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(), known by his pen name Hafez ( or 'the keeper'; 1325–1390) or Hafiz,
“Ḥāfeẓ” designates someoone who has learned the Qurʾān by heart" also known by his nickname lesān-al-ḡayb ('the tongue of the unseen'), was a Persians Lyric poetry whose collected works are regarded by many Iranian peoples 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.Yarshater. Accessed 25 July 2010.Aga Khan III, "Hafiz and the Place of Iranian Culture in the World", November 9, 1936 London.
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""Hafez's Poetic Art". Encyclopaedia Iranica. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hafez-iii Accessed August 23, 2016. 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" (as distinguished from theology). 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 bibliomancy (, somewhat similar to the Roman tradition of Sortes Vergilianae) 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.
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.Lewisohn, p. 67 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 (Mubariz Muzaffar). Though his work flourished most under the 27-year rule of Jalal ud-Din Shah Shuja (Shah Shuja),Gray, pp. 2-4. it is claimed Hāfez briefly fell out of favor with Shah Shuja for mocking inferior poets (Shah Shuja wrote poetry himself and may have taken the comments personally), 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.Jafri, Sardar. “Hafiz Shirazi (1312-1387-89).” Social Scientist, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 2000, pp. 12–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3518055. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021. Hafez was also a contemporary of the famous Sunni Islam Shaf'iite theologian Adud al-Din al-Iji - who he praised as one of the five notables of Fars province.https://referenceworks.brill.com/display/entries/EIRO/COM-2596.xml?rskey=TUgTur
In a famous qeṭʿa beginning with be ʿahd-e salṭanat-e Šāh Šayḵ Abu Esḥāq / be panj šāḵs ʿajab molk-e Fārs bud ābād (Ḵ. II, Qeṭ. 9, tr. Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia III, p. 276), praising five notables whose achievements brought prosperity to the land of Fārs, the poet refers to Qāżi ʿAżod-al-Din Iji and his famous manual of theology, Ketāb al-mawāqef fi ʿelm al-kalām (Van Ess, p. 1022; Schimmel, pp. 929-30).
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 Archaeology and Architecture, 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.
According to one tradition, before meeting his self-chosen shaykh 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 unrequited love, 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:
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.
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, 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 language 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 The autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore RABINDRANATH TAGORE and Ralph Waldo Emerson (the last referred to him as "a poet's poet").; "that Emerson claims for the domain of poetry Hafiz may turn out to be a poet's poet"
There is no definitive version of his collected works (or Dīvān); editions vary from 573 to 994 poems. Only since the 1940s has a sustained scholarly attempt (by Mas'ud Farzad, Qasim Ghani and others in Iran) been made to authenticate his work and to remove errors introduced by later and censors. However, the reliability of such work has been questioned,Michael Hillmann in Rahnema-ye Ketab, 13 (1971), "Kusheshha-ye Jadid dar Shenakht-e Divan-e Sahih-e Hafez" and in the words of Hāfez scholar Iraj Bashiri, "there remains little hope from there (i.e., Iran) for an authenticated diwan".
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.Massoud Khalili#September 9, 2001 Massoud Khalili speaking to BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet 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.حافظ
This confusion stems from the fact that, early in Persian literary history, the poetic vocabulary was usurped by mystics, who believed that the ineffable could be better approached in poetry than in prose. In composing poems of mystic content, they imbued every word and image with mystical undertones, causing mysticism and lyricism to converge into a single tradition. As a result, no fourteenth-century Persian poet could write a Lyric poetry without having a flavor of mysticism forced on it by the poetic vocabulary itself.Thackston, Wheeler: A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry, Ibex Publishers Inc. 1994, p. ix in "Introduction"Davis, Dick, "On Not Translating Hafez" in the New England Review 25:1-2 2004: 310-18 While some poets, such as Ubayd Zakani, attempted to distance themselves from this fused mystical-lyrical tradition by writing , Hafez embraced the fusion and thrived on it. Wheeler Thackston has said of this that Hafez "sang a rare blend of human and mystic love so balanced... that it is impossible to separate one from the other".Thackston, Wheeler, A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry, Ibex Publishers Inc.' 1994, p.64
For reasons such as that, the history of the translation of Hāfez is fraught with complications, and few translations into western languages have been wholly successful.
One of the figurative gestures for which he is most famous (and which is among the most difficult to translate) is īhām or artful . Thus, a word such as gowhar, which could mean both "essence, truth" and "pearl", would take on both meanings at once as in a phrase such as "a pearl/essential truth outside the shell of superficial existence".
Hafez often took advantage of the aforementioned lack of distinction between lyrical, mystical, and panegyric writing by using highly intellectualized, elaborate and images to suggest multiple possible meanings. For example, a couplet from one of Hafez's poems reads:
The cypress tree is a symbol both of the beloved and of a regal presence; the nightingale and birdsong evoke the traditional setting for human love. The "lessons of spiritual stations" suggest, obviously, a mystical undertone as well (though the word for "spiritual" could also be translated as "intrinsically meaningful"). Therefore, the words could signify at once a prince addressing his devoted followers, a lover courting a beloved, and the reception of spiritual wisdom.Meisami, Julie Scott. "Allegorical Gardens in the Persian Poetic Tradition: Nezami, Rumi, Hafez." International Journal of Middle East Studies 17(2) (May 1985), 229-260
His work, particularly his imaginative references to monasteries, convents, Shahneh, and muhtasib, ignored the religious of his period, and he found humor in some of his society's religious doctrines. Employing humor polemically has since become a common practice in Iranian public discourse and satire is now perhaps the de facto language of Iranian social commentary. Hafez was influenced by ancient Iran and Zoroastrian religion, and the terminology of this religion has been consistently used in his poems. Examples are "Mogh", "Mogh-bache", "Jamshid" etc.
Peter Avery translated a complete edition of Hafez in English, The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, published in 2007. hb; pb It was awarded Iran's Farabi prize."Obituary: Peter Avery", The Daily Telegraph, (14 October 2008), page 29, (not online 19 October 2008) Avery's translations are published with notes explaining allusions in the text and filling in what the poets would have expected their readers to know. An abridged version exists, titled Hafiz of Shiraz: Thirty Poems: An Introduction to the Sufi Master.
Certain English-language poems have been incorrectly attributed to Hafez. The American poet Daniel Ladinsky has published a number of volumes of poetry that describes its contents as "poems inspired by Hafiz" or "poems of Hafiz" or "renderings of Hafiz." Some readers have understood this to mean that they are translations of poems written by Hafiz. However, the author has acknowledged that these are original poems inspired by Hafiz and they are not translations of Hafiz poems.
There is no evidence that most of Hafez's poems were destroyed. In addition, Hafez was very famous during his lifetime. Therefore, the small number of poetic compositions we have available indicates that he was not a prolific poet.
It is likely that Hafez's Divan was compiled for the first time by Mohammad Glendam after his death. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Hafez published his court in Hijri year 770 (1368). that is, edited more than twenty years before his death.
Persian texts and resources
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Fale Hafez iPhone App an iPhone application for reading poems and taking 'faal'.
English language resources
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