A Poet in an Age of Poets
In the Iran of that age it seemed that one man in every two wrote poetry, and kings valued poets almost as highly as their mistresses, calligraphers and generals. In Hafez's time a group of Persian poets became famous from the Mediterranean shore to the Ganges and from Yemen to Samarkand. All of them bowed to Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez and ranked him above even the sweet-tongued Saadi.
Hafez liked the comparison and took pride in it. In one verse he told his own audience that he had never heard better poetry than his, by virtue of the Quran he carried in his heart. The word hafez means "one who memorizes" and was the title of those who, like our poet, knew the entire Quran by heart. He was born in Shiraz to an obscure family, on a date nobody knows, and began composing poetry from early youth.
Patrons, War and Closed Taverns
His first patron was Abu Ishaq Inju, who had been appointed governor of the province of Fars. The book says he was appointed by Ghazan Khan. Abu Ishaq loved poetry so much that he neglected government. When word came that enemies were about to attack his capital, Shiraz, he is said to have replied that no sensible person would give up a spring so pleasant for the sake of war.
A harsh commander named Mubariz al-Din Muhammad took Shiraz in a single assault and killed Abu Ishaq (1352 in the book). He forbade drinking and shut the city's taverns. Hafez grieved in a ghazal, which in essence advises hiding the wine cup in a patched sleeve, since the age is bloodthirsty, and washing the dervish cloak with tears, since this is a season of piety and abstinence.
Mubariz's successor either found the ban impossible to enforce or shrewdly saw that ruling drinkers is easier than ruling ascetics. He reopened the taverns, and Hafez, in thanks, made his name immortal.
From Wine to Love
Hafez followed the tradition of Persian poetry and wrote verses praising wine where convention called for it, sometimes even preferring the kiss of the cup to a kiss from a young beauty. But a vineyard runs dry after a thousand lines, and soon Hafez made love, heavenly or earthly, the main theme of his verse. In his eyes, the happiest freedom was now servitude to love. In one celebrated ghazal he offers the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in exchange for a single beauty mark on the cheek of a Turkish beloved from Shiraz. In another he says that the same power that gave the beloved's face its rosy bloom could surely grant him, the poor lover, patience and peace.
It seems the flame of his feelings dimmed with marriage. He took a wife and, before he could decide between wife and wine, became a father of several children. In one poem, which appears to mourn her death, he describes a lady whose home was a fairy's dwelling and who was without fault, and says that his heart, planning to settle in the city for her sake, did not know that she was about to leave on a journey. He blames the cruel stars.
In any case, the rebellious Hafez was tamed. He withdrew into seclusion and rarely traveled, and as he said, he sent his poems around the world in his place. Many kings invited him to their courts. He once thought of accepting the invitation of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir to live in his palace in Baghdad, but love of Shiraz held him. He doubted that even paradise had streams as clear as those of Shiraz or roses as fresh as its roses.
Sometimes, hoping for a reward, he wrote verses in praise of a king or emir to relieve his poverty. There was no publisher in Iran at that time willing to risk his capital to give people the works of great authors, and art had to stand with folded arms in the shoe rooms of kings and nobles, waiting. Once Hafez did set out on a long journey. The king of India had not only invited him but even sent travel money. When he reached the port of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf and was about to board, a storm rose, shook his thoughts and awakened his love of staying home. Hafez returned to Shiraz and sent a poem to the Indian court in his place.
The Divan and Its Translators' Despair
The Divan of Hafez is a collection of 693 poems, most of them ghazals, together with some quatrains, masnavis and fragments. In the book's view they are harder to translate than Dante, above all because their ringing repeated rhymes either cannot be rendered in English or turn into something silly and artificial. With their deep meanings and mysterious allusions, they were mocked by rivals in their own day, but they are now set to Persian song. It may be best to render Hafez in prose. In one such rendering, near the end of the night, drawn by the scent of a rose, the poet goes down to the garden to look, like a nightingale, for a cure for his fever. In the dark, the glow of a red rose, bright as a lamp behind the eyes, dazzles him with its beauty. The rose is lovely only because it recalls his beloved's face. Without her tulip-like cheeks, what use would the fragrant meadow or the gentle breeze in the garden be? The book then quotes a passage of passionate longing, which is omitted here as being of a more intimate nature.
Faith, Blasphemy and Beauty
Hafez had a delicate, restless spirit. Through long cultivation of taste in poetry and art, or through some inner longing, he was so sensitive to beauty that he honored every kind of it with eyes, tongue and fingertips, whether it was made of stone and paint or of flesh and blood, or appeared in a flower. When beauty was destroyed he sank into a silent, wrenching grief. This devotion to beauty is what let him find some comfort for his troubled heart in the brevity of beautiful things and the cruelty and dominion of death.
So Hafez mixes blasphemy with worship. While praising the incomparable God as the source of all earthly beauty, he may suddenly turn angry and speak words of unbelief. Many scholars who wanted to present Hafez as a believing poet have read his wine as spiritual ecstasy, his tavern as a monastery and his burning love as divine fire. It is true that Hafez was a Sufi, became a sheikh, wore the dervish cloak and wrote mystical poems. But his real objects of devotion, the book says, were wine, women and song.
There was a time when a movement arose against him and his enemies accused him of blasphemy. He escaped with his life by explaining that his blasphemous verses expressed the opinions of a Christian rather than his own. Even so, Hafez did not stay silent. He wrote, in effect, that the ascetic should not feel safe from the game of divine jealousy, because the distance from the monastery to the tavern is not as great as people think.
Death, Burial and the Tomb
When Hafez died (1389), his faith in religious principles was so doubted, and the volume of his pleasure-loving verse so large, that a group of zealots objected to giving him a religious burial. His friends settled the dispute by finding allegorical readings for his poems. A later generation made his tomb, in a Shiraz garden ablaze with roses, a place of pilgrimage, fulfilling the poet's own prediction that his grave would become the place of pilgrimage of the free spirits of the world.
On the white marble of the tomb a ghazal is carved that speaks of deep faith. In it he says that the good news of union with the beloved makes him wish to rise from his body, a bird of the holy realm freed from the snares of the world. He asks God to send down rain of guidance before he becomes a handful of dust, and asks that someone sit by his grave with wine and a musician, so that he may rise from the grave dancing at its scent. The poem ends with the wish to throw off both life and the world on the day of his death.