The Tongue of the Unseen: Hafez and His Poetry

By Dr. Rahmat Mazaheri Seif

Since the middle ages, Persia has produced more great poets than any other country in the world. Sir William Jones about two hundred fifty years ago, in his introduction on Hafez, wrote, "...At Oxford there is a manuscript containing the lives of a hundred and twenty-eight of the finest Persian poets," of these, according to Iranians, the fourteenth century poet, Hafez, is their last, greatest, and the most beloved of all; even though, Persia has had poets like Sa'di, Khayyam, Ferdosi, Nezami, and Rumi to boast about! (Iranians take Rumi as a Persian.) They also consider Hafez as their most difficult poet to understand. One may ask, how could such a difficult poet be so popular among people of all walks of life? No Hafez scholar, heretofore, has directly addressed, or adequately answered this question! In this book, the author, for the first time, raises and answers this question by bringing convincing examples from different parts of the divan. Another unique aspect of this book is in the fact that the author has interpreted some couplets entirely different than what other commentators have done, and sometimes, the opposite of theirs! Still another difference that we find in this book is the sequence of the couplets in some ghazals. The author, in order to find the natural unity of the poems, he has arranged a new sequence for the couplets. Something that is lacking in all available divans. The translations are accurately and charmingly done in the form of uni-rhymed ghazal, and each one is preceded by the original, and followed by a commentary, something that has never been done before. This book is written for English-speaking people who wish to know Hafez, especially, the siblings of the Iranians in diaspora, whose children have heard the praise of Hafez from their parents, but are unable to read him in Farsi. It is for them to read him in english and put to test the judgment of their parents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646281237

Book preview

Hafez and his poetry

Sir William Jones, who was the first British orientalist to translate one of the ghazals of Hafez, about two hundred years ago wrote:

Persia has produced more writers of every kind (chiefly poets) than all Europe, since their way of life gives them leisure to pursue those arts which cannot be cultivated to advantage without the greatest calmness and serenity of mind. At Oxford is a manuscript containing the lives of a hundred and twenty-eight of the finest Persian poets; the moderate poets are without number."¹

Of these one hundred and twenty-eight poets, Omar Khayyam and Rumi have nearly become house-hold names in the West, but Persia has had several poets who are just as great as Khayyam and Rumi, if not greater. These include Sa’di, Ferdoci, Nezami, and especially that supreme master of lyric poetry, Shamseddin Mohammad Hafez, who by far surpasses all that Persia has produced.

Hafez was born in Shiraz, Iran, in about 1320 and died around 1390. He was a contemporary of Dante. His name was Mohammad and his title Shamseddin. He was known as khawjeh, a title for high-ranking people of government and renowned poets. He used Hafez as a pen-name (meaning the one who knows the Quran by heart). Jami, another fine Persian poet of the 15th-century, gave him the title: Lessonol Ghayb, (the tongue of the Unseen.) He also called him: Tarjomanol Asraar, (the interpreter of mysteries).² Except for a few anecdotal fables, we know very little of his life, but his poetic persona has been highly praised by some of the greatest literary men of history. Joseph-Francoi Angelloz in his book, Goethe, writes, As Goethe abandoned his ideal of greater universality, he took Hafez as his guide…Now he dreamed of equaling Hafez.³

In a poem titled, from how many elements, translated by Stephen Spender, Goethe enumerates the necessary elements of an ideal poem, and in its last stanza, he equals it with Hafez’s poetry:

If the singer have the skill

Or mix such elemental flesh,

Equal with Hafez, then he will

Rejoice men ever and refresh.⁴

In the same book, in a poem translated by E.A. Bowering titled, the unlimited, Goethe writes:

And what though all the world should sink,

Hafez, with thee, alone with thee will I contend.⁵

In in wayfarer’s equanimity, Goethe writes:

Hafez, o lehre mich

Wie dus verstanden.

(O teach me, Hafez, what your wisdom taught you), translated by David Duke.

Nietzsche likened him to Sphinx. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: Hafez is a poet for poets!⁶

In the introduction of one of the most informative Persian books on Hafez and his time, A Discussion on the Works, the Thoughts, and the Life of Hafez, the author, Dr. Ghasem Ghani, asks his mentor, Mohammad Ghazvini: if a country, shall we say, like England, were to ask the scholars of every nation to give the name of the best poet of that nation’s to have his statue raised in the Hyde park, which poet deserves the honor to represent Iran as the greatest poet of all times? Despite the extra ordinary beauty of S’adi, the profundity of Khayyam, and the vivid imagery of Ferdoci, Ghaznavi answers that without any reservation, that name should be Shamseddin Mohammad Hafez.⁷

Hafez’s poetry offers the best of those three great poets and more. One of the elements that distinguishes him from the others is the degree of ambiguity and ambivalence in his poetry. He is considered by Iranians as their most difficult poet to understand. Today, after more than six hundred years, scholars are still trying to decipher the meaning of some of his couplets, or even the manner in which some of his lines need to be read!

Apparently the controversy in interpretation of his poetry existed even among the men of his own time, and their confusion seems to have been a matter of amusement to him, as he jeers at them in the following couplet:

حافظم در محفلی ۥدردی کشم در مجلسی

بنگر این بازی که من با اهل صنعت می کنم

The keeper of the Quran and a drunk in the same breath,

See the game that I play with those who are known as experts!

He knew that his ambiguity was beyond the comprehension of most readers, as he points out here:

قدر مجموعهٔ گل مرغ سحر داند و بس

که نه هر کو ورقی خواند معانی دانست

The value of the roses is known only to nightingales,

Not to those who read a leaf and think that they know what it says.

He has no patience with those who take his poems as ordinary or simple, as he scoffs at them in this couplet:

زین قصه گنبد هفت افلاک پر صداست

کوته نظر نگر که سخن مختصر گرفت

Of this story the domes of seven skies are roaring!

Look at the short-sighted one who thinks little of its thrust!

Hafez chose ambiguity out of necessity, not as a rhetorical figure. Life is ambiguous, and a true work of art should reflect its ambiguity. Hafez does not usually mean what his poetry seems to say on the surface. One can explain his almost constant use of metaphor with the following statement of Nietzsche: For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure, but a vicarious image that he holds in place of a concept.⁸ Hafez, as Nietzsche would have it, knew how to dance with words, but he himself called his style, ‘کلک خیال انگیز’ (elusive penmanship).

The names of his Iranian admirers who have called his poetry miraculous are too many to mention. The following couplets are two of the innumerable examples of his ambiguity:

چراغ افروز چشم ما نسیم زلف جانان است

مباد این جمع را یارب غم از باد پریشانی

Your tress’s gentle breeze keeps the chambers of our eyes lit;

May our trust never, O Lord, suffer the wrath of gusty winds.

In the first line the poet is speaking with God about the agreeable breeze that comes from His tress; a tress that is well combed, collected, well ordered and calm. It is calm, because He is pleased with us; pleased with us, because of our faith in Him. Therefore, He sends us the agreeable breeze to keep the light of our eyes from fading, in order that we may see, and seeing is knowing. In the second line of the original, the word ‘جمع ‘carries three different meanings, and the poem can be explained by every one of them (1) a group of people, (2) trust, confidence, conviction, (3) the order of the Beloved’s tress. He prays that their group, their congregation, on the other hand, their trust, confidence, conviction, and finally the order of the Beloved’s tress may never be disturbed by doubt or disbelief that may anger God and give rise to a ravaging wind that would extinguish the light of their eyes, and lead to spiritual blindness! In short: it is through God that we know, and may God keep us from the darkness of ignorance! There is still a fourth meaning for the word ‘جمع’: absolute union. A kind of union in which there is no longer a beloved or lover—there is only love; when the lover sees with the eyes of the beloved, and the beloved speaks through the lips of the lover!

The first line of our couplet hints that Hafez probably had the forth one in mind. In that line the speaker claims that it is the breeze of the beloved’s tress that keeps the flame of his eyes lit. This tress is over a forehead in front of the eyes. But whose forehead? Whose eyes? If its breeze is to keep the eyes of the speaker lit, it must be hanging in front of the speaker’s eyes; in other words: the tress of the beloved is over the lover’s forehead—that is absolute union, which its opposite, in the sufi language, is: ‘تفرفه,’ meaning dispersion.

Or this couple:

کمند صید بهرامی بیفکن، جام می بردار،

که من پیمودم این صحرا، نه بهرام است و نه گورش

Drop the noose that Bahraam used, with a red wine, fill up your glass,

For I have searched the whole desert, found no Bahraam nor his wild ass!

Bahraam was a Persian king whose love for hunting onagers earned him the nickname of ‘بهرام گور,’ (Bahraam, the onager hunter). As the legend has it, once he chased an onager into a cave and no-one ever again heard from him. One of the niceties of this couplet is that in the second line of the original, the word ‘گور’ carries two different meanings (1) onager, (2) grave. Is Hafez saying, I found neither Bahraam nor his onager, or neither Bahraam, nor his tomb? This is a typical Hafezian ‘ایهام’ (ambivalence) that will be explained later in this volume.

The literal translation of the second line is: I have crossed this desert; there is no Bahraam nor his tomb (or his onager). He certainly could not have meant ‘Bahraam’ in the true sense of the word; since Bahraam died nearly a thousand years before Hafez’s time. He must have been using the name as a metaphor.

In the first line, he literally says: drop Bahraamian-hunting noose, a noose that Bahraam used in vain; wasting his life in that pursuit, in that chase! Hafez is probably saying (to an imaginary reader), "stop your vain pursuit, rummaging through life after truth, enjoy life instead; for I have gone through