Hafiz’s Little Book of Life
Introducing a new translation of a classic Persian poet
May the universe
Never be empty of
The moaning of lovers.
Between 2006 and 2011, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami published his own editions of four major Persian poets, Nima, Rumi, Saadi, and Hafiz. These editions were in essence poetical works, fashioned by a filmmaker who was himself a poet versed in Western free verse traditions, an admirer of Japanese haiku, and fond of Marianne Moore.
Always at the cusp of Iran and the west, Kiarostami even used as an epigram for these editions that time-tested revolutionary rallying cry of Rimbaud, “One must be absolutely modern,” recalling thereby the longstanding and complex relation between Persian and French literary culture.
This literary venture was in keeping with Kiarostami’s place in modern Iranian film. He was the filmmaker who won approval from Western audiences, presenting to the West a highly aestheticized modern Iran in which daily life seems at once both ancient and postmodern. With these books he was repaying a debt.
Kiarostami’s films as poetry
Kiarostami’s films, after all, aspire to the condition of poetry. Two of his major works draw their titles from twentieth-century Iranian poets Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri. It has been said that Kiarostami’s poetic subtleties helped him survive in post-revolution Iran, where he remained and continued to make films too ambiguous to be censored.
His dreamlike elusiveness draws the viewer, whether Western or Iranian, ever further into a cinematic vision that seems both cinema verité and spiritual quest. In either case, he creates realities steeped in poetry.
In Iran, Hafiz’s work ranks second only to the Koran in cultural authority, and as it conveys aspects of pre-Islamic culture. Perhaps it stands even closer to the heart of a culture that is still invested in its Zoroastrian past. In Iran (and this can only be speculation on my part), what a curious place these volumes must hold, a modernist film master who purveys the essence of Iran to the West, who seems both secular and spiritual, rendering selected lines and stanzas and images and arranging them on the page in a manner easily construed as indebted to European and Anglo-American modernism.
Was he taunting his culture, or renewing it? In his edition, Kiarostami will take a line of Hafiz, extract it from its own highly formal setting, and break the line, as if locating thereby an haiku aesthetic in the heart of Persian literature. We see in his very line breaks what his films more fully document: his own interest not just in the West, but in Japan, as is witnessed by his late film set there, Like Someone in Love, his homage to the director Yasujiro Ozu.
In any of Kiarostami’s films, his camera wanders into a multitude of seemingly casual places. Powerful, momentary images arise amid his subjects’ quests, testimonies to the intersection of the passing and the permanent, where the mundane suddenly turns breathtaking.
Kiarostami’s translation project
Kiarostami’s editing of the classical Persian poets could be called a translation project, one in which the original and the target language are the same. Form is what is translated, from ancient metric monorhyme to haiku inflected free verse.
At a distance, this might be seen to reflect High Modernist gestures: make Hafiz new. But the contrast is sharp. For Pound, Eliot, and others, the poet quoted and refashioned the cultural past because it was fading from the reader’s mind, or more probably, was never even lodged there. And the reader was aspiring to an ideal of elite cultural knowing. (Those fragments, famously shorn.)
By such lights as Eliot and Pound, we see that Kiarostami is in quite a different situation. He is editing and arranging fragments of well-known, widely disseminated, and deeply loved poetic works. His Iranian reader knows well the sacred poetic past but he is invited by the radical recension of the text to see new possibilities in canonical works, perhaps to see them in a global perspective.
It’s as if Kiarostami is revealing hidden links between Iran and Japan, as if Persian poetry could at last to take its place in a Western dominated world literature, while looking East as well. For a sophisticated and literate audience, reading Kiarostami’s Hafiz anthology is an act of recognition, and of imagining connections to what was to come already embedded in a founding text of Iranian identity and culture.
By contrast, in modernist citationality, as it appears in Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and others, readers are presumed ignorant, presumed American, presumed, perhaps, born in Hailey, Idaho, and are looking to the text for guidance, for a way into an inheritance they don’t even know they have. What? A day in Dublin is worth the classical world? Who knew? Nonetheless, in both Kiarostami and High Modernism, a feeling of cultural wholeness authenticates fantasies of belonging.
Translating Kiarostami’s Hafiz
If the situation of Kiarostami’s Hafiz, reflecting Iran’s relation to the West (not to mention Japan), and of Persian prosody, were insufficiently complex, two translators have stepped up to complicate matters further.
Gary Gach and Erfan Mojib have taken up Kiarostami’s edition of Hafiz and created, not just a perfect poetic storm of well-turned lines, but a hermeneutical whirlwind. In Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, Gach and Mojib offer their own version of Kiarostami’s Hafiz. Drawing cross-cultural authority and transcendental force from Kiarostami, the translators have given us a deeply absorbing, rhythmically succinct, and evocative journey through the work of a wildly significant world figure, whose poetry is most recently available in Elizabeth Gray Jr. and Iraj Anvar’s The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Divan of Hafiz, and the Everyman anthology Persian Poetry, translated by Peter Washington.
If we consider Omar Safi’s Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, Sholeh Wolpe’s Conference of the Birds, Elizabeth Grey Jr.’s Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems by Forough Farrokhzad, and Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi, Gold, not to mention several substantial anthologies of Persian poetry, it may be that, at long last, the hour of traditional Persian poetry in America is here.
America has been waiting a while, ever since Emerson offered his own translations of Hafiz, and acknowledged his admiration of Hafiz in his essays. In this most recent welcome addition to our contemporary poetic moment, Mojib and Gach drop Kiarostami’s division of Hafiz’s work into twenty-four sections. They drop his lineation. They drop his selection of lines. They place their arrangement of glittering lines in a narrative structure.
Hafiz’ Little Book of Life tells a five-part Sufi allegory of the soul’s ascent out of this world to the One (a narrative which, despite the realism and postmodern compositional gestures, suffuses Kiarostami’s films). Within this Sufi allegory, the translators retain the minimalist aesthetic of Kiarostami’s approach.
In both instances, Hafiz is stripped of the original poetic form. Reading Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, we are in the realm both of minimalist song and in the realm of spiritual literature. The translators score the page with insights, cataphatic utterance, crystallizations of lived experiences of divine love, and drinking songs that would offer visions of erotic annihilation and spiritual rebirth.
The narrative initiates readers into the world of Sufi literature and religious thought, and also, free of charge, as a bonus, into the cinematic substructure of one of the world’s great filmmakers.
We are guided with artfulness and elegance through a series of gardens, recalling a familiar trope in Persian and Persian-influenced poetries of the world as a garden.
We are on a spiritual quest, passing through the garden of the World, to the Garden of Wine, to the Garden of Love, to the Garden of Wisdom, to the Garden of Ecstasy.
Mingling instruction and pleasure
Eroticism that would seem to the western reader a descent into the flesh rather than a spiritual aspiration.
In keeping with one of the pronounced ambitions of the Persian Sufi poetic tradition, the spiritualizing of pleasure, of drunkenness, of erotic love, and of fellowship, as an analogue for the soul’s awakening to its fate, Hafiz’s Little Book of Life mingles instruction and pleasure.
The didacticism of the allegorical narrative within which the excerpts from Hafiz are presented is played upon lightly. The translators just want to be sure we know it’s there, in part so they can wander from it in their selections, so that we can see that any distance from the sojourn of the soul is illusory.
In our pilgrimage through the world, we are never not in a garden. Mojib and Gach reveal salvific possibilities lurking within a wide range of experience. Truth comes in many tones of voice, in many kinds of writing, lyric description, apostrophes to numinous forces, intimate cries, summary statements tending toward the proverbial, eroticism that would seem to the western reader a descent into the flesh rather than a spiritual aspiration.
A particular joy of the excerpted poetry is the use of the page itself. For the translators, the page recapitulates the altered sense of time experienced in a Sufi spiritual state. This is not a radical and unreadable typography, but an exceptionally artful use of the page along the lines of projective verse. (As if, at the ends of their long and harrowing flights, Charles Olson sits on Mt. Quaff beside Ibn Arabi chatting about poetic form.)
Following Kiarostami’s lead, the translators display jewels that are the essence of other jewels. Lines are arranged within the frame of the page, sometimes high, sometimes low, the two excerpts playing off each other. Sometimes the lines are centered, in a few places words are in caps and vertical, so that despite print conventions we might feel some of the ecstatic calligraphic delights of Persian script.
To be clear, I have no Persian. I can only say how these lines feel when they get to English. The lineation and placement on the page are part of The Path upon which we are guided from the Garden of the World to the Garden of Ecstasy. (Projective verse as calligraphic rapture in the age of mechanical reproduction?)
Our spiritual geography
The first Garden of our journey out of this world, or rather, more deeply into a truer vision of this world, is nothing less than the first stage of what Henri Corbin would call our spiritual geography. The Garden of the World is where we awaken to our vexed condition. We are in a state of solitude and deprivation. We are under the oppression of the socio-political world. Put another way, we need a drink:
The city is in the dark
As the Eagle of Oppression
Spreads its giant wings. (24)
It’s a world without compassion, even without music:
The chief cop
Has chopped off
The lovely hair
Of the harp. (26)
In this first Garden of the World, we’re stunned by our own transience. It’s less an awakening than a harrowing. Intimations of hope, of lasting joy, of the closeness of a higher and better world, are there, but are fleeting, more proposed as possible than perceived.
From deep in the storehouse of premodern poetry tropes, the opening line presents what is essentially our only choice: the caravan, calling to mind the abandoned campsites of Arabic poetic tradition and the desolation of erotic abandonment, Majnun mad in the desert, memorably rendered by Michael Sells in Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabic Odes. (For the record, I understand that Arabic and Persian are different languages.) Between the doors of birth and death, of time and eternity, we catch sight of a Bedouin journey to an elsewhere:
Between these two doors
This caravan (19)
The first Garden shows us why we might feel compelled to join a caravan. The Garden is hardly a garden. Or if so, it is the world that is a garden that is hidden from our enjoyment. We’re admonished, twice, not to despair. Admonishment and exhortation dominate this Garden.
But we get good advice. Some is practical and worldly, more about managing this world rather than getting to the next one. Other advice touches on soteriology: where the soul is headed. All the while, perception is being cleansed. The senses recover their faith in paradisal possibilities:
After the typhoon
Blew through the garden
Strange:
The memory of roses
& the scent of jasmine remain (53)
Already an inner transformation is at work at the exit from the Garden of the World, where we are not meant to be broken down, forced to recognize our failures, as much as made alert. With the Garden of Wine, we enter the realm where wine, more commonly a low form of relief from misery, is a metaphor for redemption, a ready figure of a spiritual intoxication. Our place of worship is a tavern where we might encounter that charged Sufi term for a companion who is also a spiritual guide, “a / friend.”
(Recall the first film of the Koker trilogy, a film that draws its title from the 20th century Sufi-inflected poetry of Sohrab Sepehri. The title tells it all: Is this the Way to the House of the Friend?)
We ask as much in this garden without quite realizing it. The friend is the Persian Hermes, Kzmr himself, who will lead us to the beyond of the beyond. The Garden of the World is where the journey of all Kiarostami’s protagonists start, anxious, lost, feeling the closeness of death, driving around construction sites, like the protagonist of The Scent of Cherries, looking for one to pull him from the grave should suicide prove disappointing.
The Garden of Wine is the world the director sees so fully, but that his characters can only glimpse. This second garden, the Garden of Wine, recalls the topography of Persian enclaves of sensuality, indolence, and color, so beloved of Western Orientalism.
The poetry here argues against sobriety. Its argument is rooted in a stoic recognition of the fleetingness of life. The translators don’t belabor the intoxicating theology that underlies Hafiz’s poetry and Sufi literature more generally:
Bring on a boatload of wine!
Without the Friend’s face
Each corner of my eyes
Is a sea of sorrow (70)
Carnality is innately anagogical
I consider the third garden a psychic map of the exact village where Kiarostami shot Through the Olive Trees. I may be alone in this. The translators offer us an equally vivid visit to the Garden of Love.
Here, beautifully rendered, is a central pleasure of Persian poetic tradition, the seemingly perverse inversion, not uncommon in mystical discourses, of common understanding. Taverns, as has been observed, are holy temples. Wine is a spiritual experience. A highly refined eroticism attends the presence of the divine.
As in the Song of Songs, carnality is innately anagogical. Kiarostami’s gorgeous film, Shirin, gives us an unabashed modern rendering of the persisting power of Persian erotic motifs within a modern Muslim world. The film is the faces of Iranian women in a theater watching a classical love story from Persian literature, the story of Khosrow and Shirin, told by Hafiz’s precursor, the 12th century poet Nizami.
The film is a lesson in the aesthetic power of tact and intimation. We only see the women reacting to the tale that we hear being told on the screen before them, which is, after all, where we as the audience in some sense are.
The filmmaker and our translators share an insight: the tantalizing intermingling of flesh and spirit, of sexy hints and doctrinal truths, of lavish beauty and primordial longing, transmit a single paradoxical message: the world must be transcended:
Beggars in your alley
Have no need
Of the Eight Gates
Of Paradise
Captives
Of your love
Are free
Of heaven & earth (95)
Poetics as the medium of divine revelation
We are less readers of Hafiz, or initiates awaiting a guide, than aspects of the poet’s mind, where poetics is the medium of divine revelation.
In the two final Gardens of our passing through the world, the Garden of Wisdom and the Garden of Ecstasy, we might expect some preaching. These gardens represent an exalted mystical state that arise from disciplined contemplation. Hafiz lived in a theological world.
But there is in these gardens very little exhortation or raw doctrine. We are presumably beyond that, and now need encouragement and guidance in preparation for our annihilation in the One. We are addressed with gentleness and told not to despair.
This tone of impersonal lyric intimacy may be innate to Hafiz, but it may also be the translators’ truest nod toward Kiarostami, an artist keenly aware that his work addresses a secular, Western world even while he himself lived in an Eastern theocratic state.
What kind of wisdom and spiritual ecstasy is available to those who would desire it, Kiarostami and the translators together ask, what words in the realm of instrumental reason and autonomous selfhood will prepare us for our surrender to the beyond? All five suits of Hafiz fragments work by way of flashes, that long established medium of Sufi awakening, as demonstrated by Fakhruddin ‘Araqi, which creates a feeling of fullness by means of spareness.
In Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, we are, ultimately, less readers of Hafiz, or initiates awaiting a guide, than aspects of the poet’s mind, where poetics is the medium of divine revelation. The fourth Garden, the Garden of Wisdom, offers a Wisdom inseparable from torment. It is more exactly the Garden of Annihilation.
The fragments stress the inadequacy of language to depict the state of longing for the Beloved, and cut to the core of this particular iteration of Hafiz, that unrequited love and its devastations are at the expressive center of traditional Persian poetry.
The soul in all gardens but the last is bereft, is like Majnun, dragged away from Layla in chains. And yet, as the translators, or perhaps we should say our spirit guides through this harrowing psychic terrain, warn us four times, “Do not despair.”
In this garden
So many roses blossom
But nobody has ever plucked one rose
Without the disaster of thorns (155)
We are counseled, guided through the experience which defies the whole notion of being guided, since the annihilation imagined by Hafiz and in the Persian and Arabic literature in his poetic environs by its nature admits no mitigation.
The final garden, the Garden of Ecstasy, is the end of our vulgar understandings of identity. After our own myriad trials, we are like the thirty birds in Attar, each seemingly a different species, finding after the long ordeal of difference and separation from the divine, the experience the union of the soul with the One, the simurgh, the bird composed of thirty birds. As Borges recounts in “The Simurgh and the Eagle”:
Many pilgrims give up, others perish. Thirty, purified by their efforts, set foot on the mountain of the Simurgh. At last they gaze upon it: they perceive that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each one of them and all of them. In the Simurgh are the thirty birds and in each bird is the Simurgh” (Borges’ On Mysticism, 58–59).
Living our lives as if in a Kiarostami film
The source text of sorts for Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, Kiarostami’s edition of Hafiz, as described by Mojib and Gach, might be seen as a nod to secular, objectively oriented timekeeping.
The words of Hafiz are diffused throughout the day, a day much as we might imagine any of Kiarostami’s travelers, deep in their secular, quotidian temporalities, where flashes of sacred mystery manifest almost by accident.
The translators understand themselves to be in a situation antithetical to that of Kiarostami. A Western reading audience may have scant sense of allegory, or may live bewildered amid multiple, competing allegories, derived from Christianity, Judaism, New Age, sci-fi/fantasy, occultist, or yet to be revealed to the world contemporary traditions of speculative thought. Such a reader may be close to giving up on a way to read the world. The translators provide a book amid the multitude there are to live by.
Would it be too much to say they are teaching us to live our lives as if we were in a Kiarostami film?
And really, who is not like the reporter in The Wind Will Carry Us, sent to the provinces, bored, waiting for death to happen to someone else, fetching milk from a dark barn and given a glimpse the transcendent Beloved?
How wonderful it would be to see similar books by Mojib and Gach, devoted to the other Kiarostami editions, those of Nima, Rumi, and Saadi, and to further their contribution to the arrival in English of one of the world’s great bodies of poetry and thought.
This essay first appeared in Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review. Joseph Donahue’s books of poetry include Infinite Criteria (Black Square Editions) and The Disappearance of Fate (Spuyten Duyvil). Forthcoming are Terra Lucida, XIII-XVI (Música Callada + Near Star) (Verge Books) and Disfluency: Uncollected Poems (Dos Madres Press). He teaches in the English Department at Duke University.
