Translator’s Introduction

In the Alley of the Friend is the translation of an original book in Persian, Dar Kuy-e Dust, by one of the most original Persian men of letters in the twentieth century about the poetry of perhaps the most original Persian poet of all time, Hafez, who is often referred to as Lesan ol-Gheyb or the “Tongue of the Invisible.” Like the majority of Persian speakers around the world, especially in Iran, literate and illiterate alike, I grew up with the poetry of Hafez, but I claim no expertise in Hafez studies. With this excuse and also since this book is about Hafez, I will refrain from expressing any thoughts about that great poet, leave that task to the author, and instead say a few words about Shahrokh Meskoob.

Shahrokh Meskoob (1924–2005) was an artistic intellectual and an intellectual artist, a learned philosopher and historian, a talented translator, an astute scholar and social and literary critic, and a poet and writer of immense talent, whose remarkable style of writing and use of poetic language is inspirational for Persian speakers. Even more inspirational is his innovative approach to writing about major classics of Persian poetry, such as Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings and Hafez’s Divan. As Hafez is perhaps the most cited and memorized Persian poet, and due to the wealth of lore about his life and poetry, a great deal has been written over the centuries, and especially in the past one hundred years, about the Divan. Meskoob’s approach, however, is highly innovative and different from all previous scholarship. Although thoroughly informed by the necessary historical and cultural background and equipped with pertinent philosophical, mystical, and literary knowledge, Meskoob follows a path distinct from conventional scholarship in Hafez studies.¹ The author tells us in his foreword that In the Alley of the Friend is an attempt to find his way into the garden of the Divan, an excursion in that garden, and a description of what he observes. His is not, however, an excursion to observe the exterior of the garden, the mere exploration of what he calls the linguistic and rhetorical “magic” of the poet, but an exploration of the interior, of the inner workings and thinking of the mind that produced these ghazals, these love songs. To do so, rather than speaking about Hafez, Meskoob seems to summon the spirit of the poet through his poems, to act as a medium or a channel, as it were, and to allow Hafez to speak through him. Meskoob’s first-person narrative often appears to become Hafez’s, and his I and the I of the ghazals are fused and become one and the same.² This fusion and at times unexpected shift in the points of view in the narrative can initially be confusing to the reader, as they might appear to add to the seemingly insurmountable ambiguity that characterizes Hafez’s poetry. But if we trust Meskoob, and as Geoffrey Squires says in the following observation about Hafez and Meskoob, “we let ourselves go with him, follow him,” he opens new vistas in our reading and understanding of Hafez and functions as the tongue of the Tongue of the Invisible.

Hafez is “difficult” if we try to arrive at a single, definitive meaning or interpretation of his poems. This is our normal impulse or procedure with poetry. We feel if we work hard enough we will eventually get it, pin it down. But Hafez resists this. His work is essentially, systemically, open. There is no limit to the sense of his images. More than that, I think that for Meskoob and indeed Hafez this is how the world is, not convergent but divergent, bottomless, endless. The world allows closure in certain limited, defined respects, but essentially it is open, infinite, iihaam, polyvalent. And that is the normal situation, not the exception. Usually we think of ambiguity as a kind of failure, an inability to define things properly, but I think Meskoob’s exploration of Hafez’s imagery goes in the other direction. Definition is the exception not the rule. We have to learn to live with this fundamental openness, which we cannot and never will be able to close. Some people would label this a mystery, but it is not in the usual sense of mystical. It all depends how we approach Hafez. If we try to corral him, delimit him, then of course he is astoundingly difficult, but if we let ourselves go with him, follow him, then he is oddly easy.³

“Hafez studies,” Meskoob tells us, is a slippery slope, an observation that has proven to be true in regard to translating the poetry of Hafez as well.⁴ And I have learned through my experience of translating In the Alley of the Friend that translating Meskoob is also a slippery slope for the translator. His highly precise use of the Persian lexicon—employing terms that are accurate but uncommon—and in the case of the present book, his use of the often ambiguous words and phrases from the poetry of Hafez have frequently paused and postponed the process of translating this text.

Meskoob likens the ghazals to small flowerbeds, among other things, beside which he stops in his excursion to pick a flower or two. In other words, much of Meskoob’s text consists of words, phrases, and paraphrases he borrows from various ghazals or other poems with which he builds the narrative of his reading of Hafez. With the exception of a few footnotes in the chapters of his book where he makes reference to specific poems, the author takes for granted that his readers can identify the borrowed segments from the ghazals he uses in his narrative, which at times appear within quotation marks but often do not. Given this habit, we can safely assume that Meskoob’s intended audience consists of the Persian literati who are thoroughly familiar with, and even know by heart, the ghazals of Hafez. For the average reader of this translation, on the other hand, who most likely does not know Persian and has no access to all the poems alluded to in this book, I have identified and cited the couplets that contain the majority of the aforementioned hemistiches and phrases from the ghazals in endnotes and bracketed segments of the author’s footnotes. In addition, when a phrase, a line, or a couplet is alluded to or cited within quotation marks several times in the text, I have repeated the couplets that contain them in the relevant endnotes.

It is the consensus among English-speaking scholars of Persian poetry that the best translations of Hafez are the most recent renditions by the British poet Dick Davis and the Irish poet Geoffrey Squires. In his Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz,⁵ Davis provides us with the translations of seventy-nine ghazals in full, and in his Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals,⁶ Squires has rendered in part or fully 248 of the 486 ghazals. I have made extensive use of Squires’s translations, and to a lesser extent, those of Davis, especially when they lend themselves to Meskoob’s narrative.⁷ In other instances, I have provided fairly literal, though hopefully coherent, translations to avoid deviating from Meskoob’s text. In addition, on occasions, I have either used or cited a few other translations of particular ghazals, including those in Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn’s The Angels Knocking at the Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez.⁸

In quoting the ghazals and other poems by Hafez, Meskoob uses the edition of the Divan that was edited by Mohammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani and first published in 1941.⁹ The ghazal numbers in the brackets of the footnotes and in the endnotes refer to this edition. Davis, Squires, and Bly and Lewisohn use the Divan edited by Parviz Natel-Khanlari first published in 1980.¹⁰ The ghazal numbers in the Khanlari edition are different from those numbered by Qazvini and Ghani. After locating every ghazal that was translated from the Khanlari edition, I have used the corresponding Qazvini and Ghani ghazal numbers in the endnotes.

In the rendition of any text from one language and culture to another, particularly between two languages such as Persian and English that seem not only linguistically but also culturally alien to one another, each translator faces dilemmas at every step of the way, and although he or she usually negotiates a path through most of them, there often remain certain culture-specific concepts that appear to defy translation. In the rendition of this text, the translator is faced not only with the challenge posed by Meskoob’s distinctive language style and usage, but also the difficulties in rendering a number of concepts from the Divan that have been regarded by many translators as untranslatable, particularly because of their specific usage or usages in Hafez’s poetry. While some translators have tried to find, often inadequate, equivalents for these concepts, others have merely transliterated the Persian terms and provided explanations for them. For instance, the two terms kuy (alley) and dust (friend), which Meskoob has chosen for the title of his book and which are taken from Hafez’s poems, may not fully encompass in English all the meanings the original terms convey to Persian readers, since for example, both terms connote much closer intimacy than do their English renditions. In addition, since the title of Meskoob’s book for many, if not most, Persian readers indicates that his book is about the Divan, I have added a subtitle to the original.

In the ghazals and also in Meskoob’s narrative, the word friend sometimes may refer to God, sometimes to a beloved, sometimes to an actual friend, and often, ambiguously to all three. It becomes even more ambiguous given that the third-person pronoun in Persian is gender free. Moreover, the Persian alphabet does not have uppercase and lowercase letters. Hence, I have refrained from using the uppercase letters F in friend and H, as in he or his, presumably referring to God, to retain the ambiguity that characterizes both the ghazals and Meskoob’s narrative.

An important word in the poetry of Hafez is rend, an anti–religious establishment persona with whom Hafez identifies, which some translators render as “libertine” in English. Depending on the context and usage by Meskoob, I have used the terms “libertine” or “free-spirited libertine” in this translation. Hafez also identifies with sahebdelan, which I have rendered as “people of the heart” or “the kindred spirits who follow their own hearts.”¹¹

In his poetry, Hafez often refers to his “Magian elder.” Likewise, at times Meskoob refers to Hafez as “my elder” or “my rose-colored elder,” and on occasions as “Khajeh” or “Khajeh-ye Shiraz.” The word khajeh in Persian is an archaic honorific used for a person of some social standing and affluence. In the case of Hafez, based on his available biographical information, this honorific was most likely used because of his widespread reputation during his own lifetime as a poet. For this reason, I have opted to translate the term as the “bard” or the “Bard of Shiraz,” accordingly.

In a few instances, Meskoob places words and phrases in quotation marks for emphasis, and they are not actual quotes from the ghazals. The author’s footnotes are marked in the text with symbols, and my endnotes with Arabic numerals.

As I have stated earlier, I have tried to avoid undermining Meskoob’s unique and highly individual and insightful exploration of Hafez’s poetry by adding any biographical information about Hafez or including the opinions and interpretations of generations of scholars about his poetry. Instead, I direct interested nonspecialist readers to the relatively brief but extremely helpful introductions and explanations of such astute and erudite Hafez scholars and translators as Dick Davis, Geoffrey Squires, and Leonard Lewisohn, whose works I have used in my translation as well as the endnotes. Davis’s introduction and explanatory notes to his Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz offer an insightful background to Hafez and his poetry in the context of the historical, political, cultural, and literary milieu of Hafez’s time in fourteenth-century Shiraz. In his extensive annotations to his Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals, as a poet and translator, Squires walks us through not only his personal experience with Hafez’s poetry but also various aspects of Persian prosody. Squires’s bibliography provides a list of other translations of Hafez’s work as well as secondary sources for further reading. Leonard Lewisohn’s brief essay in The Angels Knocking at the Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez presents biographical as well as literary background to Hafez and his ghazals.

In rendering the Persian names and terms in the English alphabet, I have used more of a simplified transcription rather than a transliteration method, although in many instances they are the same. Hence, no diacritical marks are used to distinguish between consonants that are pronounced alike in Persian and represented by different letters. Also, I have used no diacritical marks to distinguish between the pronunciation of the letter a as in tall and the short a as in hat. The apostrophe (’) is used to represent the letter eyn and the sign hamzeh but is omitted in the initial position. The spelling of Meskoob’s name does not follow the aforementioned transcription system, but rather his own preference.

This translation is based on the first printing of Dar Kuy-e Dust, published in Tehran by Kharazmi Publishers in 1978. Readers interested in the original poems cited by Meskoob can easily find them online. To find ghazal 39, for instance, simply search “Ganjoor Hafez ghazal 39.”¹² In the appendix, I have also provided the original Persian of the set-off couplets in this translation, identified and alphabetized by the first line of the English translation of the couplet. Bracketed numbers in the appendix refer to ghazal numbers.

Finally, in this project, I am indebted to many individuals. First, to Shahrokh Meskoob, whose friendship was a source of inspiration for me, especially when I translated and wrote about his Goftogu dar Bagh¹³ (Dialogue in the Garden) in my book, Translating the Garden, in 2001.¹⁴ Over many years of teaching Persian literature, I always evaded questions I was asked about Hafez by students and friends alike, since I was uncertain about my understanding of the ghazals. The translating and close reading of In the Alley of the Friend has in a way reinforced my previous hesitation; but it has also equipped me with a fresh outlook and, as Meskoob calls it, a new window, through which I can share not only Meskoob’s reading of Hafez, but perhaps my own, with others.

My debt to Dick Davis and Geoffrey Squires is immense. Over many years, whether from our too few conversations or from reading his many pieces of writing about Persian literature, Dick Davis has taught me a great deal. And Geoffrey Squires was actually my first truly inspiring teacher of English literature over fifty years ago in Iran. Squires, who was kind enough to read and comment on an earlier draft of this translation, has been most generous with his time and so very gracious when pointing out my often incomprehensible renditions and lexical and grammatical transgressions. Once again, I thank him, and I treasure our newfound friendship after having lost track of each other for so many years. I also thank him for his generous permission to quote many couplets from his translations in this work. I am most grateful for all I have learned from both of them.

My dear friend Ali Banuazizi encouraged me to translate this book. I thank him for his encouragement, his confidence in me, and his indispensable published interview with Meskoob, which provided additional insight regarding our departed friend.¹⁵ On the murky path of this project, M. Mehdi Khorrami has always been there to shine a ray of light to help me see more clearly. I am grateful for all his help and for volunteering to read this translation and point out some of my errors. Likewise, I would like to express my gratitude to my friend of many decades, Michael Beard, for his enthusiastic support of this project and for his suggestion to add the original Persian verses in the appendix.

Despite all the difficulties that I have encountered in this project, translating In the Alley of the Friend has been not only an expression of gratitude to Meskoob for personal reasons, and more importantly for his valuable contributions to Persian culture, but also a labor of love. My wife, Diane, and I have spent many hours together ruminating, mulling over, arguing about, and enjoying not only Meskoob’s writing but also, through him, Hafez’s ghazals. I am most indebted to her and her meticulously critical mind and editorial skills for any degree of possible success in the rendition of Meskoob’s observations during his excursion in the garden of Hafez’s Divan.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the editors, artists, and staff of Syracuse University Press, including Suzanne Guiod, Kelly Balenske, Fred Wellner, and Brendan Missett, for their assistance and their highly professional work.