Hafez
Hafez Shirazi was a Persian lyric poet whose collected works are regarded by many Iranians as one of the highest pinnacles of Persian literature. His works are often found in the homes of Persian speakers, who learn his poems by heart and use them as everyday proverbs and sayings. His life and poems have become the subjects of much analysis, commentary, and interpretation, influencing post-14th century Persian writing more than any other Persian author.
Hafez is best known for his Divān, a collection of his surviving poems probably compiled after his death. His works can be described as "antinomian" and with the medieval use of the term "theosophical"; the term "theosophy" in the 13th and 14th centuries was used to indicate mystical work by "authors only inspired by the Islamic holy books". Hafez primarily wrote in the literary genre of lyric poetry or ghazals, which is the ideal style for expressing the ecstasy of divine inspiration in the mystical form of love poems. He was a Sufi.
Themes of his ghazals include the beloved, faith and exposing hypocrisy. In his ghazals, he deals with love, wine and taverns, all presenting religious ecstasy and freedom from restraint, whether in actual worldly release or in the voice of the lover. His influence on Persian speakers appears in divination by his poems and in the frequent use of his poems in Persian traditional music, visual art and Persian calligraphy. His tomb is located in his birthplace of Shiraz. Adaptations, imitations, and translations of his poems exist in all major languages.
Life
Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, was born in Shiraz, Iran and identified as a Sufi Muslim. Few details of his life are known and accounts of his early life rely upon traditional anecdotes. Early tazkiras mentioning Hafez are generally considered unreliable. At an early age, he memorized the Quran. He was given the title of Hafez, which he later used as his pen name. The preface of his Divān, in which his early life is discussed, was written by an unknown contemporary whose name may have been Moḥammad Golandām. Two of the most highly regarded modern editions of Hafez's Divān are compiled by Allame Mohammad Qazvini and Qāsem Ghani and by Parviz Natel-Khanlari.Modern scholars generally agree that he was born either in 1315 or 1317, although Gulfishan Khan suggests he was born in 1320. According to an account by Jami, Hafez died in 1390. He was supported by patronage from several successive local regimes: Shah Abu Ishaq, who came to power while Hafez was in his teens; Timur at the end of his life; and even the strict ruler Shah Mubariz ud-Din Muhammad. Though his work flourished most under the 27-year rule of Jalal ud-Din Shah Shuja, it is claimed Hāfez briefly fell out of favor with Shah Shuja for mocking inferior poets, forcing Hāfez to flee from Shiraz to Isfahan and Yazd, however, no historical evidence to corroborate this is available. Hafez also exchanged letters and poetry with Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah, the Sultan of Bengal, who invited him to Sonargaon though he could not make it. Hafez was also a contemporary of the famous Sunni Shaf'iite theologian Adud al-Din al-Iji - who he praised as one of the five notables of Farz.
Twenty years after his death, a tomb was erected to honor Hafez in the Musalla Gardens in Shiraz. The current mausoleum was designed by André Godard, a French archeologist and architect, in the late 1930s, and the tomb is raised on a dais amidst rose gardens, water channels, and orange trees. Inside, Hafez's alabaster sarcophagus bears the inscription of two of his poems.
Legends
Many semi-miraculous mythical tales were woven around Hafez after his death. It is said that by listening to his father's recitations, Hafez had accomplished the task of learning the Quran by heart at an early age. At the same time, he is said to have known by heart the works of Rumi, Saadi, Attar Neyshapuri, and Nizami Ganjavi.According to one tradition, before meeting his self-chosen Sufi master Hajji Zayn al-Attar, Hafez had been working in a bakery, delivering bread to a wealthy quarter of the town. There, he first saw Shakh-e Nabat, a woman of great beauty, to whom some of his poems are addressed. Ravished by her beauty but knowing that his love for her would not be requited, he allegedly held his first mystic vigil in his desire to realize this union. Still, he encountered a being of surpassing beauty who identified himself as an angel, and his further attempts at union became mystic; a pursuit of spiritual union with the divine.
At 60, he is said to have begun a chilla-nashini, a 40-day-and-night vigil by sitting in a circle that he had drawn for himself. On the 40th day, he once again met with Zayn al-Attar on what is known to be their fortieth anniversary and was offered a cup of Shirazi wine. It was there where he is said to have attained "Cosmic Consciousness". He hints at this episode in one of his verses in which he advises the reader to attain "clarity of wine" by letting it "sit for 40 days".
In one tale, Timur angrily summoned Hafez to account for one of his verses:
'agar 'ān Tork-e Šīrāzī * be dast ārad del-ē mā-rā
be khāl-ē Hendu-yaš baxšam * Samarqand ō Boxārā-rā
If that Shirazi Turk accepts my heart in their hand,
for their Indian mole I will give Samarkand and Bukhara.
Samarkand was Timur's capital and Bukhara was the kingdom's finest city. "With the blows of my lustrous sword", Timur complained, "I have subjugated most of the habitable globe... to embellish Samarkand and Bokhara, the seats of my government; and you would sell them for the black mole of some girl in Shiraz!"
Hafez, the tale goes, bowed deeply and replied, "Alas, O Prince, it is this prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you find me". So surprised and pleased was Timur with this response that he dismissed Hafez with handsome gifts.
Influence
Intellectual and artistic legacy
Hafez was acclaimed throughout the Islamic world during his lifetime, with other Persian poets imitating his work, and offers of patronage from Baghdad to India.European scholars began to translate Hafez's work from the 17th Century. The earliest translation of Hafez's poetic compositions is by Francois de Mesgnien Meninski who was the first court interpreter for the government of the Ottoman Empire, or Ottoman Porte. Thomas Hyde, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford translated Hafez's work into Latin in around 1690, according to Gulfishan Khan. Hyde taught himself Persian and translated the work with the assistance of a Turkish commentary.
His work was first translated into English in 1771 by William Jones. It would leave a mark on such Western writers as Thoreau, Goethe, W. B. Yeats, in his prose anthology book of essays, Discoveries, as well as gaining a positive reception within West Bengal, in India, among some of the most prolific religious leaders and poets in this province, Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore's father, who knew Persian and used to recite from Hafez's Divans and in this line, Gurudev himself, who, during his visit to Persia in 1932, also made a homage visit to Hafez's tomb in Shiraz and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has his character Sherlock Holmes state that "there is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world". Friedrich Engels mentioned him in an 1853 letter to Karl Marx. Elias John Winkinson Gibb dedicates a 'Villanelle to Hafiz' in his 1902 work Verses and Translations and Reynold Alleyen Nicholson, in 1911, dedicates a poem titled 'Hafiz' in his publication The Don and the Dervish.
There is no definitive version of his collected works ; editions vary from 573 to 994 poems. Only since the 1940s has a sustained scholarly attempt been made to authenticate his work and to remove errors introduced by later copyists and censors. However, the reliability of such work has been questioned, and in the words of Hāfez scholar Iraj Bashiri, "there remains little hope from there for an authenticated diwan".
In contemporary Iranian culture
Hafez is the most popular poet in Iran. His works can be found in almost every Iranian home. In fact, October 12 is celebrated as Hafez Day in Iran.File:Annual celebration of the Chelcharagh magazine.jpg|thumb|President Mohammad Khatami with actress Fatemeh Motamed-Aria in 2007 Yalda night use Divan of Hafez for fortune telling.
His tomb is "crowded with devotees" who visit the site and the atmosphere is "festive" with visitors singing and reciting their favorite Hafez poems.
Many Iranians use Divan of Hafez for bibliomancy. Iranian families usually have a Divan in their house, and when they get together during the Nowruz or Yaldā Night, they open it to a random page and read the poem on it, which they believe to be an indication of things that will happen in the future.