Oct 25 2024
Hafiz – I feel this yen
I feel this yen
by Hafiz
English version by Erfan Mojib & Gary Gach
I feel this yen
To tell you
Of my heart
–
The language of love
Remains untold
In any human tongue
–
My words are veiled
The way the rose
Emerges from a bud
–
I don’t know who is living
Inside this weary heart of mine
For I am silent but he
Is always full of sound & fury
–
If you’re not our classmate
In the School of Love —
Drown your notebook !
( True knowledge isn’t there. )
–
Where is the mystic
Who understands
The language
Of
The lilies
?
Why do they leave
Only to return again
?
— from Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, Translated by Erfan Mojib / Translated by Gary Gach
/ Image by Jon Butterworth /
Even though he is greatly beloved, I don’t feature Hafiz as often as his status might merit. The main reason for that is because, frankly, there is a lot of confusion in the English-speaking world about what is and is not genuine Hafiz poetry.
The confusion arises because of Daniel Ladinsky’s popular book of poetry, The Gift. Ladinsky’s books put me in an awkward spot. I really like the poetry from Ladinsky’s books… but, well, they aren’t actually by Hafiz. Ladinsky’s The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master actually contains no lines of poetry written by the great Sufi poet Hafiz!
Daniel Ladinsky seems to acknowledge this in his introduction to the book, when he writes, “I feel my relationship to Hafiz defies all reason… I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to ‘my artists and seekers.’”
You might say that Ladinsky’s poetry is “inspired by” Hafiz. Or, if you prefer a broader interpretation, you could say Ladinsky channels Hafiz. But his “translations” are not the historical writings of Hafiz. From the more limited scholar’s definition, these are poems by Daniel Ladinsky, not Hafiz.
So here’s what I do: I enjoy Ladinsky’s playful, profound poetry, but I look to other books to savor the historical poetry of Hafiz that Sufis and seekers have delighted in for centuries…
These snippets that I am featuring today are genuine lines of Hafiz poetry, however. The collection I found them in Hafiz’s Little Book of Life is an inspired, mischievous sampler of lines from Hafiz, often just one or two couplets per page, inviting you to open to any page to see what the poet has to say to you in the moment — a practice common with Hafiz poetry in many parts of the Persian-speaking world.
I love the images of these lines–
My words are veiled
The way the rose
Emerges from a bud
They suggest the way deep meaning is hidden within simple words, the way all of reality, really, holds such life within it, just waiting to blossom into fullness within our awareness.
Where is the mystic
Who understands
The language
Of
The lilies
?
Why do they leave
Only to return again
?
Hafiz
Iran/Persia (1320 – 1389) Timeline |
If you are looking for versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky, click here.