Always associated with the morning, and usually in tandem with the breeze, is the messenger, Barīd, which occurs three times, as in barīd-i ṣubḥ (276: 3), or barīd-i ṣabā (88: 3b), and barīd-i bād-i ṣabā. Another word for messenger, Payk, occurs more frequently (13 times), and may be associated with the dawn breeze, when modified by a word like ṣabā or governed by nasīm, but it may also occur, like Payām (message), in other contexts. In this particular meaning then, we do see some variation in the semiotic charge of the vocabulary.
When the speaking persona of the ghazal relates something that happened ‘last night’ (Dūsh), especially towards the opening of the poem, we can assume that the locutionary act depicted in the poem is situated temporally at dawn or early morning. As we have already seen some examples of this above, there is no need for further examples here. The appearance of angels or a call from on high (malā’ik, ṣidā-yi ghayb, lisān al-ghayb, etc.), the hour of prayer or recitation of scripture (du‘ā, vird/awrād, dars) may also be mentioned in this context.
Ghazal 235 provides a good example of a poem that by secondary and tertiary images evokes a setting at dawn. Though no word for dawn or morning appears in the poem, four lines conspire to clearly place the poem in an auroral ambience, with the sweet and holy fragrance of the beloved, or perhaps even an angel, brought by the breeze; the mention of last night and an augury or horoscope; the caravan bells that rouse the sleeping travellers to depart; and the nightingale, whose cry is normally heard at night or just prior to dawn:
Line 1:
muzhda ay dil ki masīḥā nafasī mīāyad
ki zi anfās-i khwushash bū-yi kasī mīāyad.
Glad-tidings, heart, for here comes a living, breathing Messiah
Whose sweet breaths are redolent with someone’s arrival.
Line 2:
az gham-i hijr makun nāla u faryād ki dūsh
zada-am fāl-ī u faryād-rasī mīāyad.
Do not wail and cry over the sorrow of separation
For last night, I took an augury, and someone’s coming to our aid.
Line 5:
kas na-dānist ki manzilgah-i ma‘shūq kujāst
īn-qadar hast ki bāng-i jarasī mīāyad.
No one knows where the abode of the beloved is
Only this much – that the sound of caravan bells are coming.
Line 7:
khabar-i bulbul-i īn bāgh bi-pursīd ki man
nāla’ī mīshinavam k-az qafasī mīāyad.
Ask what happened to this garden’s nightingale, for
I hear a wailing coming from a cage.
Perhaps the contra-Alba view of dawn as release, which we have surmised to be dominant in the dawn topos of Ḥāfiẓ, is reinforced by the religious hours, with dawn the time of prayers and litanies. As the Qur’ān instructs, dawn is the time when a white thread can be discerned from a black thread, the point at which fasting from food and sex begin in Ramadan (Sura 2: 187). Dawn is, then, a sacral and ritual moment, one of the fixed times of prayer, perhaps the most significant of them (Sura 17: 78–9): ‘Perform prayers when the sun declines unto the dark of the night, and recitation at dawn (al-fajr); verily the dawn recitation is attested.’ Morning is seen as breathing away the darkness and dispelling it (wa-ṣ-ṣubḥu idhā tanaffasa, 81: 17–18), and dawn is the hour when salvation came to Lot’s household (minus his wife): najaynā-hum bi saḥarin ni‘matan min ‘indi-nā. Kadhālika najzī39 man shakara (54: 33–5). Most important, perhaps, because Ḥāfiẓ quotes it directly (shab-i qadr ast u tay shud nāma-yi hijr / salāmun fīhi ḥatā maṭla‘u l-fajr: 246: 1), is the Surat al-Qadr (97), a night better than a thousand months, a night in which the angels and the Spirit descend, a silent night that is peace until the break of dawn.
This religious and spiritual dimension of dawn and the morning is stipulated more than once in the Dīvān, as for example in the opening line of ghazal 24:
Bi jān-i khwāja va ḥaqq-i qadīm u ‘ahd-i durust
ki mawnis-i dam-i ṣubḥam du‘ā-yi dawlat-i tu-st.
By your life, good sir, and the bonds of old, and faithful troth
My companion at the break of morn is my prayers for your good fortune.
This poem has a political dimension – prayer said for the patron and his reign. But Ḥāfiẓ’s prayers may also take him to the beloved (237: 9):
Maraw bi khwāb ki Ḥāfiẓ bi bārgāh-i qabūl
zi vird-i nīm-i shab u dars-i ṣubḥgāh rasīd.
Do not sleep, for Ḥāfiẓ has attained this court of acceptance
Through late-night prayer and morning study (of scripture).
The poet may here intend a mundane Beloved, but the language used has some sacral overtones. Fortune seems to smile upon the poet after he prays all night long and the true dawn begins to break (225: 4):
Gū’iyā khwāhad gushūd az dawlatam kāri ki dūsh
man hamī kardam du‘ā va ṣubḥ-i ṣādiq mīdamīd.
It seems that my fortune will open a way for my affairs, for last night
I was continually praying, and the true morn was breaking.
Recall now that our poet has said (373: 6: Khanda vu girya-yi ‘ushshāq zi jā’ī digar ast / mīsurāyam bi shab u vaqt-i saḥar mīmūyam [The laughter and tears of the lovers comes from some other quarter / I compose at night and weep at dawntide]) that night is the time to compose poetry, and dawn is the time to weep. Here, the temporal sites seem to be reversed; fervent supplications at night, and release at dawn. Or perhaps this is not a total reversal, and the act of composing sincere poems is an earnest form of supplication and prayer. Indeed, the poet sometimes plays with this notion of prayer, deliberately undermining its pious implications, as here, in the last line (line 7) of ghazal 409:
Shawq-i lab-at burd az yād Ḥāfiẓ
dars-i shabāna vird-i saḥargāh.
Yearning for your lips made Ḥāfiẓ forget
his nightly lessons, his morning litanies.
It is not only the Beloved’s lips that bring the oblivion of forgetfulness. Wine may drive away the fear of the dawn of Resurrection Day (260: 8):
Piyāla bar kafanam band tā saḥargah-i ḥashr
bi may zi dil bi-baram hawl-i rūz-i rastākhīz.
Bind a wine chalice to my shroud, so that at the dawntide of Resurrection
I may wash from my heart with wine the fear of the Day of Judgement.
Of course, the morning libation may be an antidote to the hypocrisy of various small-minded and prosecutorial officials, and as such it may bring sincerity and therefore authenticity and purity, if not always clear answers (280: 3):
Aḥvāl-i shaykh u qāḍi u shurbu’l-yahūdishān
kardam su’āl ṣubḥdam az pīr-i may-furūsh.
I asked the Sage wine-seller at dawn about
the Shaykh and the Judge and their Jewish-drinking.
Thus the wine tavern becomes the locus – the ruins on the outskirts of town, where the non-Muslims drink clandestinely so as not to offend public morality, the liminal space outside society – while the dawn becomes the poetic moment when divine intervention arrives, allowing wine and relief, or mystical intoxication (479: 1):
Saḥaram hātif-i maykhāna bi dawlat-khwāhī
guft bāz āy ki dīrīna-yi īn dargāhī.
At dawn a call from the wine tavern, wishing good fortune
It said, come back, for you are an old haunter of this court.
The wise wine-seller; the disembodied, angelic call; and also the cup-bearer, all minister the morning offering, and impart wisdom, tidings of good fortune and promises of release from suffering (388: 1):
Ṣubḥ ast sāqiyā qadaḥī pur sharāb kun
dawr-i falak darang nadārad shitāb kun.
It’s morning, cup-bearer, fill a goblet up with wine
The turning heavens do not hesitate: be quick!
But ultimately in the topography of Ḥāfiẓ, there is but little distinction to be made between
tavern and true temple: both are sanctified spots of authenticity, untainted by hypocrisy. Real angels descend on the night of Power, and Ḥāfiẓian dawn is the time when angels and voices make their visitations. An enigmatic and ultimately spiritual wayfarer recounts the tale of his mysteries at dawn40 and the call from heaven is also heard at dawn, as in this opening line (431: 1):
Saḥar bā bād mīguftam hadīth-i ārizūmandī
khaṭāb āmad ki vāthiq shaw bi alṭāf-i khudāvandī.
At dawn I was telling my tale of yearning desire
A call came, saying ‘be assured of the divine blessings’.
Or this one (279: 1–2):
Hātifī az gūsha-yi maykhāna dūsh
Guft bibakhshand gunah may binūsh
‘Afv-i ilāhī bukunad kār-i khwīsh
Muzhda-yi raḥmat birisānad surūsh.
A call came from the corner of the tavern last night
It said, they’ll forgive sin, drink wine!
Divine forgiveness will do its work
Tidings of mercy will be brought by an angel.
Prayers at dawn and sighs at night, tearful morning supplications and plaintive night-time utterance; these are the keys that lead us to the treasured object of desire, the path and procedure that will join us to the beloved.41 This then is the sacred value of the dawn, the moment of divine grace, in response to supplication and the suffering of the night of separation and liminality. The poet is rejoined to his waking society and to the world as it is, not having bettered things much, but having been consoled by God for the sufferings he has endured. Ghazal 189, in one verse (5), tells us what we should do about this discovery:
Sirishk-i gūsha-gīrān rā chu dar yāband, durr yāband
rukh-i mihr az saḥar-khīzān nagardānand agar dānand
The tears of those who retreat to solitude:
When [you]42 find those, you’ll find pearls
if you know anything, you won’t turn the sunny face of affection
from those who rise at dawn
Notes
1 August von Platen, from ‘Ghaselen, X’, as quoted in el-Shabrawy, ‘German Ghazals: An Experiment in Cross Cultural Literary Synthesis’, p. 62.
2 Paul Valéry, Cahiers, II: 1261, as quoted in Franklin, The Rhetoric of Valéry’s Prose Aubades, p. 3.
3 The idea for this essay came from my student days, in classes I took with Professors Heshmat Moayyad and Jaroslav Stetkevych. I am grateful to Professors Leonard Lewisohn and James Morris for organizing, with the Iran Heritage Foundation, the conference on ‘Ḥāfiẓ and the School of Love in Classical Persian Poetry’ at Exeter University in the spring of 2007, which provided the opportunity to flesh out these ideas more fully.
4 See Heinen, ‘Thwarted Expectations: Medieval and Modern Views of Genre in Germany’, pp. 334–46. On the question of the Alba genre, as well as other genres of this and somewhat later periods, see Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, esp., for the Alba, pp. 167–85.
5 Woledge, ‘Old Provençal and Old French’, pp. 343 and 346–8 for the performance context.
6 A topical, often political, poem with precise contemporary references, perhaps most akin in the Persian tradition to the qiṭ‘a. The most prosodically complex and dignified genre of the Troubadours is probably the canso, typically a love poem. These circulated with the poets’ vida, or with a razo, similar to the aṣbāb al-nuzūl of Qur’anic exegesis, or the circumstances of composition often provided in medieval Persian literary anthologies, or hagiographies (e.g. Shams al-Dīn Aflākī’s Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, about the life and poetry of Rūmī). Poems of the Alba genre, because they contain dialogue, are seen by Woledge as dramatic poems, in contrast to most Provençal lyrics, which are monologues of the poet speaking about his love.
7 Saintsbury, The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Chivalry, p. 366.
8 Jeanroy, La Poésie lyrique des Troubadours, p. 339.
9 Kay, ‘Alba’ in The Oxford Companion to Literature in French, p. 17.
10 Woledge, ‘Old Provençal and Old French’, p. 346.
11 Ibid., pp. 345–6 and p. 346, n. 7.
12 Chambers, ‘Alba’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 8.
13 Hatto, Eos: An Inquiry, pp. 76–7.
14 According to Hatto, Eos: An Inquiry, p. 87, who gives instances of the Alba topos interfering in European translations of the Biblical Song of Songs (Shir ha-shirim). There is a particular crux at verse 2:17, where the Authorized Version (KJV) of the English Bible reads as follows: ‘Until the day break and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.’ The Hebrew passage does not suggest an Alba scene, according to Hatto, who draws upon J.B. Segal’s chapter on Hebrew in the Eos volume, arguing that the Hebrew passage concerns the falling of night (the time when the shadows flee) because the word shel represents shadows that protect from sunlight, not shadows of the dark (pp. 206–7 and n. 37). See, however, the contrary view of Ariel and Chana Bloch, in The Song of Songs: A New Translation, p. 157, who do argue that the Hebrew reads as a dawn scene. This would mean that the Alba scene could have roots in Mediterranean mythopoetics, possibly spread through the influence of Hellenism.
15 Hatto, ed. Eos: An Inquiry, where Woledge’s contribution, ‘Old Provençal and Old French’, appears on pp. 344–89.
16 Lewis and Stern, ‘Arabic’, in Eos, ed. Hatto, pp. 216–17.
17 Ibid., p. 230. I have followed their translation, only introducing suggestions in brackets.
18 The dawn has come when there is enough light to distinguish a white from a black thread.
19 Empaytaz de Croome, Albor: Mediaeval and Renaissance Dawn-Songs in the Iberian Peninsula, pp. 6–7.
20 Wickens, ‘Persian’, in Eos, ed. Hatto, p. 244.
21 A variant reading has in‘ām rā, which seems preferable.
22 A variant reading has nihādan ‘udhr-i...
23 Wickens, ‘Persian’, in Eos, ed. Hatto, pp. 246–7.
24 Quoted in Empaytaz de Croome, Albor, p. 6, without specific attribution to the particular work of de Riquier in which the notion is elaborated. However, it comes from Martín de Riquer, Las Albas provenzales, Introduccíon, textos y version castellana, p. 12, where he argues that the religious Alba poems developed out of the contra-Alba, where the dawn is desired.
25 Shapiro, ‘The Figure of the Watchman in the Medieval Alba’, pp. 607–39, citing pp. 619–19.
26 C.-H. de Fouchécour, La Description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du XIeme siècle.
27 On which, see Rasūlī, ‘Ṣabā’, pp. 915–16.
28 Julie Scott Meisami, ‘The World’s Pleasance: Ḥāfiẓ’s Allegorical Gardens’ and also her ‘Allegorical Gardens in the Persian Poetic Tradition: Nezami, Rumi, Hafez’.
29 For example, her The Handling of Ab/water in Farrukhi, Hafiz and Talib.
30 Lewis, ‘Hafez. viii. Hafez and Rendi’, and ‘Hafez. ix. Hafez and Music’, EIr, XI, pp. 483–91 and 491–8.
31 The Ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ: Concordance and Vocabulary.
32 Of their many relevant works, see, for example, Suzanne P. Stetkevych, ‘Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions’, pp. 98–9; and Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb.
33 Ḥusayn-‘Alī Mallāḥ, Ḥāfiẓ va mūsīqī, p. 8, n. 3.
34 Ḥusyan ibn Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd-i Sīstānī, Iḥyā al-mulūk: shāmil-i tārīkh-i Sīstān az advār-i bāstānī tā sāl-i hizār va bīst va hasht-i hijrī qamarī, p. 10 and n. 2. See also Bāstānī Pārīzī, ‘Ḥāfiẓ-i chandīn hunar’, pp. 10–11.
35 See van den Berg, Minstrel Poetry from the Pamir Mountains, p. 32.
36 Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, p. 149.
37 The same idea is reiterated in ghazal 209.
38 Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, pp. 118–20.
39 Recall the p
oem of al-Walīd II, cited in the beginning, which ends with this verb: wa’llāhu ‘anni bi-ḥusni l-fi‘li yajzī-hā.
40 Saḥargah rahruvī dar sar-zamīnī / hamī guft īn mu’ammā bā qarīnī (474: 1).
41 Du‘ā-yi ṣubḥ u āh-i shab kilīd-i ganj-i maqṣūd-ast / bi-dīn rāh u ravish mīraw ki dar dildār payvandī (431: 2).
42 In fulfilment of its own homiletic journey, this essay here substitutes ‘you’ for what the poet has written as ‘they’.
Ḥāfiẓ and the Language of Love in Nineteenth-Century English and American Poetry
Parvin Loloi
Some of the Persian poets have been known in the West since the middle of the seventeenth century, through the accounts of such travellers as Sir Thomas Herbert.1 Translations of Ḥāfiẓ first appeared in the West (in Latin), produced by such pioneers of Orientalism as Meninski, in his Linguarium Orientalium (Vienna 1680), and Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, who in his Syntagma Dissertationum (published posthumously in 1768) translated a poem by Ḥāfiẓ, and was also the first to translate from Khayyām. The first English translation of a ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ, under the title of ‘A Persian Song’, was published by Sir William Jones in his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771, pp. 135–40). Jones presented both literal and verse translations of the ‘Turk-i Shīrāz’ ghazal, which was to become very popular amongst the Romantics over the following century. Jones’ ‘Persian Song’, indeed, became a model for later translators of Ḥāfiẓ in English. In the remainder of the eighteenth century, only one more selection from Ḥāfiẓ appeared in English.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 47