But there’s another way of making oneself understood which is both witty and sincere! If in the preceding, ear and wit were at play, here there is a tenderly affectionate aesthetic sense which stands on a par with the loftiest poetry.
In the Orient the Qur’an is learned by heart and as a result, the slightest play on its suras and verses affords quick comprehension amongst its adepts. We’ve experienced the same thing in Germany where fifty years ago, education was set up in such a way as to make the entire younger generation firm in their biblical knowledge; one learned not only important sayings by heart but also attained an adequate knowledge of the rest. There were many people who stood fully prepared to supply biblical maxims for everything that transpired and to make use of sacred scripture in their conversations. It can’t be denied that the wittiest and most graceful rejoinders emerged as when, even in our day, certain eternally applicable passages crop up here and there in conversation.
Classical dicta serve a similar purpose and through them we mark and express ever recurrent feelings and experiences.
Fifty years ago, when we were young, we too, wishing to show honour to our native poets, quickened our memories through their writings and showered them with the finest applause in expressing our own thoughts through their well-chosen and cultivated words and in that way we acknowledged that they knew how to unfurl our innermost feelings better than we ourselves did.
Still, to achieve our true purpose, we call to mind a well-known, yet quite mysterious, way of communicating in ciphers. To wit, when two people agree on a certain book and append page and line numbers to a letter, they can be certain that the recipient will work out the meaning with little difficulty.
The song, which we designate under the rubric ‘Cipher’, alludes to just such an agreement. Lovers will take certain poems by Hafiz as instruments for the exchange of their feelings. They indicate the page and the line which express their circumstances of the moment and in this way, collaboratively composed poems come about, most beautifully expressed. Splendidly scattered passages from this inestimable poet are joined together through passion and feeling, inclination and choice bestow an inner life on the whole of it, and the separated lovers, adorning their grief with the pearls of his words, find some solace in the outcome.
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My heart demands me
To open myself to you;
Were I to hear from yours,
It would demand that of me.
Why does the world
Look upon me with such sadness?
In my innermost self
My friend alone dwells,
There is no one else there
And not a trace of the foe.
Within me grew a resolve
Sure as the rising sun.
From today onwards
I will lead my life
Only in transactions
I think of him,
My heart begins to bleed.
I have no strength
Other than in loving him,
So in stillness justified.
How can this be!
I want to hug him
And I cannot.88