Hafiz – författare

There are many things we can perhaps more easily say with flowers than with words. And flowers can say many things to us. So perhaps these poetic expressions of spoken words and flowery subject are a perfect match.

Many would agree that there is one flower, the rose, that embodies both the human condition, its ambitions, its sacrifices and its symbolism of devoted love that together with its own peerless self; the beauty of its perfume, its hues and colours, its shapes and forms, from rambler and climber to the stately grace of a rose bed, and, of course, its thorns, to warn that consequences carry a price.

Poets know that a rose is perhaps able to speak in many tongues on many subjects and it is therefore unsurprising that the rose is one of the great enduring symbols of the tradition in both Western and Eastern poetry.

A rose can bring a tremble of the lip, or raise the beating of a heart. They can create a mood or simplify a feeling. Their message can be direct or nuanced but so often it is just perfect.

Our classic poets from Hafiz, D H Lawrence, Robert Burns and Shakespeare, along with very many others, explore this beautiful living symbol with their exquisite lines and verse.

Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī is commonly known to us as Hafiz, the Persian poet who was born in Shiraz, Iran in either 1315 or 1317. The facts of much of his early life are unknown to us but it is said that, at an early age, he memorised many passages of the Quran and was therefore given the title of Hafiz, which means ''the memoriser or the safe keeper.''

Hafiz mainly wrote lyric poetry or ghazals - an ideal form for expressing the ecstasy of the divine and the intoxicating mystical union with God. He was also outspoken on society’s hypocrisy but was supported by patronage during his lifetime from the court of Abu Ishak and succeeding regimes until, towards the end of his life, when he resided at the Court of Timur, more usually known to us as Tamerlane, the conqueror who founded the Timurid Empire in modern day Iran and Central Asia.

Certainly that support enabled Hafiz to devote himself to his writings. Surprisingly there is no definitive version of his collected works (or Dīvān); some editions run to a mere 573 poems others to just shy of a thousand. However, their beauty and wordplay illuminates why Hafiz was admired so much throughout the Islamic world even during his own lifetime. He remains one of the most celebrated of the Persian poets and his influence through poems, proverbs and sayings can be felt to this day. On various holidays, including 12th October in Iran, Hafiz Day is celebrated: Families will open his Dīvān at random and read aloud that poem, using it as a guide to what may happen next in their lives.

Hafiz died in 1390. His mausoleum, Hāfezieh, is located in the Musalla Gardens in Shiraz.

Authoritative edition of Hafiz’s most important poems, including original Persian and brilliant English translations

Recent translations of Hafiz have been controversial. Omid Safi, an Islamic studies scholar at Duke, notes that “there are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering ‘versions’ that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth Gray offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar.”

A “ghazal” is usually understood to mean lyric poetry concerned with love. But what had been a courtly love lyric concerned with wine and physical beauty became, in the hands of Sufis like Farid ud-Dín ‘Attar and Jalal ud-Dín Rumi, a way to describe a mystic’s relationship with God. Ghazals also became a means of veiling from theological and political conservatives the Sufi belief in the possibility of an intuitive, personal union with God.

Háfiz became the greatest of all Sufi poets, called the “Tongue of the Invisible” and the “Interpreter of Mysteries.” His command of the ghazal’s traditional imagery and themes blends eroticism, mysticism, and panegyric into verse of unsurpassed beauty. His eighty ghazals are presented in this book. Persian originals appear on facing pages to brilliant English translations of Gray and Anvar.

In the afterword, Persian scholar Daryush Shayegan notes how “there is no antagonism between the earthly wine and the divine wine, just as there is none between profane love and the love of God, since one is the necessary initiation to the other.”