In the Library
The Divan of Hafez
Hafez, 1390
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 45 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Gertrude Bell (1897)
- Chapters
- Chapters 44
- Length
- Length 10k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Arise, oh Cup-bearer, rise! and bring / To lips that are thirsting the bowl they praise,
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Rumi
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Quiet Night Thoughts
Li Bai
Li Bai drinks with the moon and his own shadow the way Hafez drinks toward the Beloved, a poet a world away who also made the wine cup a door out of the ordinary.
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The Shahnameh
Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi's epic shares Hafez's Persian music and reverence for kings and roses, but chronicles a nation's whole mythic history instead of one heart's private ache.
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About the book
Across Iran, at Nowruz and in every hour of doubt, a household opens this book at random and reads whatever ghazal a finger lands on as a message meant for them; no other book of verse on earth is opened as an oracle this way. Hafez sings of wine and the cupbearer, the beloved's dark curl, the tavern where the honest drunkard shames the preaching hypocrite. The miracle is that you can never settle it: the wine may be a cup in Shiraz or the wine of God, the beloved a boy or the divine, and Hafez holds both inside a single line and refuses to choose, so the poem means more the longer you look. Goethe, reading Hafez in old age, was moved to answer him with a whole Divan of his own. Read one aloud and the nightingale complains to the rose while some private ache of yours is suddenly named in a garden six hundred years gone.