Hafiz
Devotion · Longing
Hafiz
A Persian lyric poet approached through the particular poem and its credited translator.
c. 1315–1390 · Persian lyric poet from Shiraz
Their literary world
Hafiz is a master of Persian lyric poetry. His ghazals move between earthly and divine registers: a beloved’s face, a garden, or a cup of wine can hold sensual delight, mystical longing, and a challenge to rigid moral authority at once.
His poetry questions hypocrisy and spiritual pretension while welcoming music, pleasure, and affection. Its images can sustain more than one reading: romantic love and mystical devotion need not be separated into tidy categories. That ambiguity invites readers to interpret rather than settle the poem once and for all.
Featured reading · Read the published work
The Phoenix
Read the short poem through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s historical English version, and keep the translator’s role in view as you read.
The phoenix makes renewal imaginable, but this version reaches us through Emerson’s nineteenth-century interpretation of Persian poetry. Keep both voices in view: Hafiz’s poetic tradition and the English translator shaping its reception. The source page identifies the translation credit and provides the poem.
The Academy of American Poets credits the English version to Emerson, translated from Persian.
Read Emerson’s version at Poets.orgA passage
“Last night, as half asleep I dreaming lay,”Ode 44 · English translation by Gertrude Bell
A way into the passage
The poem begins in a dreamlike scene where desire, wine, and spiritual suggestion overlap. The translation preserves an ambiguity central to Hafiz: sensual and sacred meanings can occupy the same image.
Essential works
Ghazal · English translation by Gertrude Bell
Ode 44
A lyric of wine, desire, and delight that unsettles a strict division between worldly pleasure and spiritual meaning.
Ghazal · in Poetry Foundation’s translated selections
Ode 487
A lyric that offers another entry into the range and ambiguity of Hafiz’s ghazals.
Collected ghazals
Dīvān of Hafiz
The principal collection associated with Hafiz’s lyric poetry, transmitted and edited through a long textual history.
A question worth exploring
Must love be divided into sacred and worldly forms, or can one experience carry both?
A question to carry with you
How does a translation change the voice we think we know?
An editorial introduction by Flute & Forge Studio.