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Hafez's “Turk of Shiraz” Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael C. Hillmann
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Extract

The most familiar of Hafez's poems in the English-speaking world is the so-called “Turk of Shiraz” ghazal, a much translated and frequently discussed poem that has been called a number of things which it isn't: A great poem, a grand philosophical utterance, a unified composition and a typical Hafezian ghazal. And it hasn't been called something which it may well be: a verse-song intended for recital with musical accompaniment.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , Summer 1975 , pp. 164 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1975

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Boston (November, 1974). The article embodies some ideas that are more fully developed in several chapters of the author's Unity in the Ghazals of Ḥāfeẓ (forthcoming).

References

Notes

1. Qazvini, Muhammad and Ghani, Qasem eds., Divān-i… Hafez (Tehran: Zavvāar, 1941), no. 3.Google Scholar This edition is hereafter referred to as QG. The variant in Ahmad, Nazir and Reza Jalali Na'ini, S. M. eds., Dīvān-e-Hafiz (Tehran: Sāzmān-i Umur-e Farhangī va Ketāb-khānah'hā, 1971), p. 18, no. 7Google Scholar, exhibits the same number but slightly different order of bayts (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 5, 6, 7, 9). Aya Sofya MS 3945, f. 402 1., features a seven-bayt variant: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, which Rehder, Robert M. presents and discusses in “The Unity of the Ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ,” Per Islam 51 (1974): 55-96Google Scholar; but there are many errors in Rehder's reading of both the Aya Sofya and QG texts; e.g. (with U.S. Library of Congress transliteration), b.1: ba-dast should be bī-dast, bā-khāl should be bī-khāl, ū should be u; b.2: may bāgī should be may-i bāqī; b.3: fighān should be faghān; b.4: dānastam should be dānistam, ˓ashq should be ˓ishq; b.7: khush should be khwush, ba-khwān should be bikhwān, ˓aqd should be ˓iqd; b.8 (in QG): na-gushavad u na-gushāyad should be nagshud-u nagshāyad. In any case, bayt 4, not in the Aya Sofya MS, does seem flat and undramatic, especially its first meṣra˓, in comparison with the bayts around it; but the omission or change in position of bayt 8 seems curious if it is taken as a continuation of bayt 7 (refer to the translation and explication below). As for verbal variants among the three sources, the most significant is the taẓmīn (literary allusion or quotation) from Sa˓di in Aya Sofya 3945 and the Aḥmad-Jalāli edition in place of the first meṣra˓ of bayt 6 in QG: Sa˓di, Divān, ed. Maẓāher Moṣaffā (Tehran: Kānun-e Ma˓refat, 1965), p. 582Google Scholar, line 3 (the ghazal is a lover's lament at separation from and mistreatment by the beloved), which reads: badam guftī-yu khursandam ˓afāk allāh niku guftī-- “You spoke ill of me/insulted me and I'm satisfied; God forgive you, you spoke well, i.e., even your insults are like ‘good’ words to me.”

For the purpose of the present article, the conclusion to be drawn from the differing versions of the “Turk of Shiraz” ghazal is that the QG 3 text of the poem here discussed does not necessarily represent the ghazal exactly as Hafez composed or recited it, but rather represents a legitimate and old version of great popularity worth examining in vacuo on its own terms.

2. Jones, William A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: W. & J. Richardson, 1771), pp. 137-40Google Scholar, preceded by a literal translation on pp. 135-36.

3. Arberry, A. J. “Orient Pearls at Random Strung,” Bulletin of Oriental and African Studies 11 (1943): 699-712CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wickens, G. M. “An Analysis of Primary and Secondary Significations in the Third Ghazal of Ḥāfiẓ,” BSOAS 14 (1952): 627-38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Intiqād al-I˓tirāḍ” (Toronto, 1953, mimeographed)Google Scholar in reply to the rebuttal to “Significations” by Boyce, Mary “A Novel Interpretation of Ḥāfiẓ,” BSOAS 15 (1953): 279-88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Arberry, “Orient Pearls,” pp. 706-7.

5. Wickens, G. M. “The Persian Conception of Artistic Unity in Poetry and its Implications in Other Fields,” BSOAS 14 (1952): 240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Wickens, “Significations,” pp. 627-28.

7. Ghani, Qāsem Tārikh-e ˓Aṣr-e Ḥāfeẓ (Tehran: Zavvār, 1942), pp. 268-70 and 390Google Scholar, fn. 2, asserts that the “Turk of Shiraz” may have been Shah Shujā˓'s son and successor, Zayn al-˓Abedin. But this seems unlikely both because the word turk can mean merely “beloved” and because the phrase turk-e shirāzi was previously used by Sa˓di to represent a beloved in a ghazal describing the lover's troubled state with an address of the indifferent, aloof beloved: Sa˓di, Divān, p. 601, line 5.

8. Zarrinkoob, Abdol-Hossein “Hafez, Khwājah-yi Rindān,” Bā Kārvān-i Ḥullah (Tehran: Arya, 1964), p. 272Google Scholar; Mortazavi, Manuchehr “Ihām ya Khaṣīṣah-yi Aṣlī-yi Sabk-i Hafez,” Nashrīyah-yi Dānishkadah-yi Adabīyāt-i Tabriz 11 (1959/60): 193-224, 485-500, and 12 (1960/61): 65-84Google Scholar; Human, Mahmud with Esma˓il Khu'i, Hafez, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Ṭahuri, 1968/69), p. 27.Google Scholar

9. Sudi, Sharḥ-i Sudi bar Hafez, 4 vols., 2nd ed. Tr. ˓Esmat Sattarzadeh (Tehran: Rangin, 1968/69), 1:26Google Scholar; published translations by Gertrude Bell, Herbert Bicknell, E. G. Browne, Richard le Gallienne, Walter Leaf, John Payne, A. J. Arberry, Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, and Robert Rehder; Wickens, “Significations,” p. 361, cites “bāqī, left over; bāghī (having the same pronunciation in Persian), a garden; rebellious, bāgh (Turkish), a tie, a belt.”

10. Muhammad Mo˓in, An Intermediate Persian Dictionary, 6 vols. (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1963-74), 1:463.Google Scholar

11. Muhammad ˓Ali Bamdad, Hafez-shināsi (Tehran, n.d.), p. 15Google Scholar; Hafez-shināsi, 3rd ed., with Bamdad, Mahmud (Tehran: Ebn-e Sina, 1969), p. 28Google Scholar; Arberry, A. J. ed., Fifty Poems of Hafiz (Cambridge: University Press, 1962, reprinted with corrections), notes on poem no. 3, pp. 142-43.Google Scholar

12. Schroeder, Eric “Verse Translation and Ḥāfiẓ,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 7 (October 1948): 215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Rehder, “Unity,” pp. 71-86.

14. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1971), p. 2501.Google Scholar

15. Hospers, John “Aesthetics, Problems of,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co. and Free Press, 1967), 1:43.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

17. Wickens, “Persian Conception,” pp. 239-41. Rypka, Jan and others, History of Iranian Literature, ed. John, Karl (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1968), pp. 91 and 102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. E.g., QG 1, 26, 95, 103, 140, 152, 185, 270, 299, 309, 317 and 374.

19. QG 270 is an example of a ghazal in which the lover-speaker cannot be identified with the character “Hafez.“

20. Lughatnāmah, ḥ, p. 106.

21. Ibid.

22. Zarghamfar, Mortaza Hafez va Qur'ān (Tehran: Ṣa'eb, 1966/67), p. 12Google Scholar, cites the bayts in the Divān which contain the word “Koran”; these bayts appear in ghazals QG 9, 69, 94, 154, 255, 271, 319, and 447.

23. Lughatnāmah, ḥ, p. 106.

24. Bastani Parizi, M. E. “Hafez-i Chandīn Hunar,” Nāy-i Haft Band (Tehran: ˓Ata'i, 1971), pp. 332-62.Google Scholar

25. Ali Mallah, Hosayn Hafez va Mūsiqī (Tehran: Vizārat-i Farhang va Hunar, 1972).Google Scholar