Hafez (c. 1326 - c. 1389) was a Persian lyric poet of Shiraz, regarded as the greatest master of the ghazal and one of the central figures of Persian literature. [1] His collected Divan, running to roughly five hundred poems, fuses the language of love, wine and the tavern with mystical suggestion and sharp satire of religious hypocrisy, and remains a household book throughout Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. [2]
Life
Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi was born in Shiraz around 1326 and spent nearly his whole life there. Little can be established with certainty about his biography; the early accounts are late, brief and coloured by legend. [3]
The name Hafez is an honorific given to a person who has memorised the Quran, and the poet refers to this accomplishment in his own verse. He received a traditional education in Arabic, Quranic sciences, theology and Persian literature, and appears to have earned part of his living as a teacher and a copyist. [1]
His fortunes rose and fell with those of his patrons. He enjoyed favour at the court of Abu Ishaq Inju, lost it under the austere Mubarez al-Din Muhammad, whose religious severity he mocked in his poems, and regained standing under Shah Shuja of the Muzaffarid dynasty. He died in Shiraz around 1389. [2]
The poetry
Hafez wrote chiefly in the ghazal, a short lyric of rhyming couplets bound by a single rhyme and refrain, in which each line is nearly self-contained. He brought the form to a technical perfection that later Persian poets treated as the standard against which their work was measured. [1]
His recurring figures are the beloved, the wine cup, the tavern, the nightingale and the rose, the pious hypocrite and the honest libertine. The poems set the sincerity of the wine-drinker against the pretension of the preacher, and they praise a love whose object is never fixed. [3]
The ambiguity is deliberate. Sufi commentators read the wine as divine intoxication and the tavern as the path of the mystic, while other readers take the poems as worldly lyrics; the text supports both without settling between them. [2]
Reception in the Persian world
The Divan was compiled after the poet's death and exists in many manuscript recensions, so that establishing a definitive text remains a live scholarly problem. [3]
Copies are found in a great many Persian-speaking households, often alongside the Quran, and are used for fal-e Hafez, a practice of bibliomancy in which the book is opened at random for guidance, particularly at Nowruz and on the winter solstice night of Yalda. His tomb in Shiraz, rebuilt as the garden pavilion known as the Hafezieh in the 1930s, is a place of continuous pilgrimage. [1]
Influence abroad
European interest began with eighteenth-century translations, notably those of William Jones. Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (1819) was written in explicit homage to Hafez, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who translated him from German versions, and Friedrich Nietzsche both wrote admiringly of his work. [2]
Hafez remains the most quoted poet in the Persian language, and his verses continue to supply proverbs, song lyrics and calligraphic art across the region. [3]
