Meskoob's work is not an easy read. But it will be very rewarding for anyone fascinated by the ties between Iranians and their amazing poetry. The reader looking for a systematic study of Hafez and his poetry should go elsewhere. Meskoob's work offers other delights.
One cannot say only that Iranians love their poetry. Rather they are immersed in it from childhood. For the literate, the illiterate, the teacher, the student, the intellectual, the driver, and everyone else, poetry is like food and water. There is poetry in religion, love, pornography, panegyrics, politics, comedy, mysticism, and every other aspect of life.
Such devotion does not stop at Iran's political boundaries. Pilgrims from all over Turkey visit Rumi's tomb in Konya. Most can neither read nor understand his words, but no matter. Just the music of his verses brings joy and tears.
What is special about Hafez and his lyrics? Iranians call him Lisan al-Ghayb, the “Tongue of the Invisible.” He sees what we do not see and relates secrets unknown to the rest of us. Here is what the author says about him and us:
He is closer to us than any other poet and at the same time he is more remote than any other poet. We have all had some dealings with him in one way or another…He has been with us and has lived inside us as long as we have let him be as he is: but as soon as we have tried to delve into him through “scholarship,” logical analysis, and so on, he has slipped out of our grasp and disappeared before our myopic eyes. (p. xvi)
Although Meskoob (1924–2005) is a scholar of considerable learning, in this work, he rejects the path of “Hafez Studies.” Instead, he “has merely taken an excursion for a while in the garden of Hafez's Divan and said a few words about what he has seen” (ibid).
For that reason, the reader can dip into this book at any section and take pleasure. The only drawbacks are the lack of an index (admittedly something difficult to compose) and the awkward way the reader must switch between original texts and translations. For example, in a section dealing with the beauty of truth (p. 130), we read the following (translated) lines.
Search in the back of the book (p. 208), we find the original was:
The translation seems to lose the idea that lies will blacken the sun from the first dawn (of creation). Somehow the evocative “sobh-e-nokhost” is lost in translation.
The reader is left to flip back and forth between the main text, the footnotes, and the appendix. There are eleven pages of Persian texts of the verses—all separated from the main text. Far better to have placed the originals in the main text just above or below the translations.
The awkwardness gets more complicated because Meskoob weaves paraphrases of Hafez's verses into his prose. The translator helpfully provides footnotes that cite the original (in translation). However, there is no way for readers to find the verse in its original Persian. They must flip between text and footnotes, and in the end have no original Hafez.
For example, starting on page 157, Meskoob writes passionately of the chaos, depravity, hypocrisy, and brutality of Hafez's time. Brothers turned on brothers, wives and husbands on each other, and no one's life was secure. Partisans of rival warlords battled in the streets of Shiraz, and gangs from rival neighborhoods—backed by high-ranking officials—slaughtered each other.
The author has skillfully woven Hafez's lyrics into his narrative of those brutal years, as if the beauty of the poetry could somehow lessen the many evils visited upon Iranians at that time. The style challenges both the translator and the reader. The translator unpacks the references with footnotes supplying the source of the reference and lines in English of the poetry used. To find the original, however, the reader must refer to Hafez's divan.
For example, Meskoob talks about the poet's sufferings during the reign of the harsh, fanatic Mobarez al-Din Mohammad Mozaffar (r. 1335–1358). He overthrew the hedonistic, self-indulgent Abu Eshaq Inju and was in turn overthrown by his own son, the poetry-loving Shah Shojaʾ. Hafez refers to Mobarez al-Din as “Mohtaseb,” or censor. At one point, he refers to pale, aged wine as bim-e-mohtaseb dideh (gone pale out of fear of the mohtaseb). Many of his verses mourn the loss of wine, music, and pleasure and the victory of fanaticism and hypocrisy. Meskoob (p. 161) writes:
That prince [Mobarez al-Din] was an authoritarian hypocrite and one who killed with ease, who used religious law as a pretext for persecution and bloodshed. The poet remembers “pleasurable wine, the breeze soaked in roses, the music of the harp” and the friendship of the companion that are hidden under a heavy, grim-faced sky, like hiding “a wine-cup in the sleeve.”
A footnote refers us to ghazal 41 and the couplet “Hide the wine cup in your patched sleeve / As from the mouth of the jug, the times are spilling blood” (p. 268). We end our search in the divan with the treasure of the original.
So our path to delight is long and sometimes difficult. The reader will need patience. But, like Meskoob's excursion through Hafez's Ku-ye-Dust (the alley [or neighborhood] of the friend), the trip is well-worth the effort.
