Divan of Hafez

What is this book about?

The lyric collection of the fourteenth-century Shiraz poet Hafez, consisting mainly of ghazals — roughly 480 to 500 poems in modern critical editions. Wine, the tavern, the beloved, the rose, and the nightingale recur, and so does mockery of clerics and market inspectors. Whether these images point to earthly love and drink or to Sufi divine love has been argued for six centuries; Hafez made that very double meaning his method.

Why read it?

It almost never offers one poem, one meaning. Hafez's central technique is a word carrying two or three senses at once; a translator usually has to choose one, which means every version decides on the poet's behalf. So the best way to read Hafez is not to find the authoritative translation but to read two or three side by side and watch where they diverge — the divergence is where the poem is.

Core Ideas

• One word can point at wine and at God at once; ambiguity is not a flaw in language but its highest achievement.
• The gap between the appearance of piety and the reality of desire is satire's most durable target.
• Love is at once concrete and bodily, and impossible to satisfy with any particular object.
• A poem does not deliver a fixed meaning; it lets the reader choose among several.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Should the wine and the beloved be read literally or mystically?
• When a man openly praises drink and love, is he offending religion or speaking about it in another language?

Who should read it?

For readers of lyric poetry who can accept not understanding everything and continuing anyway. If you need every line to have a settled meaning, this book will make you anxious.

How to Read It

Hafez's lines are full of mockery of rigid dogma, building a spiritual refuge out of praise for wine and love — the source list's reading. Note at the outset that the Divan is not one book but a stack of versions: surviving editions contain anywhere from about 480 to nearly a thousand poems, and there is no agreed text. One caution: the English poems attributed to Hafez by Daniel Ladinsky are widely noted as not being translations in the strict sense, and should not be read as Hafez himself.