SOURCE: "Hafiz and His English Translators," in Islamic Culture, Vol. XX, No. 2 and 3, April, 1946 and July, 1946, pp. 111-28, 229-49.

[In the following essay, Arberry, who has himself translated Hafiz's works, traces the history of English translations of the poems of Hafiz.]

I

A century and a half ago, when the East India Company had but recently stumbled into a great Imperial inheritance in Bengal, and its servants were concerned to equip themselves linguistically for the onerous responsibilities that had settled upon their shoulders, it was a mark of polite culture in the brilliant society of Calcutta to be able to illustrate a point or adorn an argument with quotations from the Persian poets. War-ren Hastings was himself an early convert to the fashion, which continued well into the nineteenth century, until in fact Persian ceased to be the common medium of politics and business in the ruined Mughal Empire, and Macaulay was pleased to condemn the scholars of India because they were ignorant of Greek and Latin. In this interval the vogue of Persian poetry spread rapidly from India to England, and from England to the Continent. This was the background against which Edward Fitzgerald grew up; otherwise it could hardly have occurred to him to spend his time and convert his genius translating the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. Of the many Persian poets whose words were on the lips of these enthusiastic orientalists, none enjoyed greater esteem and admiration than Hafiz of Shiraz. It was a devotion that persisted through three generations, bridging the years that separate Sir William Jones from Gertrude Bell. A book could be written about all the Englishmen and Englishwomen who have worshipped at the shrine of Hafiz: this article only touches the fringe of the matter, in accordance with the Arabic saying that what cannot be entirely attained need not therefore be entirely abandoned.

Travellers in Persia during the seventeenth century, among them Sir Thomas Herbert, did not fail to report on the esteem in which Hafiz was held by his fellow-countrymen. But, so far as can be traced, the first English scholar to translate any of the poems of Hafiz was Thomas Hyde (1636-1703), a Cambridge scholar who succeeded Edward Pococke the Elder as Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford; and is best known for his remarkably learned treatise on the religion of the Ancient Persians (Historia Riligionis Veterum Persanem, Oxford, 1700), and his edition and translation (Oxford, 1665) of the astronomical tables (Zij) of Ulugh Beg, the grandson of Tamerlane. Hyde was an adventurous scholar, and made the most of his opportunities as Bodley's librarian to indulge a Catholic taste for linguistics; but it is not necessary for us here to follow him in his easy progress through Samaritan, Ethiopic, Syriac, Pahlawi, Singhalese, Telugu, Tartar and Chinese. It was probably about the year 1690 that he transcribed the first Ghazal of Hafiz and rendered it into Latin, with the aid of a Turkish commentary: This trifle was ultimately printed in 1767, in the second volume of Gregory Sharp's edition of Hyde's miscellanea.

It happened that Hyde's halting attempt first came before the public at a time when a far greater oriental scholar, in the first fresh enthusiasm of youthful erudition, discovered for himself that Persian poetry was a rich and yet unexplored mine of glittering jewels, and Hafiz the brightest among them. Sir William Jones (1746-1794), newly a fellow of University College, Oxford, had just begun work on his remarkable thesis on Asiatic poetry (though the Poeseos Asiatical Commentarionem Libri Sex were not published until 1774), and was already familiar with the Persian Language. Early in 1768 he met Count Reviczki, a Polish diplomat who was a true fellow-spirit: the new friends were inexpressibly delighted to find they shared a boundless admiration for Persian poetry. Reviczki was especially interested in Hafiz, and from time to time sent Jones 'une de mes dernières traductions … dont je n'amuse qudque fois quand J'ai du loisir': he published a small selection of the odes with a Latin translation at Vienna in 1771. But Jones had already preceded him in the mission of introducing the Nightingale of Shiraz to the cultured society of Europe. Being commissioned by King Christian VII of Denmark to prepare a French translation of a Persian biography of Nadir Shah, he improved the occasion by publishing as an appendix (1770) French verse-translations of thirteen Ghazals of Hafiz. Thus the first poetical translation of Hafiz ever to be printed by an Englishman were actually done in French, and that of excellent quality. A single example will perhaps be sufficient illustration …

O toi, léger & doux Zéphire,
Quand tu passes par le séjour
Où l'objet de mon tendre amour
Entousé des grâces respire,
Fais qu'au retour, selon mes vocux.
Ton habine soit parfumée
De cette senteur embaumée
Qu'épand l'ambre se ses cheveux.
Que de son souffle favorable
Mon être seroit ranimé,
Si par toi de mon bien-aimé
J'avois un message agréable!
Si trop foible tu ne peux pas
Porter ce poids, à ma prière
Jette sur moi de la poussière,
Que tu recueilles sous ses pas.

Mon âme languit dans l'attente
De son retour si désiré,
Ah! quand ce visage adoré
Viendra-t-il la rendre contente?
Le pin put moins haut que mon coeur,
A présent au saule semblable,
Pour cet objet incomparable
Il tremble d'amoureuse ardeur.

Quoique celui que mon ccrur aime,
Pour ma tendresse ait peu d'égards,
Hélas! pour unde ses regards
Je donnerois l'univers même.
Que ce seroit un bien pour moi,
Puisqu' à ses pieds le sort m'enchaine,
De n'avoir d'autre soin ni peine,
De ne vivre que pour mon Roi.

We see in this rendering a characteristic that marks a far more famous version of Hafiz which Jones published in the following year in his Grammar of the Persian Language, namely, the expansion of the original Persian to something like one and a half times its length. This feature, which has appeared in many translations by other hands—though seldom to so great an extent—has often been discussed, and the conclusion has generally been reached that it is inevitable: having regard to the fact that many of the ideas and figures used by Hafiz are unfamiliar to a Western reader not versed in the religious, literary and historical background of the Persian poet, it seems beyond hope to achieve the same pregnant brevity and concise felicity of phrase in any other language if the richness and variety of Hafiz style are in any way to be reproduced. The celebrated version now to be quoted scored a remarkable success immediately upon publication, and has remained a firm favourite ever since: in fact, until outshone by the brilliancy of Fitzgerald's Rubáiyá, it was Persian poetry for the vast majority of English readers not familiar with the Persian language.…

Sweet maid, if thou would'st charm my sight,
And bid these arms thy neck infold;
That rosy cheek, that lily hand
Would give thy poet more delight
Than all Bocara's vaunted gold,
Than all the gems of Samarcand.

Boy, let yon liquid ruby flow,
And bid thy pensive heart be glad,
Whate'er the frowning zealots say:
Tell them, their Eden cannot show
A stream so clear as Rocnabad,
A bower so sweet as Mosellay.

O! when these fair perfidious maids,
Whose eyes our secret haunts infest,
Their dear destructive charms display;
Each glance my tender breast invades,
And robe my wounded soul of rest,
As Tartars seize their destin'd prey.

In vain with love our bosoms glow:
Can all our tears, can all our sighs,
New lustre to those charms impart?

Can cheeks, where living roses blow,
Where nature spreads her richest dyes,
Require the borrow'd gloss of art?

Speak not of fate: Oh! Change the theme,
And talk of odours, talk of wine,
Talk of the flowers that round us bloom:
Tis all a cloud, 'tis all a dream;
To love and joy thy thoughts confine,
Nor hope to pierce the sacred gloom.

Beauty has such resistless power,
That ever the chaste Egyptian dame
Sigh'd for the blooming Hebrew boy!
For her how fatal was the hour,
When to the banks of Nilus came
A youth so lovely and so coy!

But oh! sweet maid, my counsel hear
(Youth should attend when those advise
Whom long experience renders sage):
While music charms the ravish'd ear;
While sparkling cups delight our eyes,
Be gay; and scom the frowns of age.

What cruel answer have I heard!
And yet, by heaven, I love thee still:
Can aught be cruel from thy lip?
Yet say, how fell that bitter word
From lips which streams of sweetness fill,
Which nought but drops of honey sip?

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung:
Thy notes are sweet, the damsels say;
But O! far sweeter, if they please
The nymph for whom these notes are sung.

'As a translation the song is open to serious criticism,' writes Professor R. M. Hewitt in a recent issue of English Studies. 'The rhyme system and the stanza are remote from those of the original, and there is no approach to the rhythm. The matter of the poem has been inflated by exactly a half.' These comments are very true; though as regards rhythm it is worth pointing out that Jones's octosyllables are not so very far short of exactly reproducing the Hazaj of Hafiz. But there are other more fundamental issues raised by this version than those mentioned by Professor Hewitt. Several translators have made the attempt to put Hafiz into English in the exact metres and rhyme-schemes of the original; of these experiments more will be said later; but Jones is at least equal in boldness to any who have not feared, where it took their fancy, to substitute an English for a Persian figure, and even to introduce wholly original images that lack all justification if strict fidelity is to be the criterion of poetic translations. But is this to be the criterion? Let Richard Le Gallienne, who in his own way is at least as bold as Jones, argue the case for the defence. Surely the only service of a translation is to make the foreign poet a poet of one's own country not to present him as a half-Anglicized foreigner speaking neither his own language nor our own! It is beyond dispute that many of the versifiers who have tried to produce 'faithful' versions of Hafiz have only succeeded in robbing him of every poetic quality. Jones's Persian Song is not Hafiz, and Fitzgerald's Rubáityát is certainly not Omar Khayyam, but both give the uninitiated English reader a good opinion of Persian poetry, and that may be regarded as a great compensation for any lack of verbal or rhythmic fidelity. Jones writes in the authentic manner of his age, the age of Pope and Gray and Goldsmith; it would have been an unparalleled literary miracle if he had not; but his writing has the enduring. quality of the true classic, and gives pleasure even today. Finally, the Persian Song encouraged many in Jones's day and later to take up the study of Persian; and that in itself is a sufficient testimonial to its merit. For it must be remembered that Jones, in pleading the cause of Persian poetry, was in his day a pioneer of pioneers; and, like all pioneers, he found himself confronted by a solid wall of conservative prejudice. Literary criticism was still the handmaid of the classical tradition, and it savoured almost of blasphemy for a man to suggest that Hafiz the Persian was at least as worthy of study and imitation as Anacreon the Greek and Horace the Roman. So Jones was obliged to apologise for his boldness. 'I must request, that, in bestowing these praises on the writings of Asia, I may not be thought to derogate from the merit of the Greek and Latin poems, which have justly been admired in every age; yet I cannot but think that our European poetry has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables: and it has been my endeavour for several years to inculcate this truth, that, if the principal writings of the Asiatics, which are deposited in our public libraries, were pointed out with the usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our great seminaries of learning, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be opened for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind; we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes; and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate.'

Before leaving Sir William Jones, who certainly did more than any other European scholar, before or since his time, to establish in the West a true appreciation of Persian poetry, it will not be without interest to furnish two further illustrations of his astonishing virtuosity, this time in the form of a Latin verse translation of an ode of Hafiz, first published in his volume of Poems (1772), and a Greek rendering of another in the style of Theocritus, printed in his Poeteos Adsiaticce Commentari (1774).…

Jam rosa purpureum caput explicat. Adsit,
  amici,
   Sauvis voluptatum cohors:
      sic monûere senes.

Nunc laeti sumus: at citiùs laeta avolat aetas.
  Quin sacra permutem mero
     Scragula nectareo?

Dulcè gemit zephyrus. Ridentem mitte
 puellam,
  Quan molli in amplexu tenens
     Pocula laeta biban.

Tange chelyn. Saevit fortuna; at mitte querelas.
   Cur non canoros barbiti
      Elicimus modulos?

Ea! florum regina nitet rosa. Fundite vini,
   Quod Amoris extinguat facem,
     Rectareos latices.

Suavè loquens Philomela vocor: Quî fiat ut
 umbrâ
  Tectus rosarum nexili
     (Veris avis) taceam? …

II

Three years after Jones and Reviczki published their first versions of Hafiz, a colleague of Jones at the Temple, John Richardson (1741-1811), fired by this double example, and animated with the desire to provide servants of the East India Company with materials for their Persian studies, produced a small volume containing the text, literal and verse translations, and detailed analysis of three odes of Hafiz. Richardson is best known for his Persian-Arabic-English dictionary which, founded on the earlier publication of Meninski, and later revised by Francis Johnson and Sir Charles Wilkins, served three generations as a standard work of reference, until in fact it was displaced by Steingass. His methods as a translator were closely similar to those of Jones, and his versions are marked by a polished elegance which gives cause for regret that he did not attempt more. For example, two stanzas from his rendering of Hafiz' first ode, the same which Hyde did into Latin: we give Hyde's translation for purpose of comparison …

Agedum, O Pincema, circunmitte poculam &
 præbe illud:
Amor enim poimeò facilio videatur, sed
 accidunt tamen difficilia.
Propter odorem Moschothecw, quam subsolani
  extremitas ex illis
  antiis aperit;

Propter crispaturam cincinnorum ejus
  suaveoleutium,
   quantus incidit cordibus ardor!

Fill, fill the cup with sparkling wine,
Deep let me drink the juice divine,
   To soothe my tortured heart:
For love, who seemed at first so mild,
So gently looked, so gaily smil'd,
   Here deep has plunged the dart.

When, sweeter than the damask rose,
From Leila's locks the Zephyr blows,
   How glows my keen desire!
I chide the wanton gale's delay,
I'm jealous of his am'rous play,
   And all my soul's on fire.

In order to follow the chronological sequence of Hafiz's English translators it is now necessary to transport ourselves, as Jones had done in 1783, from London to Calcutta, where we find Francis Gladwin (d. circa 1813), sometime officer in the Bengal Army, and encouraged by Warren Hastings to continue his Persian studies, sponsoring in 1785 and 1786 the two volumes of the short-lived Asiatick Miscellany. This ill-fated periodical during its brief career permitted the publication of a number of versions from Hafiz by several hands. Jones himself contributed many articles on Persian and Sanskrit subjects to the Miscellany; a good number of these are unsigned; and the second volume contains two anonymous versions of Hafiz, one over the initial H and the other subscribed HH, which have the unmistakable timber of this great scholar's work: the attribution is strengthened by the fact that H also stands below a quatrain whose ascription to Jones is attested by his biographer Lord Teignmouth as well as the Thraliana, and which is printed under his name in The Oxford Book of English Verse; the little poem has had a great vogue, and it will not be without interest to supply its original in Persian.…

On parent knees, a naked new-born child,
Weeping thou sat'st, when all around thee
 smil'd:
So live, that, sinking in thy last long sleep,
Calm thou may'st smile, when all around thee
 weep.

The version of Hafiz, initialled H, is a rendering of the well-known Mukhammas whose authenticity is now generally rejected by Persian editors: the poem does not occur in the oldest manuscripts of the Diwan. An extract will suffice to prove the translation's charm.…

Blest idol, view, absorb'd in Love,
 Thy helpless victim's fate.

In thee alone I live and move,
  Ah! see my wretched state.

Yet, should a thousand lives renew my soul,
At thy dear feet I sacrifice the whole.

When shall kind fortune be my friend?
 When shall thy pitying breast

Permit thy suppliant to attend,
 And urge his heart's request?

O when, bright tow'ring eagle, will thou deign
To grace his nest, and hear his plaintive
 strain?

Is cruelty familiar grown,
  Yet from its ways depart:

Delight in misery disown—
 Thou hast no iron heart;

O come, my love, pass o'er thy votary's head,
Which prostrate o'er thy threshold's dust is
 laid.

The other verse translations of Hafiz contained in the Asiatick Miscellany are the work of 'the late Capt. Thomas Ford' and of Thomas Law. The former is of a poem which is certainly not genuine, and therefore hardly merits attention. The latter deserves less summary treatment, if only for the sake of its translator. Thomas Law (1759-1834), seventh son of a bishop of Carlisle, went to India in 1773, and resigned from the Company's service in 1791 on the customary grounds of ill-health. Perhaps under Jones's influence, he conceived an admiration for the young republic on the other side of the Atlantic, and spent the latter part of his life in the United States, where he made a name and lost a fortune by interesting himself in American Currency questions: his second wife was a granddaughter of Mrs. Curtis, whose second husband was George Washington; he was one of the chief mourners at Washington's funeral. His 'imitation' of Hafiz is sufficiently pedestrian, but here it is, with its value as a curiosity …

My bosom grac'd with each gay flow'r,
   I grasp the bowl, my nymph in glee;
The monarch of the world that hour,
   Is but a slave compar'd to me.

Intrude not with the taper's light,
    My social friends, with beaming eyes;
Trundle around a starry night,
   And lo! my nymph the moon supplies.
Away, thy sprinkling odours spare,
  Be not officiously thus kind,
The waving ringlets of my Fair,
   Shed perfume to the fainting wind.

My ears th' enlivening notes inspire,
   As luta or harp altemate sound;
My eyes those ruby lips admire,
   Or catch the glasses sparkling round.

Then let no moments steal away,
   Without thy mistress and thy wine;
The spring flowers blossom to decay,
   And youth but glows to own decline.

From Calcutta we now return to London and the most ambitious enterprise yet: seventeen Select Odes edited and translated into English verse. This volume was a product of the fluent pen of John Nott (1751-1825), a noted scholar in his day. Originally trained as a physician, he travelled out to China in 1783 as surgeon of an East Indiaman, and turned three years' absence from home to good account by learning Persian; these translations of Hafiz were the first and solitary fruits of his excursion into orientalism. Thereafter he roved over a wide field of studies; translated Latin, Greek and Italian classics; established himself as an authority on Elizabethan poetry; but wrote such long and tedious annotations on George Wither as to provoke the disgust of Charles Lamb and the subsequent sarcasm of Swinburne. He was also renowned as a conversationalist, which presumably means that he talked as readily and variedly as he wrote. His versions of Hafiz are quite pleasing in the eighteenth century manner, and he courteously acknowledged his debt to Reviczki, Richard-son and Jones. The specimen which follows is characteristic of his style …

Go, friendly Zephyr! whisp'ring great
Yon gentle fawn with slender feet;
Say that in quest of her I rove
The dangerous steeps, the wilds of love.

Thou merchant who dost sweetness vend
(Long may kind heav'n thy life defend!)
Ah, why unfriendly thus forget
Thy am'rous sweet-billed parroquet?

Is it, O rose! thy beauty's pride
That casts affection far aside,
Forbidding thee to court the tale
Of thy fond mate, the nightingale?

I know not why 'tis rare to see
The colour of sincerity
In nymphs who boast majestic grace,
Dark eyes, and silver-beaming face.

What tho' that face be angel fair,
One fault does all its beauty mar;

Nor faith, nor constancy adorn
Thy charms, which else might shame the
 moon.

By gentle manner we controul
The wise, the sense-illumin'd soul:
No idle lure, no glitt'ring bait
Th' experienc'd bird will captivate.

What wonder, Hafiz, that thy strain,
Whose sounds inchant the etherial plain,
Should tempt each graver star to move
In dances with the star of love?

III

All the preceding translators had laboured under the handicap of having to establish their text of Hafiz on the authority of manuscripts, often faulty, always inflated, for no poet has suffered more than the Nightingale of Shiraz from the felonious attentions of later versifiers' ambitions to win currency for their own creations by signing them with his name. The first printed edition of Hafiz came from Upjohn's Calcutta Press in 1791, set up in the Nasta'liq types designed and cast by Sir Charles Wilkins: the book never had a very wide circulation, and few copies came to this country; it is now a great rarity. The text of Upjohn's edition leaves much to be desired, but at all events it was a step in the right direction, and a material help to students in India. John Haddon Hindley (1765-1827), the next to make a volume of Hafiz, was not able to use the 1791 edition, but had good manuscripts at his disposal in the Chatham Library at Manchester, which was in his charge when his Persian Lyrics (London, 1800) appeared. Hindley, like Richardson, never went East, but his work—he also did the Pand-Namah of 'Attar—is none the worse for that. He was the first to discuss at length and in detail the problems involved in translating Hafiz, and his remarks are still memorable. 'To give a literal or perfect translation of our author metrically, or even prosaically, into English, may be confidently pronounced impossible. An obvious proof of this assertion will be found, on considering for a moment those oppugnancies, which occur so generally in the idiomatic construction of the languages of England and Iran, and which must ever most effectually militate against such closeness of version. Whatever might be looked for from favourable analogies, the frequent and varied allusions from words of similar sound and formation, though generally of exactly opposite signification, as well as the lively and often recondite lusus verborum, so common in the Arabic and Persian, and which, though strange, if not trifling, to a European ear, are, to the habitual feelings of the Asiatic, both choice and exquisite. These obstacles, I say, must alone render every chance of translative imitation in this case completely hopeless." Hindley next passes to another obstacle—the frequent use of compound words in Persian poetry, impossible to reproduce in elegant English. He also refers pertinently to the problems raised by Hafiz's habitual use of Sufi imagery. The next point which calls for comment is the very construction of the Persian ode, with its repetitive monorhyme: here Hindley's comments are indeed worth pondering by all who may even yet be unconvinced, despite the palpable failure of previous experiments that the form of the Ghazal cannot be imitated in English. 'The constanit recurrence of the same rhyme.… is not suited to our language, which, as has been often observed by critics, will not bear reiterated monotonies. In such cases, then, he (the translator) may surely dispense with the minutie of punctilious imitation, 'provided he strictly confine himself to the prominent ideas of his original, where no eccentricities oppose him.' In this remarkable preface Hindley also discusses a further point of great interest even yet, namely, the criticism levelled against the Persian ode that it consists of a string of unconnected and incoherent ideas. This charge is still brought from time to time, as in the recent paper Harmonious Jones by Professor Hewitt from which we have already quoted: 'This particular ode of Hafiz,' writes the critic, referring to the original of Jones's Persian Song, 'is more than usually incoherent, and what unity it possesses comes from the rhyme which is the same throughout and occurs ten times.' Later in this paper we shall return to this criticism: for the present it is instructive to see how Hindley in his day answered the same charge. He maintains that Hafiz is in fact far less guilty of the alleged incoherency than most of his compatriots, and that what looseness and variety of images do occur in his poems can be readily condoned in a lyric poet. Besides, 'if we attend only to the time, the place, the object, the intention and the imagery of each Ghazal, the ideas for the most part appear to flow naturally, and without any absurd or harsh transition: and surely in these lighter rhapsodies, the coruscations of wit, the effusions of tenderness, and the luxuriant sallies of an unrestrained and impassioned imagination, may be fairly presumed to have been aided by the delicious wines, by the joyous symposiacs, and by the instructive and delightful Macamat of Shiraz, just as similar poetical beauties are reported to have arisen from similarly stimulating and exhilarating causes in that truly Hafizian poetry so immediately present to classical recollection, which sings the praises of Teios, Mitylene and Falemum. Under these circumstances, therefore, the translator will only have to allow our author, what he finds in the Grecian and Roman lyric poets, and what we should be willing to allow any poet of our own, the liberty of glancing with the frenzied eye of inspiration from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, in search of objects adopted to the subject of his composition; and, after attending to the minute turns of the versification, we suspect, it will be his own fault, if he finds an unsurmountable difficulty in explaining his author's meaning in a manner so perceptibly connected as to avoid exciting disgust in an English reader.' One last counsel Hindley adds. The Persian language, he reminds his readers, is still only imperfectly and rarely understood in England, though the situation is improving; Persian poetry is as yet exotic fare; therefore, do not serve up too much of it at a time, for 'by attempting too much, we may disgust, instead of pleasing.' How salutary a warning, even for the present day! Hindley himself heeded it, by only translating eleven odes; we again confine ourselves to a single illustration of his methods, choosing for the purpose his version of the poem which we selected as characterising Sir William Jones's still as a versifier in French:

Zephyr, should'st thou chance to rove
By the mansion of my love,
From her locks ambrosial bring
Choicest odours on thy wing.

Could'st thou waft me from her breast
Tender sighs to say I'm blest,
As she lives! my soul would be
Sprinkl'd o'er with ecstasy.

But if Heav'n the boon deny,
Round her stately footsteps fly,
With the dust that thence may rise,
Stop the tears which bathe these eyes.

Lost, poor mendicant! I roam
Begging, craving she would come:
Where shall I thy phantom see,
Where, dear nymph, a glimpse of thee?

Like the mind-tost reed my breast
Fann'd with hope is ne'er at rest,
Throbbing, longing to excess
Her fair figure to caress.

Yes, my charmer, tho' I see
Thy heart courts no love with me,
Not for worlds, could they be mine,
Would I give a hair of thine.

Why, O care! shall I in vain
Strive to shun thy galling chain,
When these strains still fail to save,
And make Hafiz more a slave.

Hindley dedicated his volume to Sir William Ouseley, 'an able and zealous restorer of oriental literature in Great Britain at the close of the Eighteenth Century.' Sir William had himself published a number of prose-translations of Hafiz in his Persian Miscellanies (London, 1795) and Oriental Collections (London, 1797-1800); but as the subject of prose renderings of Hafiz in general falls outside the scope of this paper, further reference to these attempts would be superfluous. Similarly we do not propose to comment on the prose-versions offered by Sir Gore Ouseley (1770-1844) in his Biographical Notices of Persian Poets (London, 1846), but will only quote his estimate of Hafiz that 'his style is clear, unaffected, and harmonious, displaying at the same time great learning, matured science, and intimate knowledge of the hidden as well as the apparent nature of things; but, above all, a certain fascination of expression unequalled by any other poet.'

IV

The generation of Sir William Jones had thus paid no mean tribute to the greatest lyric poet of Persia: if the versions produced during those thirty years exhibit a marked uniformity of style and spirit, the matter is easily explained on two scores—the still strong influence of the classical tradition in English poetry, not yet demolished by the Romantics, and the overwhelming personal authority of Jones himself, unchallenged in his lifetime and undisputed for many years after his premature death. But while the inspiration of these versions of a Persian poet now began to work itself out ever more widely in the English poetry and verse of the nineteenth century, Hafiz himself, like all his compatriots, presently suffered the same neglect in this country which befell all oriental studies. While the German von Hammer (Tübingen 1812) and Rozen-zweigschwannau (Vienna 1856-1864) translated the entire Diwan, the latter into creditable verse interleaved with a sumptuous though inflated edition of the text, and H. Brockhaus (Leipzig 1854-1856) printed the first eighty odes with a Turkish commentary, it was not until 1875 that the next volume of English verse-translations appeared, though two years earlier S. Robinson published A Century of Ghazals in Prose. Credit for this belated revival of Hafiz studies belongs to Herman Bicknell (1830-1875), a remarkable character: having studied medicine, he joined the army as a surgeon, saw service in India, China, Kashmir and Tibet, and in 1862, taking the name of Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahid, made the pilgrimage to Mecca undisguised. Bicknell spent many years with his Hafiz, and went so far as to live for a time at Shiraz 'with the object of clearing up doubtful points, and of becoming personally acquainted with the localities mentioned by the poet.' The appearance of his production was a result of brotherly piety, for Bicknell died before he could see his volume through the press: C. E. Wilson gave a helping hand in getting the book into proper shape. It is an ornate work, florid after the bastard Persian style of the mid-Victorian period to which it belongs: it contains versified translations of no fewer than 189 odes, as well as numerous other pieces. E. G. Browne names Bicknell as one of the three most successful English translators of Hafiz, and in his Literary History of Persia quotes two of his renderings, only to establish their inferiority to Miss Gertrude Bell's. To rank Bicknell third in the imposing concourse of Hafiz-worshippers is to pay him too much honour, though quantitively his work is certainly considerable: yet in quality his versions are not wholly lacking in merit, their chief fault being that they aim at too strict a literalness to be truly poetic. Here we give a typical specimen, rather pedestrian, very workmanlike, and still smelling of the midnight oil: the joyous rapture of the original is almost wholly vanished …

In blossom is the crimson rose, and the rapt
  bulbul trills his song;
A summons that to revel calls you, O Sufis,
 wine-adoring throng!

The fabric of my contrite fervour appeared
  upon a rock to bide;
Yet see how by a crystal goblet it hath been
  shattered in its pride.

Bring wine; for to a lofty spirit, should they at
  its tribunal be,
What were the sentry, what the Sultan, the
 toper or the foe of glee?

Forth from this hostel of two portals as finally
  thou needst must go.
What if the porch and arch of Being be of
 high span or meanly low?

To bliss's goal we gain not access, if sorrow
 has been tasted not;
Yea, with Alastu 's pact was coupled the
 sentence of our baleful lot.

At Being and Not-being fret not, but either
  with calm temper see:
Not-being is the term appointed for the most
 lovely things that be.

Asaf s display, the airy courser, the language
  which the birds employed
The wind has swept; and their possessor no
  profit from his wealth
  enjoyed.
Oh! fly not from thy pathway upward, for the
 winged shaft that
 quits the bow
A moment to the air has taken, to settle in the
  dust below.

What words of gratitude, O Hafiz,
Shall thy reed's tongue express anon,
As its choice gems of composition
From hands to other hands pass on?

In 1877 E. H. Palmer (1840-1882) published his Song of the Reed, a collection of verses original and translated. Palmer was a competent Persian scholar and a good draftsman, and his tragic early death cut short a career of great promise still largely unfulfilled. His six versions from Hafiz contained in this volume are pleasing after the mid-Victorian manner, not at all like the polished classical style of Jones, quiet reading for the heavily-curtained drawing-room, with little inspiration but sound scholarship and good taste. We again choose one of Hafiz's most popular lyrics to illustrate; though its authenticity is highly questionable …

O minstrel! sing thy lay divine,
Freshly fresh and newly new!
Bring me the heart-expanding wine,
 Freshly fresh and newly new!

Seated beside a maiden fair,
 I gaze with a loving and raptured view,
And I sip her lip and caress her hair,
 Freshly fresh and newly new!

Who of the fruit of life can share,
 Yet scorn to drink of the grapes's sweet
 dew?
Then drain a cut to thy mistress fair,
 Freshly fresh and newly new!

She who has stolen my heart away
 Heightens her beauty's rosy hue,
Decketh herself in rich array,
 Freshly fresh and newly new!

Balmy breath of the western gale,
 Waft to her ears my love-song true;
Tell her poor love-loin Hafiz's tale,
 Freshly fresh and newly new!

V

Twenty years passed over Palmer's little-remembered volume of verses, and then was published what by general consent takes rank as the most successful attempt so far made to translate Hafiz, body and soul, into the English idiom. In Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (1897) Gertrude Bell (1867-1926) made her first bow to the world of letters: it is a brilliant and remarkable performance, one that makes every lover of Persian poetry regret that the unusual talents there displayed should never again have been employed in the same direction. Of these translations, 43 in all, E. G. Browne has written that they 'are true poetry of a very high order and, with perhaps the single exception of Fitzgerald's paraphrase of the Quatrains of 'Umar Khayyam are probably the finest and most truly poetical renderings of any Persian poet in the English language.' Miss Bell turned her back on the Bicknell school, that is the translators who conceive it to be their task to make their versions as literal as the bondage of verse-form permits, and equal in length to the original and went back to the older tradition of Jones.

E. G. Browne, who appears to have been somewhat allurgic to Jones, wrote of his versions that they 'are pretty enough,' but 'can hardly be dignified by the name of poetry, and are, moreover, so free that they can scarcely be called translations'; yet of Miss Bell's he wrote that 'though rather free, they are in my opinion by far the most artistic, and, so far as the spirit of Hafiz is concerned, the most faithful renderings of his poetry.' This praise of a contemporary worker was undoubtedly fully merited, but the verdict on a great predecessor is surely unjust: both Jones and Gertrude Bell were true children of their environment, and a true comparison between their productions must take into account other factors than fidelity and impassionedness—it must be based on the criteria of English literary history. Moreover, while judgments involving what is called the spirit of an original and its reproduction in the version are necessarily tenures, it is not without interest to recall that Miss Bell herself confessed, 'I am very conscious that my appreciation of the poet is that of the Western. Exactly on what grounds he is appreciated in the East it is difficult to determine, and what his compatriots make of his teaching it is perhaps impossible to understand.' That is at first reading a startling statement, but no doubt allowance should be made for a very great degree of modesty, natural and becoming enough in a young scholar taking the stage for the first time. At all events, let us turn for the present from these abstractions and consider our concrete materials, the versions themselves; and, since comparisons though odious are always instructive and sometimes illuminating, let us examine what Gertrude Bell made of one or two poems which had already exercised her predecessors. First, her idea of Jones's Persian Song:

Oh Turkish maid of Shiraz! in thy hand
If thou'st take my heart, for the mole on thy
   cheek
I would barter Bokhara and Samarkand.
Bring, Cup-bearer all that is left of the wine!
In the Garden of Paradise vainly thou'lt seek
The lip of the fountain of Ruknabad,
And the bowers of Mosalla where roses twine.
They have filled the city with blood and broil,
Those soft-voiced Lulis for whom we sigh;
As Turkish robbers fall on their spoil,
They have robbed and plundered the peace of
  my heart.
Dowered is my mistress, a beggar am I;
What shall I bring her? a beautiful face
Needs nor jewel nor mole nor the tiring-
 maid's art.

Brave tales of singers and wine relate,
The key to the Hidden 'twere vain to seek;
No wisdom of ours has unlocked that gate,
And locked to our wisdom it still shall be.
But of Joseph's beauty the lute shall speak;
And the minstrel knows that Zuleika came
 forth,
Love parting the curtains of modesty.

When thou spokest ill of thy servant 'twas
 well—
God pardon thee! for thy words were sweet;
Not unwelcomed the bitterest answer fell
From lips where the ruby and sugar lay.
But, fair Love, let good counsel direct thy
  feet,
Far dearer to youth than dear life itself
Are the warnings of one grown wise—and
  grey!
The song is sung and the pearl is strung;
Come hither, Oh Hafiz, and sing again!
And the listening Heavens above thee hung
Shall loose o'er thy verse the Pleiades' chain.

This version is unquestionably more faithful than Jones's and it is also shorter, in fact, roughly equal to the original in length: but its style is equally unquestionably less mature, and it contains few memorable lines or phrases. Nevertheless, it is both competent and attractive: yet it is by no means the translator's best.

Secondly, Miss Bell's rendering of Palmer's pleasant verses.

Singer, sweet singer, fresh notes strew,
   Fresh and afresh and new and new!
Heart-gladdening wine thy lips imbrue,
   Fresh and afresh and new and new!

Saki, thy radiant feet I hail;
Flush with red wine the goblets pale,
Flush our pale cheeks to drunken hue,
   Fresh and afresh and new and new!

Then with thy love to toy with thee
Rest thee, Oh, rest! when none can see;
Seek thy delight, for kisses sue,
   Fresh and afresh and new and new!

Here round thy life thy vine is twined;
Drink! for elsewhere what wine wild find?
Drink to her name, to hours that flew,
   Hours ever fresh and new and new!

She that has stolen my heart from me,
How does she wield her empery?
Paints and adorns and scents her too,
   Fresh and afresh and new and new!

Wind of the dawn that passest by,
Swift to the street of my fairy hie,
Whisper the tale of Hafiz true,
   Fresh and afresh and new and new!

This is a notable achievement, for with a minimum of extraneous comment the translator has brilliantly succeeded in reproducing the true form of the original Persian, even including the internal rhyme; and her verses have a lilt and a pace which put them far above Palmer's in poetic fervour, while at least equalling his in fidelity.

Thirdly, what is one of Miss Bell's finest renderings, which to compare with Bicknell's is to establish the interval that separates fine poetry from flat verse:

The rose has fleshed red, the bud has burst,
And drunk with joy is the nightingale—
Hail Sufis! lovers of wine, all had!
For wine is proclaimed to a world thirst.
Like a rock your repentance seemed to you;
Behold the marvel! of what avail
Was your rock, for a goblet has cleft it in
 two!
Bring wine for the king and the slave at the
  gate!
Alike for all is the banquet spread,
And drunk and sober are warmed and fed.
When the feast is done and the night grows
 late,
And the second door of the tavern gapes
 wide,
The low and the mighty must bow the head
'Neath the archway of life, to meet what.…
 outside?

Except thy road through affliction pass,
None may reach the halting-station of mirth;
God's treaty: Am I not Lord of the earth?
Man sealed with a sigh: Ah yes, alas!
Nor with Is nor Is Not let thy mind contend;
Rest assured all perfection of mortal birth
In the great Is Not at the last shall end.

For Asaf s pomp, and the steeds of the wind,
And the speech of birds, down the wind have
 fled,
And he that was lord of them all is dead;
Of his mastery nothing remains behind.
Shoot not thy feathered arrow astray!
A bow-shot's length through the air it has
  sped,
And then … dropped down in the dusty
 way.

But to thee, Oh Hafiz, to thee, Oh Tongue
That speaks through the mouth of the slender
 reed,
What thanks to thee when thy verses speed
From lip to lip, and the song thou hast sung?

Two further examples must be all we have space to include here to illustrate Gertrude Bell's methods. The first is her version of the opening Ghazal in the Diwan. …

Arise, Oh Cup-bearer, rise! and bring
To lips that are thirsting the bowl they praise,
For it seemed that love was an easy thing,
But my feet have fallen on difficult ways.
I have prayed the wind o'er my heart to fling
The fragrance of musk in her hair that
 sleeps—
In the night of her hair—yet no fragrance
  stays
The tears of my heart's blood my sad heart
 weeps.
Hear the Tavern-keeper who counsels you:
"With wine, with red-wine your prayer carpet
 dye!
There was never a traveller like him but knew
The ways of the road and the hostelry.

Where shall I rest, when the still night
 through,
Beyond thy gateway, Oh Heart of my heart,
The bells of the camels lament and cry:
"Bind up thy burden again and depart!"

The waves run high, night is clouded with
 fears,
And eddying whirlpools clash and roar;
How shall my drowning voice strike their ears
Whose light-frighted vessels have reached the
 shore?

I sought mine own; the unsparing years
Have brought me mine own, a dishonoured
 name.
What cloak shall cover my misery o'er
When each jesting mouth has rehearsed my
 shame!

Oh Hafiz, seeking an end to strife,
Hold fast in thy mind what the wise have
 writ:
'If at last thou attain the desire of thy life,
Cast the world aside, yea, abandon it!'

The second (and final) specimen is the rendering of the poem carved on Hafiz's tomb.…

What are the tidings of union? that I may
 arise—
Forth from the dust I will rise up to welcome
 thee!
My soul, like a homing bird, yearing for
 Paradise,
Shall arise and soar, from the snares of the
 world set free.
When the voice of thy love shall call me to
 be thy slave,
I shall rise to a greater far than the mastery
Of life and the living, time and the mortal
  span:

Pour down, oh Lord! from the clouds of thy
  guiding grace,
The rain of a mercy that quickeneth on my
  grave.
Before, like dust that the wind bears from
  place to place,
I arise and flee beyond the knowledge of man.
When to my grave thou turnest thy blessed
 feet,
Wine and the lute thou shalt bring in thine
 hand to me,
Thy voice shall ring through the folds of my
 winding-sheet,
And I will arise and dance to thy minstrelsy.
Though I be old, clasp me one night to thy
 breast,
And I, when the dawn shall come to awaken
 me,
With the flush of youth on my cheek from thy
 bosom will rise.
Rise up! let mine eyes delight in thy stately
  grace!
Thou art the goal to which all men's
 endeavour has pressed,
And thou the idol of Hafiz's worship; thy face
From the world and life shall bid him come
  forth and arise!

VI

While Gertrude Bell was still engaged in compiling her choice volume, Walter Leaf (1852-1927), the great Homeric scholar, was similarly employing himself, bringing to bear on Persian poetry a mind and a taste refined by long study of the classics: his Version from Hafiz came out in 1898. Whereas Miss Bell had deliberately thrown off the restraint of scrupulous fidelity to form and metre, Leaf had other views of the translator's duties. "Those who want them have not far to seek for translations of Hafiz.… They may scent in our Western winds the aroma from his Eastern garden, perfumed with musk of Tartary; they may gaze on the flame of rose and tulip, or taste of the tart and heady Persian wine, and wind their fingers in the ringlets of the beloved. But to the fifth sense of hearing not one, I think, has attempted to appeal, and the song of the Bulbul of Shiraz has fallen upon European ears only in measures transformed at best, often only in the wingless words of prose. But for Hafiz, at least as much as for any poet, form is of the essence of his poetry. More indeed than for the poets whom we know best. We have learnt from our Greek masters to seek the unity of a poet in thought or mood developed in it. Whether sensuous or intellectual, the unity is internal and essenial. To a Persian poet this is not so; and that is a hard lesson which we must learn before we can do full justice to Eastern art. In the Persian ode we find a succession of couplets often startling in their independence, in their giddy transitions from grave to gay, from thought to mood.… It is from the common metre and common rhyme alone that an ode gains a formal unity.… For all these reasons it seems worthwhile to make an attempt, however poor, to give English readers some idea of this most intimate and indissoluble bond of spirit and form in Hafiz. And with it all, one must try to convey some faint reminder of the fact that Hafiz is, as few poets have been, a master of words and rhythms.' And so Walter Leaf made his heroic and not wholly unsuccessful experiment of translating 18 of the odes into English verse, monorhymed and metred in conformity with their originals. The first is one of the best, a new version of the poem that attracted both Palmer and Gertrude Bell (the latter, as we have seen, uncommonly faithful to the Persian), it is to be noted that this ode is of doubtful authenticity, and has been rejected by Hafiz's latest and most learned Persian editors.

Minstrel, awake the sound of glee, joyous and
 eager, fresh and free;
Fill me a bumper bounteously, joyous and
  eager, fresh and free.

O for a bower and one beside, delicate,
  dainty, there to hide;
Kisses at will to seize and be joyous and
  eager, fresh and free.

Sweet is my dear, a thief of hearts; bravery,
 beauty, saucy arts,
Odours and unguents, all for me, joyous and
 eager, fresh and free.

How shall the fruit of life be thine, if thou
 refuse the fruitful vine?
Drink of the vine and pledge with me, joyous
  and eager, fresh and
  free.

Call me my Saki silver-limbed, bring me my
  goblet silver-rimmed;
Fain would I fill and drink to thee, joyous and
  eager, fresh and free.

Wind of the West, if e'er thou roam, pass on
 the way my fairy's home;
Whisper of Hafiz am'rously, joyous and eager,
 fresh and free.

Jones's Persian Song comes out thus in Leaf:

An if you Turk of Shiraz land this heart
 would take to hold in fee,
Bokhara town and Samarcand to that black
 mole my dower should be.

Ho, Saki, pour the wine-flask dry; in Eden's
 bowers we ne'er shall find

Musallas' rosy bed, nor streams of Ruknabad's
 delightsome lea.

Alack, these saucy Lulis, dear beguilers that
 the town embroil,
The wantons tear the heart-strings as the Turks
 their plunder-
 ban quetry.

On our frail love the loved One's pure
 perfection no dependence
 knows;

Can unguent, powder, paint and patch
 embellish faces fair, pardie?

Be wine and minstrel all thy theme; beware,
 nor plumb the deeps
 of fate;

For none hath found, nor e'er shall find by
  wit, that great enigma's
  key.

Of that fair favour Joseph wore, to make more
  fair the day, we know;
For him love bade Zulaikha tear apart her veil
  of pudency.
Thy words were hard, yet I submit; forgive
  thee God! Thy words
  were good;

The tart response beseemeth well the honeyed
 ruby lips of thee.

Give ear, my life! Perpend my words; for
  more dear e'en than life
  itself

To youth, so blest of Fortune, speaks the sage
  advice of ancientry.

The ode is made, the pearls are strung; go,
  Hafiz, sweetly sing thy
  lay;

With jewels from the Pleiad crown doth
 Heav'n engem thy minstrelsy.

Ingenious, but not poetry; the body of Hafiz, but not his soul; does not this type of literary exercise remind one of the set pieces that are written so cleverly by so many entrants for the competitions promoted by the weekly reviews, or done impromptu at Christmas parties? We add one more example, a bad one, to show how easily this technique of translation degenerates into parody, and to prove that Homer's editor, like Homer himself, sometimes nods.…

All bounds my heart is breaking; friends, haste
  to my salvation!
Woe's me! My secret hidden cries loud for
 proclamation.

'Mid reefs my bark is grounded; blow fair, O
 breeze of mercy;
Mayhap we win the Friend yet, Love's goal of
 navigation.

This ten-day smile of heaven swift passes like
  a tale told!
Be gracious while thou mayest, brook not
 procrastination.

That glass of Alexander naught save the bowl
  of wine was;
See all Darius' kingdom spread there in
 revelation.

Go to, thou lord of power, do thanks for
 fortune's dower,
Seek out the poor unfriended, raise up the
 lowly station.

All peace within the two worlds, two words
  alone assure it,
"Tow'rd lovers loving-kindness, tow'rd foes
 dissimulation."

Ringed round with wine and roses, sweet sang
  the bulbul yestreen,
"Bring quick the morning goblet; friends,
 watch in expectation."

All entry men forbid me inside the gate of
  virtue;
So, sir, and wilt thou scorn me? Go, change
  predestination!

More sweet to me than kisses, more soft than
 maiden's cheeks are,
That bitter named of Sufis "Dam of
 abomination."

When comes the hour of sadness, turn thou to
 wine and gladness;
Karuns of beggars maketh wine's chemic
 transmutation.

Wine-flecked is Hafiz' cassock, yet not of
 choice he dons it;
Ah, Shaikh of hem unspotted, hear thou my
 exculpation!

It seems a fairly safe guess that this translation has given pleasure to nobody but the translator; certainly it presents Hafiz in a particularly unfavourable guise; and matters are not helped by the fact that Leaf was working from a text which has set the order of lines in the poem completely awry.

VII

Walter Leaf was not long in finding a convert to his theory. In 1901, printed for the Villon society for private circulation, in three elegant white-bound volumes came The Poems of Shemseddin Mohammed Hafiz of Shiraz, with a title-page proclaiming them 'now first completely done into English verse from the Persian, in accordance with the original forms.' The translator was John Payne, who had previously exercised his ingenuity in making versions of Francois Villon, Boccaccio's Decameron, The Arabian Nights, Omar Khayyam, etc. That was the kind of man he was: after his death, a John Payne Society sought to keep alive his name. Undeniably he had remarkable qualities and a rare gift of rhyming; but his versions of Hafiz suggest that he had little literary taste, and no powers of self-criticism, for a more wearisome and turgid collection it would be difficult to find. To parody Richard le Gallienne, "Is it good translation to turn what is such pleasure for the East into positive Payne for the West?" In a preliminary discourse Payne argues verbosely the case for excluding all mysticism from the interpretation of Hafiz: his concluding summary of the poet's character perhaps best illustrates his view-point. "Unbound by our laws and unfettered by our prescriptions, above our approof and beyond our blame, such as Hafiz are not to be tried by our standards or condemned by our limitations; they have an inalienable title to the privilege which forms the foundation of our English judicial system; they can only be judged by their peers. Like Shakespeare, like Socrates, like Mendelsohn, Hafiz was one of the children of the bridechamber, who mourn not, for the bridegroom is with them. Happy, thrice happy those rare elect ones among the servants of the Ideal, to whom it is given, through shower and sunshine and without default against their august vocation, to cull the rose of hilarity from the storm-swept meads of life, who are gifted to respire with impurity the intoxicating breath of the lilies and jessamines of love and joy.… These are the Parthemogeniti of life; they need no purification, as do those who have come out of great tribulation and have made white their robes in the blood of the Lamb; intemerate and free were they born, as the flowers of the field, and pure and incontaminable shall they abide for ever. Like Ben Jonson's lily of a day, they are the plants and flowers of light; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet eternity is full of their glory." Hafiz would be surprised at such a tribute!

There, in three volumes, is the whole of Hafiz and pseudo-Hafiz, done to death by John Payne, a literary crime as monstrous as murder: it is more than a little shocking to find Edward Burne-Jones named as the principal accessory before the act, to him being dedicated "this book which owed its completion to his urgent instance." How much Persian did Payne really know? It is difficult to answer this question: for he had available to him, as others have unfortunately had, the extraordinary complete prose-rendering of Henry Wilberforce Clarke (Calcutta, 1891), with its odd critical and explanatory notes," and all that he needed to do was to use this as a hazardous crib, rejecting, as suited his taste, all Clarke's ingenious mystical interpretations. On the whole, it seems inevitable to condemn John Payne for the not uncommon offence of plagiarising the pundits. Fortunately, the small circulation to which he condemned his book has limited the damage it has done to Hafiz' reputation. We quote three typical specimens: first, Jones's Persian Song is yet another key.

Lo but that Turk of Shiraz take My heart
  within her hand of snow,
Bokhara, ay, and Samarcand On her black
  mole will I bestow.

Give, cupbearer, the wine that's left; For
  thou'lt not find in Paradise
The banks of Ruknabad nor yet Musella's
  rosegarths all a-glow.

Alack, these saucy sweet-sellers, These town-
  perturbing gipsy maids!
They ravish patience from the heart, As
  Turkmans plunder from the
  foe.

The beauty of the Friend of love Imperfect
 independent is;
What need of patch and pencilling And paint
 have lovely faces, trow?

The tale of wine and minstrel tell Nor after
  heaven's secrets seek;
For this enigma to resolve None ever knew
  nor yet shall know.

For that still-waxing loveliness That Joseph
  had, too well I knew
That love would cause Zuleikha forth The veil
  of continence to go.
Thou spak'st me ill; Yet I'm content. God
 pardon thee! Thou
 spakest well;
For bitter answers well on lips Of sugar-
  dropping ruby show.
To admonition lend thine ear, O soul; for
  dearer than the soul
To happy youths the counsels are Which from
  wise elders' lips do
  flow.
Songs thou hast made and jewels strung.
  Come, Hafiz, and recite
  them well,

So heaven on thy string of pearls The
  clustered Pleiades may strow.

That is undoubtedly one of Payne's least offensive efforts. The following version runs truer to form …

For our pain no cure, ywis, is. Help! oh help!
For our woes no end in bliss is. Help! oh
  help!
Faith and heart they've ta'en and threaten now
  the soul:
'Gainst these cruel cockatrices. Help! oh help!
Help, against the heart-enslavers pitiless,
Souls who seek in price of kisses! Help! oh
  help!
See, our blood they drink, these stony-hearted
  trulls!
Muslims, say, what cure for this is? Help! oh
 help!
Day and night, I fare distracted, weep and
 burn,
As the wont of me, Hafiz, is. Help! oh help!

This rendering writes its own epitaph: it is equally appropriate to the next.…

When my Beloved the cup in hand taketh
The market of lovely ones slack demand
 taketh.
I, like a fish, in the ocean am fallen,
Till me with the hook yonder Friend to land
  taketh.

Every one saith, who her tipsy eye seeth,
"Where is a shrieve, that this fair firebrand
  taketh?"

Ho, at her feet in lament am I fallen,
Till the Beloved me by the hand taketh.

Happy his heart who, like Hafiz, a goblet
Of wine of the Prime Fore-eternal's brand
 taketh.

Can it be seriously maintained that this kind of translation is either Hafiz or poetry?

VIII

It is small wonder that so excellent a critic as Richard le Gallienne, when he came to the task of putting Hafiz into English, revolted against John Payne's theory and practice, and found it expedient to enunciate principles of translation whose validity can hardly be questioned. "Surely the only service of translation is to make the foreign poet a poet of one's own country—not to present him as a half-Anglicized foreigner speaking neither his own language nor our own.… no translation, however learned, is of any value that does not give at least some of the joy to the reader that was given by its original. Hafiz has for centuries been one of the great literary joys of the Orient. Is it good translation to turn what is such pleasure for the East into positive pain for the West?" le Gallienne was the first to address himself to the task of translating Hafiz while admittedly possessing no knowledge whatsoever of the Persian language; and it is highly interesting to read his defence. "I feel myself justified in thinking that in their translations (i.e., those of Wilberforce Clarke and Payne) I have as trustworthy, if not more trustworthy, material for the making of an English rendering than if I had studied Persian for myself for ten years. Were I to make such original studies, I should arrive in the end no nearer to the poet's meaning than the previous labours of Colonel Clarke or Mr. Payne enable me to do by the comparatively right study of their translations. It is true that I should have formed some notion for myself of the metrical music of Hafiz.… but to have heard that music would, I feel sure, more than ever have convinced me of the futility of any attempt to reproduce it in English." On the attempts to copy Persian rhymes and metres in English he writes, "so distasteful to English ideas are the metrical devices and adornments pleasing to a Persian ear that the attempt to reproduce them in English can only result in the most tiresome literary antics, a mirth-less buffoonery of verse compared with which Browning at his grotesquest is endurable. Rhythms, which in Persian, doubtless, make the sweetest chiming, fitted with English words, become mere vulgar and ludicrous jingle." On another cardinal point, the alleged incoherence of Hafiz, le Gallienne has something instructive to say: "The difficulty of inconsequence I have endeavoured to overcome, partly by choosing those poems that were least inconsequent, partly by supplying links of my own, and partly by selecting and developing the most important motive out of the two or three different motives which one frequently finds in the same ode!" Finally, his purpose in what he did. "My aim has been to make English poetry—rather than a joyless shadow of a great classic. I offer this rendering, in the first place as poetry, in the second as translation; but, at the same time, my aim has been, as faithfully as in me lies, truly to interpret the great Persian poet to English readers, so that the total result of my endeavour is really—if not literally Hafiz."

There are one hundred le Gallienne translations for those to analyse who may wish to make an extended study of his methods, and the total volume of his contribution to the interpretation of Hafiz. In this essay we will confine ourselves to a handful of examples based on well-known originals. Here is part of the opening poem of the Diwan:

Saki, for God's love, come and fill my glass;
   Wine for a breaking heart, 0 Saki, bring!

For this strange love which seemed at first,
  alas!
    So simple and so innocent a thing,

How difficult, how difficult it is!
  Because the night-wind kissed the scented
 curl
  On the white brow of a capricious girl,

And, passing, gave me half the stolen kiss,
  Who would have thought one's heart could
 blead and break

For such a very little thing as this?
    Wine, Saki, wine—red wine, for pity's
  sake!

O Saki, would to God that I might die!
   Would that this moment I might hear the
 bell
    That bids the traveller for the road
 prepare,
   Be the next stopping-place heaven or hell!

Strange caravan of death—no fears have I
    Of the dark journey, gladly would I dare

The fearful river and the whirling pools;
   Ah! they that dwell upon the other side,
   What know they of the burdens that we
 bear?
   With lit-up happy faces having died,
   What know they of love's bitter mystery,
   The love that makes so sad a fool of me?
A fool of Hafiz!—Yea, a fool of fools.

This version is of course very free; it expands and inserts considerably; but in the end it comes out faithful enough to the spirit of Hafiz, in spite of a number of features ("With lit-up happy faced having died") which are purely English and characteristically le Gallienne; and it has a pleasing dignity. This translation, then, can be safely pronounced successful after its kind, though not by any means perfect. The tale of the Persian Song is somewhat different.

You little Turk of Shiraz-town,
   Freebooter of the hearts of men,
As beautiful, as says renown,
   Are your freebooting Turcomen;
Dear Turco-maid—a plunderer too—
   Here is my heart, and there your hand:
If you'll exchange, I'll give to you
  Bokhara—yes! and Samarcand.
  Indeed, I'd give them for the mole
Upon your cheek, and add thereto,
 Even my body and my soul.
Come, bearer of the shining cup,
 Bring the red grape into the sun,
That we may drink, and drink it up,
 Before our little day is done;
 For Ruknabad shall run and run,
And each year, punctual as spring,
The new-born nightingale shall sing
Unto Musella's new-born rose;
But we shall not know anything,
Nor laugh, nor weap, nor anywise
Listen or speak, fast closed our eyes
And shut our ears—in Paradise!

You little robber-woman, you
 That turn the heads of Shiraz-town,
With sugar-talk and sugar-walk
 And all your little sugar-ways,—
Into the sweet-shop of your eyes
  I innocently gaze and gaze,
  While, like your brethren of renown,
O little Turk of Shiraz, you
Plunder me of my patience too.

Yet all too well the lover knows
 The loved one needs no lover's praise;
What other perfume needs the rose?
Perfection needs no words of ours
 Nor heeds what any song-bird says—
Sufficient unto flowers are flowers.

Nay, give it up! nor try to probe
 Secret of her, or any heaven;
It is a most distracting globe—
  Seven the stars, our sins are seven;
Above no answer, nor below:
Let's call the Saki—he may know;
Yes, who knows, HE may know.

O love, that was not very kind!
 That answer that you gave to me;
Nay, I mistook, you spoke me well!
 For you to speak at all to me
 Is unforeseen felicity;
Yea, bitter on your lips grows sweet
 And soft your hardest words to me.

Sweetheart, if you would hearken me,
 I am a very wise old thing,
And it were wise of you to hear.
My little Turk, my cypress dear,
 So wise the wisdom that I sing
 That some day on a shining string
High up in heaven, tear by tear,
  As star by star, these songs shall hang
At evening on the vested sky,
 These little songs that Hafiz sang,
  To one that heard not on his knees:
So well I sang them—even I—
 That, listening to them, Heaven's Lord

Tossed me from heaven as reward
The small change of the Pleiades!—
These little songs that Hafiz sang
To one that heard not on his knees.

However this version may strike an English reader unaware of Persian, to those who are familiar with the original Hafiz its inadequacies and misrepresentations are all too apparent; it is altogether too girlish for Hafiz; and there are some terrible arch touches that only the Edwardian age for which le Gallienne was then writing could fully appreciate. As with Jones, so with le Gallienne, time and environment played their part; and unhappily the pleasantry of one generation has a way of becoming the slang of the next, and the very acme of triteness to the following. Jones has his 'blooming Hebrew boy' to make us snigger; and le Gallienne his 'you little robber-woman, you' and his 'wise old thing' to make us shiver; and the significant fact about all this is that there is nothing in the poetry of Hafiz that the years have soured or current speech debased. The unhappy mixture of good and bad, felicitous and unfelicitous, which mars le Gallienne's version of the Persian Song is seen again in this third and final example, an ode which Jones in his day made into very fair French.…

Shiraz, city of the heart,
    God preserve thee!
Pearl of capitals thou art,
    Ah! to serve thee.

Ruknabad, of thee I dream,
   Fairy river:
Whoso drinks thy running stream
   Lives for ever.

Wind that blows from Ispahan,
   Whence thy sweetness?
Flowers ran with thee as thou ran
   With such fleetness.

Flowers from Jafarabad,
   Made of flowers;
Thou for half-way house hast had
   Musalla's bowers.

Right through Shiraz the path goes
   Of perfection;
Anyone in Shiraz knows
   Its direction.

Spend not on Egyptian sweets
   Shiraz money;
Sweet enough in Shiraz streets
   Shiraz honey.

East Wind, hast thou aught to tell
   Of my gipsy?
Was she happy? Was she well?
   Was she tipsy?

Wake me not, I pray thee, friend,
  From my sleeping;
Soon my little dream must end;
   Waking's weeping.

Hafiz, though his blood she spill,
   Right he thinks it;
Like mother's milk 'tis his will
   That she drinks it.

What a pity, that so pleasant a poem is spoiled by the false note of 'Was she tipsy'!

IX

Nothing further happened to Hafiz in English after le Gallienne in 1905, until in 1921 the Oxford University Press published Elizabeth Bridges' Sonnets from Hafiz & Other Verses, in its own way and within its all too limited scope a most interesting and significant contribution. "The last fifteen pieces in this book," writes the late Laureate's daughter, "are not translations. Their aim is rather to convey if possible something of the original spirit than to give a faithful rendering of either thought or form; and I have not scrupled to omit, insert, alter or even deliberately to pervert the idea as fancy or feeling dictated. Some of the poems follow the Persian fairly closely … others are merely founded on or suggested, by one or two couplets!" This introduces a new technique, admittedly more revolutionary even than le Gallienne's; but it is a technique which may well have a greater following in the future. Here is an example of the less literal versions, obviously based on Ode of the Diwan.

Arise, O cup-bearer, and bring
Fresh wine for our enrapturing!
O minstrel, of our sorrow sing
'O joy of whose delight we dreamed,
'O love that erst so easy seemed,
'What toil is in thy travelling!'

How in the loved one's tent can I
Have any rest or gaiety?
Ever anon the horsemen cry,
'O lingering lover, fare thee weli!'
Ever I hear the jingling bell
Of waiting steed and hornessry.

O seeker who wouldst surely bring
To happy end thy wandering,
O learner who wouldst truly know,
Let not earth's loves arrest thee. Go!
Mad thee with heaven's pure wine; and fling
To those clear skies thy rapturing.

In one version Elizabeth Bridges imitates metre and monorhyme.…

Where is the pious doer? and 1, the estray'd
 one, where?
Behold how far the distance, from his safe
 home to here!

Dark is the stony desert, trackless and vast
 and dim,
Where is hope's guiding lantern? Where is
 faith's star so fair?

My heart fled from the cloister, and chant of
 monkish hymn,
What can avail me sainthood, fasting and
 punctual prayer?

Wht is the truth shall light me to heaven's
 strait thoroughfare?
Whither, O heart, thou hastest? Arrest thee,
 and beware!

See what a lone adventure is thine unending
  guest!
Fraught with what deadly danger! Set with
  what unseen snare!

Say not, O friend, to Hafiz, 'Quiet thee now
  and rest!'
Calm and content, what are they? Patience and
 peace O where?

Unfortunately fifteen pieces are not enough to satisfy: even less sufficient are the few examples which R. A. Nicholson has published in translation of Hafiz; and much could have been expected from his pen, which has represented the mystical lyrics of Rumi so superbly well. His method, in the specimens published in Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, 1922), is very similar to that of Miss Bridges: "Some," he writes, "are pieced together from verses which occur in different odes, while others are free or fairly literal translations of passages in the same ode," adding in another place, "in a few from Hafiz. I have taken the same kind of liberty which Fitzgerald used in his version of Omar Khayyam." His version of the first ode is fairly complete.

Saki, pass the cup and pour,
Pour me out the balmy drink!
Love, who seemed so light of yore,
Underneath his load I sink.
Quoth mine ancient Guide, who knows
Every inn upon the way:
"Well for you if purple flows
O'er the carpet as ye pray!"
Zephyr, quick! blow loose the knot
Of my sweetheart's tangled hair!
Tis the heart of all the plot
Laid against my life, I swear.
Sea and storm and dead of night,
Midst the whirlpool's ghastly roar:
Ah, what know they of our plight,
Happy loiterers on the shore?
In this mansion of Farewell
Pleasure, ere it comes, is gone,
Where a never silent bell
Tolls "Arise and journey on!"
Hafiz, tired of blame and praise,
If thy spirit longs for rest,
Leave the world and all its ways,
Clasp the Loved One to thy breast!

Three verses from a single ode inspire a truly poetic version.…

Mortals never won to view thee,
Yet a thousand lovers woo thee;
Not a nightingale but knows
In the rosebud sleeps the rose.

Love is where the glory falls
Off thy face: on convent walls
Or on tavern floors the same
Unextinguishable flame.

Where the turban'd anchorite
Chanteth Allah day and night,
Churchbells ring the call to prayer,
And the Cross of Christ is there.

And a couplet provides the original of verses which are in the true tradition of English metaphysical poetry.…

The calm circumference of life
When I would fain have kept,
Time caught me in the tide of strife
And to the centre swept.

Of this fierce glow which love and you
Within my breast inspire,
The Sun is but a spark that flew
And set the heavens afire!

To complete this review of the English verse-translations of Hafiz it only remains to mention P. L. Stallard's thirty-three Renderings from the Dewan of Khwaja Shamsu 'ddin Mahammad Hafiz Shirazi (Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1937). This book, which, if it is not the best, at least is not the worst that has been published on Hafiz, brings nothing new to the general problem; but it may be interesting to cite these latest versions of two old favourites.

First, Ode 1.

Pour, pour the wine, Ha! Saki: aye, and
  speed!
For love seemed easy once that now is hard!

At length, though breezes bring the breath of
  nard
From her dark tress, in its glint hearts must
  bleed!

See! If the ancient Magian bid thee so,
With wine thy prayer-mat tincture thou: for,
 say,
Shall he that travelled by the path not know
The road's each stage and fashion of the way?

Here in Love's inn what solace mine, or rest,
While still complain the camel-bells a-chime
Ceaseless, and call that now, and now, 'tis
 time
We bound our litters to new bournes addrest?

Fear of the mounting sea, mirk of the night,
Right horror of the whirlpool, all our state
How should they know, who with their burden
 light
To the far shore have passed the sundering
 strait?

I thought my works to prosper in self-will,
And all, thereby, in ill-repute have end!
Where lies inviolate that secret still
The which the companies of saints perpend?

Would'st thou gain to His presence, Hafiz? So
Go not about thyself from Him to hide.
But, reaching thither, cleave thou to His side,
And for the Loved let all the World's pride
 go!

Second, the Persian Song:

Should that little chit of Shiraz
   Bear my heart within her hand,
For her cheek's swart mole I'd barter
   Bukhara and Samarcand!

Bring me wine, boy, all remaining;
   For in Paradise no flowers
Fledge the Ruknabad, nor blossom
   Roses in Musalla's bowers.

But, ah! as the Turk his plunder,
   So my heart's ease have they ta'en
All these wantons and these fair ones,
    Wrecking cities in their train.

Yet, for love as lame as mine is,
   Is my darling's scorn the meed
As for patches, paints, and potions,
   Stands what perfect face in need?

Bring a tale of wine and minstrels:
   Leave Time's secret where it lies;
None have yet, nor shall, unravel
   Mysteries that transcend the wise.

Well I know how Yusuf s beauty,
   Shining as an ampler day,
Rent Zulaikha's veil, and rending
   Stole her chastity away.

Yet lean ear to counsel, darling:
   Youths who'd prosper ever hold,
Dearer than the breath within them,
   By the wisdom of the old!

Didst thou twit me? God forgive thee!
   Spak'st me fair? But then we know
Tart words ill become that ruby
   Lip of thine, that sugared bow!

Hafiz, come! Thou'st done thy rhyming,
   Strung thy pearls; the Pleiads throng
To shed splendour from the chiming
   Circles on thy well-tuned song!

It seems a pity about chit and twit, and it is a pity that Longfellow should have spoken of mournful numbers in this particular metre, but there it is. And these, for the present, ends the long catalogue of those who have occupied their time and wit putting Hafiz of Shiraz into English rhyme.