Hafiz

Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez of Shiraz (c. 1315–1390) is the most beloved lyric poet of Persia. He is remembered chiefly for his ghazals, short rhymed lyrics of love, wine and mystical longing, gathered after his death into the Divan. His pen-name, Hafiz, means one who has memorised the Qur'an. He lived in Shiraz, where his tomb remains a place of pilgrimage, and his verses are still consulted and recited across the Persian-speaking world.

The poems here are three English versions: forty-three free rhymed renderings from Gertrude Lowthian Bell's Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (London: Heinemann, 1897), one song translated by Sir William Jones (1771), and a selection of forty-two odes in Herman Bicknell's translation, as printed in the Colonial Press Persian Literature (1909). Bell's introduction and notes and the volume's introduction and footnotes are left out. The 1917 Four Seas edition of Edna Worthley Underwood's Songs of Hafiz is also included; its title page says 'newly translated from the Persian', but the notes quote Julius Hart's German essay and the names follow German spelling, so she likely worked through German versions.