Hafiz - A New World
Ivan M. Granger July 22nd, 2009
A New World
by Hafiz
English version by Haleh Pourafzal and Roger Montgomery
Let’s offer flowers, pour a cup of libation,
split open the skies and start anew on creation.
If the forces of grief invade our lovers’ veins,
cupbearer and I will wash away this temptation.
With rose water we’ll mellow crimson wine’s bitter cup;
we’ll sugar the fire to sweeten smoke’s emanation.
Take this fine lyre, musician, strike up a love song;
let’s dance, sing all night, go wild in celebration.
As dust, O West Wind, let us rise to the Heavens,
floating free in Creator’s glow of elation.
If mind desires to return while heart cries to stay,
here’s a quarrel for love’s deliberation.
Alas, these words and songs go for naught in this land;
come, Hafez, let’s create a new generation.
— from The Spiritual Wisdom of Hafez: Teachings of the Philosopher of Love, by Haleh Pourafzal / Roger Montgomery
/ Photo by Paul Keller - A new generation at the Tomb of Hafez /
It’s been far too long since we last had a selection by Hafiz, so today… A New World.
split open the skies and start anew on creation.
The lines of this poem read like lovely poetic embellishments, but there is more going on here than ecstatic wordplay. Beneath the poetry, Hafiz is using precise esoteric language. The “rose” of the rose water. A “fire” that is also sweet. Becoming as egoless as dust before the West Wind… Meanings to contemplate and explore within.
If mind desires to return while heart cries to stay,
here’s a quarrel for love’s deliberation.
I particularly like these lines. The “mind” Hafiz is talking about is the conceptualizing, projecting mind. It is this mind that must be absent (or stilled) before we can see reality directly. When we do this, our sense of self shifts. We no longer imagine ourselves to be the little ego, we find ourselves centered deeply at home within the heart. For the first time we fully recognize the heart as being present.
But — if the mind desires to return once we have discovered the presence of the heart, well, that’s a dilemma… “a quarrel of love’s deliberation.”
come, Hafez, let’s create a new generation.
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Hafiz
Iran/Per (1320 - 1389) Timeline |
Hafiz, whose given name was Shams-ud-din Muhammad, is the most beloved poet of Persia. Born in Shiraz, he lived at about the same time as Chaucer in England and about one hundred years after Rumi. He spent nearly all his life in Shiraz, where he became a famous Sufi master. When he died he was thought to have written an estimated 5,000 poems, of which 500 to 700 have survived. His Divan (collected poems) is a classic in the literature of Sufism. The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the efforts of Goethe, whose enthusiasm rubbed off on Ralph Waldo Emerson, who translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Hafiz’s poems were also admired by such diverse writers as Nietzsche, Pushkin, Turgenev, Carlyle, and Garcia Lorka; even Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz in one of the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1923, Hazrat Inayat Khan, the Indian teacher often credited with bringing Sufism to the West, proclaimed that “the words of Hafiz have won every heart that listens.”
– From The Gift: Poems of Hafiz the Great Sufi Master
If you are looking for versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky, click here.
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