that root grows the great paradox of his work. The most quoted poet in the Persian language, the one whose verses Iranians keep in the house beside the Qur’an and open for guidance, wrote almost nothing that does not speak of wine, the cupbearer, and the tavern — and built his entire art on the refusal to say whether the wine is wine.

The tomb of Hafez (the Hafezieh) in its garden in Shiraz, with the open pavilion sheltering the poet’s grave. — Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Shiraz in a hard century

He was born in Shiraz, in the southern Iranian province of Fars, around 1315; he died there around 1390, and is buried in the city he scarcely left. Almost everything else about the life is reconstruction. The early biographical notices — the tazkiras, the anthologists’ sketches — are thin, late, and thick with anecdote, and the modern study of the life proceeds chiefly by reading the poems against the documented politics of the age. What can be fixed is the city and the century, and both were turbulent.

Fourteenth-century Shiraz sat in the wreckage left by the Mongols, a Persianate world that had lost its central empire and broken into competing local dynasties. Hafez came of age under the Injuids, and his youth ran beside the reign of Abu Ishaq Inju, a cultivated and pleasure-loving prince whose court fostered exactly the refined, wine-warmed sociability the poems remember. Then the order changed. The Muzaffarids took Shiraz, and under the harsh, pietistic Mubariz al-Din Muhammad the taverns were shut and the wine poured into the gutters — a regime of enforced piety against which Hafez’s lifelong contempt for the religious hypocrite has an unmistakable edge. Mubariz al-Din’s son Shah Shuja, who blinded and deposed his father and ruled for some twenty-seven years, was himself a poet, and under him Hafez’s reputation reached its height; tradition holds that the two also fell out, and that Hafez spent a stretch away from Shiraz, in Yazd and perhaps Isfahan, before returning. The verse registers loss without dating it — the death of a wife, the death of a son — and registers the long shadow of Timur, the conqueror whose armies reached Shiraz late in the poet’s life. A celebrated story, almost certainly invented but exactly in character, has Timur summon Hafez to answer for a couplet that offered to trade Samarkand and Bukhara — the conqueror’s own capitals — for the dark mole on a Shirazi beauty’s cheek, and has the poet talk his way out with a joke about the poverty such extravagance had brought him.

Across all of it he was, by trade, a man of the religious sciences — a Qur’an reciter and teacher, attached to a madrasa, a scholar of the text he had memorized. This is the first fact to hold against any reading of him as a mere libertine: the wine-poet was a professional custodian of scripture.

The Divan and the ghazal

Hafez did not assemble his own book. The Divan — the collected poems — was put in order after his death, by tradition by a friend named Muhammad Gulandam, and it has come down in a textual condition that has occupied scholars for two centuries: the manuscripts disagree, verses migrate, and no two old copies hold quite the same poems in the same words. The standard modern critical editions, the 1941 text of Muhammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani and the later edition of Parviz Natel-Khanlari, settle on roughly five hundred ghazals — 495 and 486 respectively — with a smaller body of other forms attached. The ghazal is the heart of it, and the ghazal is the instrument Hafez perfected.

Illustrated frontispiece from a Safavid manuscript of the Divan of Hafez (16th century), Walters Art Museum (W.632). — Walters Art Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

A ghazal is short — usually between five and a dozen bayts, or couplets — and tightly governed: a single rhyme and refrain runs through both halves of the opening couplet and then returns at the end of every couplet after, the poet signing the last with his pen-name, the takhallus, so that the name Hafez is spoken into the close of the poem itself. Within that frame the form is famously discontinuous. Each couplet is a self-contained jewel, complete in a breath; the poem advances less by argument than by the resonance of one self-sufficient image against the next, like beads strung on the thread of the rhyme. The earlier Persian masters had already turned the form toward the sacred — within the long tradition of Persian poetic mysticism, Sanai of Ghazna first made the Persian poem a vehicle for the mystic’s matter, and Attar of Nishapur carried the work forward — but it was Hafez who fused that inherited spiritual charge with the secular love-lyric and the courtly panegyric into a surface so polished and so charged that the seams vanish. The compression is the genius and the difficulty at once: a single couplet can hold a lover’s complaint, a jab at a sanctimonious cleric, and a metaphysical wager, and refuse to say which it meant first.

Wine that may not be wine

Here is the crux on which his whole reputation turns. The recurring cast of the poems is fixed and small. There is may, wine; the saqi, the cupbearer who pours it; the kharabat, the tavern or ruined place of ill repute, set against the mosque and the ascetic’s cell; the Beloved, of unspecified gender, beautiful and cruel and indifferent; and the pir-e moghan, the Magian elder, the old keeper of the wine-house whose Zoroastrian foreignness places him pointedly outside the law of Islam, and into whose mouth the deepest wisdom is repeatedly put. Moving through this world is the figure Hafez most loves to wear: the rend, the libertine or rogue — a near cousin of the wandering qalandar dervish — who drinks openly, scorns reputation, and despises above all the zahid, the ostentatious ascetic, and his hypocrisy, riya.

“Dancing Dervishes,” a folio from a Divan of Hafez, attributed to Bihzad, Herat, c. 1480 — Sufi mystics in ecstatic dance. — Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two readings have always contended for this vocabulary, and the contest is genuinely unsettled rather than merely undecided. On the literal reading, the wine is wine and the tavern a tavern: this is bacchic, erotic, this-worldly song in a long line of Persian and Arabic wine poetry, a celebration of love and intoxication and the present moment against the gray demands of preachers and kings. On the mystical reading, every term is a cipher in the established symbolic lexicon of Sufism: the wine is the rapture of the divine presence, intoxication is the annihilation of the self in God, the cruel Beloved is the Beloved of the mystics — God under the veil of a human face — and the rend’s defiance of the mosque is the antinomian piety of the Malamatiyya, the self-blamers who courted the world’s scorn to kill the subtler sin of spiritual pride. On this account the libertine’s open drinking is itself an act of devotion, a deliberate ruin of one’s reputation for sanctity.

The poems sustain both, often in the same breath, and Hafez seems to have built them precisely so they cannot be reduced to one. This is the difference between him and his contemporaries on either side. Rumi’s ecstatic verse, for all its imagery of wine and the Beloved, declares its devotion openly and rests every line on the Qur’an; Omar Khayyam’s quatrains, by contrast, read for many as the genuine skepticism of a man who knew the theology well enough to decline it; the Arabic wine-ode of Ibn al-Farid in Cairo names its intoxicant as the love of God almost without disguise. Hafez holds the wager open. His irony is too fine, his surface too perfectly poised, for the reader ever to catch him confessing which world he stands in — and the modern scholarship has split along exactly this fault, some pressing the Sufi key (the tradition that crowns him lisan al-ghayb, the Tongue of the Unseen, and tarjuman al-asrar, the Interpreter of Secrets), others reading a worldly poet of love and protest whom later piety enlisted into mysticism after the fact. The doubleness is not a problem in the poems to be solved. It is the poems’ deepest formal achievement.

Lisan al-ghayb: the book as oracle

That very ambiguity made the Divan into something no other book of Persian verse became: an instrument of divination. The practice is called fal-e Hafez, the taking of an omen from Hafez. One holds a question in mind, opens the Divan at random, and reads the ghazal the page falls open to — and, in the older fuller form, the ghazal following — as an answer slanted toward one’s case. In a gathering the book is opened once and each poem in turn is read in the name of one of the company. The custom is woven into the year’s high moments: families bring out the household Divan on the night of Yalda, the winter solstice, and at Nowruz, the spring new year, and let the dead poet speak to the living. It is exactly the metaphorical density that makes the poems unanswerable as statements that makes them inexhaustible as oracles — a verse vague enough to mean wine or God will bend, just as readily, toward a marriage, a journey, a grief. The honorific the practice rests on, lisan al-ghayb, is the same one the mystical readers claim: the poet as a voice through which the Unseen speaks. Here the disputed Sufi reading and the popular custom meet, and neither asks the other for permission.

A poet’s poet, east and west

The reach of the Divan runs the length of the Persianate world and well past its edges. Within Iran his standing is singular: not the most learned of the poets, nor the most prolific, but the most loved, the one whose lines surface in ordinary speech and whose tomb is a destination. He was buried in a garden outside Shiraz; the site, the Hafezieh, was given its first proper monument under the Timurids and rebuilt across the centuries — most memorably the open pavilion raised by Karim Khan Zand in the eighteenth century — and it remains a place of constant visitation, as much a national shrine as a grave.

Glazed tilework lining the inside of the dome above Hafez’s grave at the Hafezieh, Shiraz. — Pentocelo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Westward the Divan found a second life. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s complete German translation, published in 1812-13, put the whole book before a European readership for the first time, and it fell into the hands of an aging Goethe, who answered it with the West-östlicher Divan (1819), addressing Hafez across five centuries as a twin and writing a German cycle in deliberate dialogue with the Persian. Through Goethe the current crossed the Atlantic: Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading Hafez in German, took him for a poet’s poet and drew on the wine-songs for his own verse. The line of serious English translation — from the Victorian completists through Arthur Arberry’s mid-century studies to Dick Davis’s Faces of Love and the essays gathered in Leonard Lewisohn’s Hafiz and the Religion of Love — has kept circling the same wall the original built: a poetry whose music and whose calculated ambiguity resist the crossing into any other tongue, so that every translator must choose, couplet by couplet, a wine the poet declined to name.

The texts and the scholarship

The English and the scholarly Hafez rest on a contested Persian text and a long argument about how to read it. The indispensable critical edition remains the 1941 Divan of Muhammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani, collated from old manuscripts and printing 495 ghazals; it was joined by Parviz Natel-Khanlari’s edition (486 ghazals), and the textual problem — which verses are genuinely Hafez’s, which order the poems should take — has never fully closed, since the poet left no autograph and the early copies disagree. The authoritative reference framing for the life, the art, and the figure of the rend is the multi-part Encyclopaedia Iranica treatment, whose sections on Hafez’s life and times and on the libertine persona supply the scholarly scaffolding behind the account above. The central modern debate over the mystical versus the worldly reading is staged most fully in Leonard Lewisohn’s edited volume Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (London, 2010), which gathers the case for reading Hafez within the tradition of Persian Sufi love-poetry; against and alongside it stand the literary-critical readings that take the wine for wine and the protest for protest. The philosophical and sapiential dimension — Hafez as a poet of wisdom, the lisan al-ghayb who thinks in images — is argued by Hossein Ziai in his essay Hafiz, Lisan al-Ghayb of Persian Poetic Wisdom, and the most accomplished recent verse rendering into English is Dick Davis’s bilingual Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (2012). The compact, reliable overview is the Britannica entry on the poet.

The first poem in nearly every ordering of the book opens not in Persian but in Arabic, a borrowed half-line — ala ya ayyoha-s-saqi — calling on the cupbearer to pass the cup around. It is a fitting threshold. The poet who had the whole Qur’an by heart begins his own book with a summons to wine, in the sacred language, and never once turns to tell the reader whether the cup he is asking for is the one that breaks the law or the one that dissolves the self into God. He leaves the cup in the hand and the question in the air, and goes on pouring.

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