Hafiz

Hafiz lived almost his entire life in Shiraz, [[san-francisco|the city]] of poets in southern Iran. He was born around 1325, lost his father young, memorized the Quran by fourteen (the source of his epithet, Hafiz — the one who has memorized), studied with the religious scholars of [[san-francisco|the city]], served at various points the local Inju and Muzaffarid dynasties as a court poet, and lived through periods of comfort and periods of disfavor. He died around 1390 and was buried at the Hafezieh in Shiraz, which remains a place of pilgrimage and quiet visitation in Iran today.

His surviving work is the Diwan-e Hafiz — about 500 ghazals (lyric love poems) and shorter forms, compiled by his student Muhammad Gulandam after his death. The poems were not numbered or ordered by Hafiz himself; the standard order is alphabetical by the rhyming letter of the radif.

What the ghazals do

The Hafiz ghazal is short — typically seven to twelve couplets, all sharing a single rhyme and a refrain word. Each couplet is independent enough to stand on its own; the whole poem moves by association rather than narrative. Across the Diwan, recurring images braid together: the beloved (whose face is sometimes a young person, sometimes God, sometimes both); wine (sometimes literal, sometimes the wine of mystical drunkenness, sharab); the tavern (the Sufi gathering, in contrast to the official mosque); the Magi (the Zoroastrian elder, a stand-in for the unauthorized spiritual master); the nightingale and the rose (longing and the beloved); the cypress (the slender body of the beloved); the zealot and the pious one (Hafiz’s recurring objects of gentle satire).

The interpretive tradition has long divided on whether to read these images literally or symbolically. The Sufi reading — dominant within the Persian tradition — takes the beloved, the wine, and the tavern as veils for the soul’s longing for the divine, in continuity with the broader symbolic vocabulary of Sufi poetry. A more literal reading takes the beloved as a young person and the wine as wine. The most subtle readers (Daryush Shayegan, Annemarie Schimmel) have argued that Hafiz’s deliberate ambiguity is itself the point: the poems refuse to choose, and the same line carries both meanings simultaneously, as the world does.

Fal-e Hafiz

In Iranian households, the Diwan-e Hafiz is often used for fal-e Hafiz — bibliomancy. A question is held in mind; the book is opened at random; the ghazal on the page is read for guidance. The practice is informal — performed by everyone from grandmothers to philosophy professors — and is one of the ways the Diwan lives in everyday Persian life as something more than a literary work.

On Hafiz in English

The major translations vary widely. Reynold A. Nicholson’s prose versions (early 20th c.) are scholarly and literal. The popular English Hafiz of Daniel Ladinsky — whose books The Gift and I Heard God Laughing have introduced millions of Western readers to “Hafiz” — is, by Ladinsky’s own account, only loosely based on the Persian original; many of the poems he attributes to Hafiz are his own creations. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: read Ladinsky if you enjoy them, and read also Dick Davis, A.J. Arberry, and Peter Avery for translations that engage the actual Persian text.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[sufism]]
• Parallels: [[rumi]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Hafiz. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Trans. Dick Davis. Penguin Classics, 2013. Source class: primary text / scholarly translation.
2. Hafiz. Fifty Poems of Hafiz. Trans. A.J. Arberry. Cambridge, 1947. Source class: primary text / scholarly translation.
3. Hafiz. The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz. Trans. Peter Avery. Archetype, 2007. Source class: primary text / complete translation.
4. Annemarie Schimmel. A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry. University of [[asheville|North Carolina]] Press, 1992. Source class: book / scholarly study.

Lenses still to grow

• The Persian ghazal tradition in which Hafiz lives — Sa’di, Khwaju Kermani, Salman Savaji.
• Fal-e Hafiz as a contemporary practice — its sociology, its place in modern Iranian life.
• The Goethe–Hafiz encounter — Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (1819) was the major early German engagement with Hafiz and shaped European Romantic interest.
• Hafiz and Iranian national [[eating-the-landscape|identity]] — what the Diwan has meant across the modern history of Iran.
• The Ladinsky question — what the popular American “Hafiz” is and is not.