Shirazi Turk


Shirazi Turk is a ghazal by the 14th-century Persian poet Hāfez of Shiraz. It has been described as "the most familiar of Hafez's poems in the English-speaking world". It was the first poem of Hafez to appear in English, when William Jones made his paraphrase "A Persian Song" in 1771, based on a Latin version supplied by his friend Károly Reviczky. Edward Granville Browne wrote of this poem: "I cannot find so many English verse-renderings of any other of the odes of Ḥáfiẓ." It is the third poem in the collection of Hafez's poems, which are arranged alphabetically by their rhymes.
More recently this ode has inspired a number of scholarly articles and some controversy. Should it be taken at face value, as a poem in which the poet describes his unrequited love for a handsome youth, and turns to wine as a consolation? Or does it also conceal a hidden Sufi meaning describing the path of Love leading to union with God? Is the Turk male or female? Was he or she a real person or an imaginary one? Another topic that has been discussed is whether the poem is coherent, or whether it fails to have a unified theme.
In the century after Hafez's death, a famous anecdote was told of how the Mongol conqueror Timur met Hafez and criticised him for writing so disrespectfully of Bokhara and Samarkand in this poem. This story first appears in a work called Anis al-Nas by Shoja' Shirazi, and it was elaborated on in a collection of biographies of poets completed in 1486 by Dawlatshah Samarqandi. If this meeting took place, which is not certain, it must have been during Tamerlane's first visit to Shiraz in 1387, two years before Hafez's death.
It has been argued that the poem is likely to have been written after 1370, when Tamerlane began to develop Samarkand and make it famous as his capital. If so, it was probably written later in Hafez's life, since in 1370 he was 53 or 55.

The poem

The transliteration given here is based on that approved by the United Nations in 2012, which represents the current pronunciation of educated speakers in Iran, except that to make scansion easier, the long vowels are marked with a macron. The glottal stop is written, and kh is written x.
Prose translations of the poem can be found in Clarke, pp. 40–43, Windfuhr, Hillmann, and Ingenito. A number of poetic versions are quoted in part or in full by Arberry.
The Persian text of the poem, and recordings in Persian, are available on the Ganjoor website.

Metre

The metre is known as hazaj. Each bayt or verse is made of four sections of eight syllables each. In Elwell-Sutton's system, this metre is classified as 2.1.16, and it is used in 25 of Hafez's 530 poems.
"Overlong" syllables, which take up the place of a long plus a short syllable in the metre, are underlined.

The text

The text of the poem is not entirely certain. The version given above is that of Muhammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani. However, of ten manuscripts examined by Mas'ud Farzaad, in fact only two have the above text.
Nine of the ten manuscripts agree on the order of verses 1–5 and 9. But concerning verses 6–8 there is more disagreement. One manuscript has the order 1, 2, 7, 6, 3, 9, omitting 4, 5 and 8. Another manuscript omits verses 6 and 7. In the other manuscripts verses 6, 7, and 8 are found in various orders: 7, 8, 6; 8, 7, 6; and 6, 8, 7.
Bashiri argued that verses 6 and 7 are interpolations, and Rehder suggested that one or both of verses 4 and 8 might be spurious.
Eight of the manuscripts have a different version of verse 6.

A Sufic interpretation?

The practice of Sufism was widespread in Iran during these centuries and greatly influenced Persian poetry. However, how far this poem of Hafez is to be taken in a mystical sense is disputed. One of those who interpreted it mystically is Clarke, who explains that the Turk symbolises God, Samarkand and Bukhara signify this world and the next, the wine is the mysteries of love, and so on.
However, not all scholars see a mystical interpretation in this poem. Gertrude Bell, for example, in her Poems from the Divan of Hafiz, p. 129, wrote:
E. G. Browne in volume 3 of his Literary History of Persia wrote:
Similarly in the 16th century, the Turkish commentator on Hafez, Ahmed Sudi, adopted a literal approach to Hafez's poetry, rejecting the excessively mystical interpretations of his predecessors Süruri and Şemʿi.
The ruler of Shiraz in Hafez's time, Shah Shoja', also found both aspects, spiritual and worldly, in Hafez's poems. He is said to have complained that Hafez's poetry was "at one moment mystical, at another erotic and bacchanalian; now serious and spiritual, and again flippant and worldly". Many modern commentators agree with Browne and Bell, and the majority accept the ode at its face value.
Iraj Bashiri on the other hand argues strongly for a Sufic interpretation of this poem. He compares this poem with another of Hafez's ghazals, Sīne mālāmāl, which is more obviously Sufic in character. According to Bashiri, both poems describe the seven stages of Love an initiate must go through to achieve union with the Divine.
Bashiri also draws attention to certain apparent astronomical references: the Sun, Saturn, Venus and other bright planets, the seven planets, the Pleiades, and the firmament itself, all of which can be given Sufic meanings. His interpretation is at odds with that of Hillmann, who dismisses Bashiri's article as unscholarly.
However, even Hillmann acknowledges that in this poem there is a certain ambivalence – the ambiguity or īhām for which Hafez is famous. "The allusion to Joseph and Zulaykha may seem to some to be wholly in the spiritual area of the spectrum, whereas the minstrel-and-wine image in bayt 8 and the self-praise in bayt 9 perhaps can be taken only as part of the physical world." The question of the intent of the poem therefore is open to interpretation, some scholars taking it wholly as a physical description of love, others like Arberry as a "grand philosophical utterance".

Gender of the Turk

Whether the Turk is male or female is not expressed grammatically in Persian. Many of the earliest translators of this poem all translated it as though the Turk were female, beginning with William Jones, whose version begins: "Sweet maid, if thou wouldst charm my sight...". Herman Bicknell is an exception, writing "If that Shirâzian Turk would deign to take my heart within his hand, To make his Indian mole my own, I'd give Bokhára and Samarḳand."
In fact, although in the great Persian narrative epics and romances the love interest was always female, there was also a long tradition of love poetry in both Arabic and Persian in which, in the great majority of cases, the person whose beauty was praised was male. Among the Persian poets who wrote love poems of this kind were Farrokhi, Manuchehri, Sanai, Anvari, Iraqi, Saadi and Awhadi. Often the object of the poet's admiration was described as a "Turk", as in the couplet below from a qasida of Manuchehri :
Saadi, who like Hafez was from Shiraz, used the phrase "Shirazi Turk" a century before Hafez:
Khwaju Kermani, another poet resident in Shiraz a generation before Hafez, wrote:
In poems of the early part of the period the object of the poet's love was often a soldier; later he became any kind of adolescent youth, but military metaphors continued to be used to describe the effect his beauty had on the poet.
Most modern scholars are therefore in agreement that Hafez's "Shirazi Turk" was male. However, there are some exceptions. Leonard Lewisohn, with reference to the Beloved, writes: "Gender is always ambiguous in Persian, but in Hafiz’s verse the Witness is nearly always female".
Another question is whether the Turk in this poem was really Turkish, and a real person, or simply a poetic invention. The 16th-century Bosnian-Turkish commentator on Hafez, Ahmed Sudi wrote:
But Sudi also reports another theory:
A suggestion by Hafez's editor Qasem Ghani that the Turk might have been the son of Shah Shoja', one of the rulers of the time, is dismissed as "improbable" by Hillmann in view of the fact that "Turk" usually simply means "beloved" and that the phrase had already been used by Saadi.

Verse 1

The xāl-e Hendū was regarded as a symbol of beauty on the face of the beloved. The phrase also appears in a ghazal of Saadi, quoted by Arberry, in which Saadi contrasts the darkness of the mole with the paleness of the beloved's face:

Verse 2

The internal rhyme in the first half of this verse, which has bi-taryāqi wa-lā rāqī "neither remedy nor enchanter". There is another internal rhyme in verse 9 of this poem: qazal goftī o dor softī. Whenever such internal rhymes occur, they almost always coincide with the end of a metrical foot.

Verse 3

Concerning the xān-e yaqmā, Herman Bicknell explains: "In Turkistán, if we may believe tradition, there was formerly a military institution called the "Feast of Plunder," at which the soldiers, when their pay-day came, violently carried off dishes of rice, and other dishes placed upon the ground. They were thus reminded that rapine and plunder were their lawful pursuits."
The idea behind this line is that the "Turk" plunders the heart of the poet, as in this verse of Saadi:

Verse 4

The idea that a beautiful face has no need for cosmetics or jewellery is contained in the following verse of Saadi:
The translator Herman Bicknell, who spent some months in Shiraz in 1868, points out that the word rtl=yes, besides signifying "water," is applied to powder for the complexion. "Of this powder two sorts are sold at Shíráz, one our pearl-powder, the other rouge. They are respectively named rtl=yes and rtl=yes ". He also reports that women in Persia in his day made artificial moles or beauty spots, either permanent by tattooing them, or temporary ones.
Hillmann translates xat as "eye-liner " and Windfuhr as "eyeline". However, the normal meaning of xat in Persian love poetry is the line of the growing moustache which adorns an adolescent boy's lip. If so, it would refer to an actual physical feature of the face rather than to make-up. The phrase xāl o xatt is frequent in the poets, as in the following line of Hafez:

Verse 5

In verse 5, reference is made to the Qur'anic/Biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, who in Islamic tradition is called Zulaykhā. Those who interpret this poem non-mystically do not give a satisfactory motivation for this verse. However, in Sufism, the story was widely used as an example. John Renard writes:

Verse 6

Eight of the manuscripts have a different version of verse 6, namely:
The first of these two lines is actually a quotation from a ghazal of Saadi.

Verse 8

The word hekmat means "wisdom, science, knowledge, philosophy". It is a frequent theme of other Hafez poems that it is love, not reason or intellect, which helps the seeker on his spiritual journey and provides the answer to the riddle of life in a perplexing world.
The phrase 'eqd-e sorayyā "the necklace of Sorayya " occurs in earlier Persian poets also. A well-known instance is in the rhymed prose in the introduction to Saadi's Golestān:
Bicknell explains "heaven may scatter the necklace of the Pleiades on your poetry" as meaning "may fling as largess to express her delight".

Critical reception

This ode has been admired by numerous scholars and translators. Arberry writes of the last verse: "The 'clasp' theme here used is a very common one, but its present treatment is scarcely surpassed for beauty in the whole Dīvān." Hillmann writes: "A first impression of the 'Turk of Shiraz' is of a texture of hyperbole, paradox, a sense of the ultimate or perfection, eloquence, and seriousness, with familiar images and conceits given new vitality through new combination and given form by means of verse patterning."
Some critics, however, have questioned the coherence or unity of the poem, beginning with William Jones's friend and tutor in Persian, Count Károly Reviczky, who wrote in 1768 "I did not translate the poem into Latin verse, on account of the incoherence of the verses". Jones himself in his version used the phrase "Like orient pearls at random strung". The chief critic in this area is Hillmann, who wrote: "One might conclude that the "Turk of Shiraz" is not a wholly successful poem precisely because it seems lacking in unity, no other aspect or feature of the ghazal having been demonstrated to compensate for this lack."
Defending the poem from such criticism, Arberry finds only two themes in it: "The principal theme is – the fair charmer, beautiful, proud, unapproachable, the human, this-worldly reflection of the immortal loveliness of the Divine spirit.... The subsidiary theme is – wine are the sole consolation of the lover, to compensate his sorrow over the incapacity of his love, and the transitory nature of mundane affairs." He scorns the idea that the poem has no unity. Rehder finds that rather than thematic unity, the poem has "an obvious unity of thought and mood".

Other poems by Hafez

There are also articles on the following poems by Hafez on Wikipedia. The number in the edition by Muhammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani is given: