Emerson || EMERSON AND HAFIZ: THE FIGURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POET

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EMERSON AND HAFIZ: THE FIGURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POETAuthor(s): Paul KaneSource: Religion & Literature, Vol. 41, No. 1, Emerson (Spring 2009), pp. 111-139Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25676860 .

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EMERSON AND HAFIZ: THE FIGURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POET

Paul Kane

In a lecture of 1854, "Poetry and English Poetry," Emerson suggests that

poets must believe in their poetry, if?in turn?we are to believe in theirs. He then proceeds to list five exemplars: Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, and Wordsworth (LL 1.301). Hafiz, of course, is the surprise, the odd man out. Again, in "The Powers and Laws of Thought," we have a similar list: "Dante or Angelo [Michaelangelo], Machiavel, Shakspeare, Hafiz, Rabe

lais, Goethe, Beranger,"1 and, once again, in the synthetic essay, "Poetry and Imagination," the more exclusive triad: "Pindar, Hafiz, Dante" (CW 8.40).2 It is unlikely many of Emerson's contemporaries would have had more than a passing notion of Hafiz's work, but there the Persian poet stands like a signpost to urge readers and listeners on, or as a puzzlement to challenge them to find out just who this Hafiz is. Perhaps after Emerson's 1858 Atlantic Monthly article, "Persian Poetry," it was no longer intellectually respectable to be wholly ignorant of Hafiz, yet nonetheless?and especially given the spate of parodies of "Brahma" in the wake of its publication the

year before?there's no guarantee appreciation would have replaced puzzle ment upon closer acquaintance with Hafiz. What is clear, though, is that for Emerson by mid-century Hafiz was in the poetic mix, and there's no

doubting that Emerson had a particular or even peculiar fondness for him, one that lasted right to the end of his working life. Emerson translated over

R&L41A (Spring 2009) 111



112 Religion & Literature

a hundred poems and fragments of Hafiz and undertook a study of him, along with other Persian poets, for three decades running. It was a serious

interest, and a consequential one as well, both for Emerson's own poetry and for his concept of the poet as an inspired or religious figure. Although this aspect of Emerson's work is well known and has been documented for

years, particularly with Joel Benton's Emerson as a Poet in 1882 and Frederic Ives Carpenter's Emerson and Asia in 1930, it has begun to receive more at tention recently.3 There is good reason, I think, to take an even closer look.

But before we examine Emerson's engagement with Hafiz, I want to say something about why I believe it is important to do so. That is, I want to

put this in a larger context. In the first place, this is an essay about Emer son's poetry, which, in comparison to the prose, receives considerably less attention. This is understandable, as Emerson's prose is his primary vehicle. And yet we know that Emerson himself, despite his modesty about his ac

complishments in verse, regarded himself first and foremost as a poet, and not only in the extended sense of the term as found in his essay "The Poet." From childhood on to old age, Emerson composed poems continually and was regarded as a major poet in his own time. That assessment has persisted to some degree up to the present, but at the same time, Emerson's reputa tion as a poet has been a decidedly mixed one. While he has always been

controversial, we now seem to be of two minds about him as a poet. Thus we find that he occupies more pages than anyone except Whitman in the

Library of America's distinguished two-volume collection, Nineteenth Century American Poetry, while the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature

dropped his poetry altogether in their sixth edition.4 Emerson's poems tend to be considered either wholly necessary or utterly nugatory. While this is not the place to mount a defense of Emerson's poetry (nor,

in my view, does it require defending), I do want to assert?somewhat po

lemically?that in relation to the rest of his work, the poetry ought not to be treated as either separate or irrelevant. Emerson's oeuvre is a totality, of which the poetry is an important part; to ignore the poetry, therefore, is to

be ignorant not only of the part but of the whole. But more than that, the

poetry isn't a tangential or even supplementary portion; it plays a central role in Emerson's work. It is not simply the prose versified or a lesser version of the essays. We can say that, like the prose, the poetry is a body of work in

itself, but the two stand in dynamic relationship to each other, and together make up a single entity. A convenient emblem for this can be found in the verse mottos to the essays. Anyone who has lingered over the mottos knows that frequently there is something odd going on there, as if the little poems

were written in a different mood or by someone other than the author of the essays. Certainly, they can be made to fit, but it frequently requires the



PAUL KANE 113

scholar to be a tailor. As a result, the mottos are often passed over, as if

slightly embarrassing. That is a good indicator of how the poems in general are treated, but it also points to the fact that Emerson's poetry is not always coextensive with his prose. To read the prose separate from the poetry, or vice versa, is to get a partial Emerson. It is only when the two are brought into conversation with each other that one gets the full Emerson, the one

who unsettles all. The poetry, it seems to me, requires more treatment than it has received, and needs to be treated on its own terms first. Within the domain of Emerson's poetry, the Persian translations stand in

similar relationship to the rest of his verse as does the poetry in relation to the prose. That is, it tells us something important about the entire enterprise.

This is especially true of his renderings of Hafiz. We will have occasion to note his treatment of the Persian poet Saadi as well, but it is Hafiz who oc

cupies a key position in Emerson's notion of who or what the poet is, and he reflects what Emerson himself is attempting to do in his own verse. By attending to Emerson's Hafiz we will better understand Emerson's poetry. And the more fully we understand the poetry, the more we will comprehend the prose. In Emerson's case, in other words?putting it in the ratios of a

proportion?Hafiz : Poetry :: Poetry : Prose.

Emerson's interest in Hafiz's poetry is generally dated to his acquisition of a German translation of the poet in April, 1846, Der Diwan von Moham med Schemseddin Hafts, by the prominent Austrian diplomat and Orientalist,

Joseph von Hammer (later Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, the name by which Emerson knew him).5 Emerson must have begun translating Hafiz from the German text almost immediately because five months later we find two poems, "From the Persian of Hafiz" and "Ghaselle: from the Persian of Hafiz," in his Poems (published 1847, but printed December 25, 1846, and submitted to the publisher in October of that year). But Emerson was

clearly aware of Hafiz much earlier. In the essay "History" (1841) we find Emerson's first mention of Hafiz in print, the same year he shows up in the journals,6 but we may suppose that before then Emerson would have encountered references to Hafiz in a number of places, most particularly in Goethe's West-Ostlicher Divan (1819).7

Goethe, like Emerson later, came to Hafiz by way of von Hammer's translation of the Divan, in 1814. And like Emerson, Goethe already had a long-standing interest in the Orient. There is a curious parallelism in Goethe's and Emerson's initial response to Hafiz. Goethe launched into




the extensive and extraordinary West-Eastern Divan, finding a kindred spirit in Hafiz and addressing him directly in the Hafis JSfameh section as a mirror of himself, "Und so gleich' ich dir vollkommen" (Goethe 52). Emerson,

having first to translate Hafiz from the German, similarly went on enthu

siastically to write poems that addressed or invoked the Persian master. Whatever Emerson knew of Hafiz up to that point, he would not have read

many of the poems, and it's possible-?having seen what Goethe made of them?that he was eager to encounter these poems for himself directly. But his wait would have been a long hiatus, since we know from a letter to his brother William that Emerson had purchased the multi-volume set of Goethe's

Nachgelassene Werke in August of 1836, and had "read little else" during that

time, including, we can suppose, the West-Eastern Divan (L 2.32-33). As it turned out, von Hammer's edition of Hafiz came into Emerson's hands a

full decade later?certainly a long wait. We will have cause to note further on that, in addition to sharing a marked enthusiasm for the Persian poet, Emerson and Goethe also took up similar stances toward the religious or

esoteric dimension of Hafiz's work. It is a further instance of how much resonance Goethe had for Emerson. When Emerson placed Hafiz in the company of Homer, Dante, Shake

speare, Milton and Wordsworth, he was clearly trying to call our attention to Hafiz as a major world poet, an integral figure in what Goethe called

Weltliteratur. Now, 150 years later, it's safe to say his ploy has not worked. We do not read Hafiz, any more than we read other major non-Western classical writers. If we do read them it is largely incidental. That is no doubt

changing, and more and more there are scholars arguing for a broader defi nition of the field of literary study. But one drawback is that knowledge of non-Western foreign languages is sparse and we may well be uneasy about

studying works in translation, especially when it comes to poetry, where the use of language is so inextricably constitutive of the writing itself. But if we are to consider Emerson's translation (of translations) of Hafiz, we will have to grapple somewhat with Hafiz's work first. There are difficulties,

though, apart from reading Persian. To begin with, we know relatively little about Hafiz (whose real name was Khwajeh Shamsu'd-Din Muhammad), and what has come down to us is an uncertain mix of fact and legend. He was a contemporary of Chaucer's, born in Shiraz sometime around 1325 and dying there in 1389 or 1390. He is sometimes compared to Dante, who died at about the time Hafiz was born, because they both epitomized the times in which they lived and both seemed to deal with matters sacred and secular simultaneously. Scholars have pieced together a minimal and

plausible biography, but anecdotes are not easily verified and Hafiz remains as tantalizingly unknown as Shakespeare. The difference, however, is that



PAUL KANE 115

while the lack of reliable biographical information is not an impediment to interpreting Shakespeare's plays (though it might be in the case of the

sonnets), it is problematical when one is trying to work through many of Hafiz's lyrics. It's a difference that makes a difference, as we will see shortly.8

A second difficulty is that there is no definitive scholarly edition of Hafiz's work. The poems were part of an oral tradition, and were only written down after his death. They exist in scattered form in numerous manuscripts of

differing quality and authenticity throughout the Muslim world. By now there are many published versions of Hafiz (he is by far the most popular poet in Iran, and the one most translated into English), but at present the

preferred scholarly edition appears to be the Divan as edited by Parviz Natil Khanlari (1983-84). While new editions continue to appear, based on dif ferent sets of manuscripts, a standard text is nowhere in sight?leading to what one scholar calls simply an embarras de richesse? This may seem more a

problem for textual scholars than for literary critics, but it is disconcerting to find certain poems in one edition rejected as inauthentic in another, not to mention innumerable variants of a substantive nature. Such subtle dif ferences have a way of getting magnified in interpretations.

When it comes to translations in English, the picture gets even more blurred. Not only do different translators use different manuscript texts, their translations depend a good deal upon how they interpret Hafiz's biography and, especially, his controversial relationship to Sufism. Translations of Hafiz begin in the eighteenth century with one poem by Sir William Jones (1771) and several others by John Nott (1787), but it isn't until the nineteenth

century that we get a "complete" Divan rendered by the British officer H. Wilberforce Clarke in 1891, perhaps the strangest of all the translations (a bewildering mixture of verse and prose commentary that only a late Vic torian could have produced). One of the best-known translations is by the

irrepressible Gertrude Bell, Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (1897), which stands out from a number of other Victorian treatments that are less felicitous. One can see, then, that Emerson's translations (beginning in 1846) were

actually an early instance of a sustained interest in Hafiz in the English speaking world. Interest in Hafiz has continued to grow. Twentieth-century translations abound and include well-regarded ones by A.J. Arberry, Peter

Avery, Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., and Reza Saberi. I mention these translations because they all offer differing versions of Hafiz's religiousness, which is central to interpreting the poems, and one must be sensitive to the transla tors' predilections when considering their renderings. A lot appears to be at stake here and it will help us understand Emerson's high regard for Hafiz if we know what some of the issues are that swirl around the Persian poet.

Scholars and critical interpreters, including translators, tend to fix Hafiz




along a spectrum that ranges from a worldly savant with a savage distrust of religiosity on the one side, and a dedicated Sufi writing esoteric verses

requiring an initiated understanding on the other. Because there can be considerable ambiguity in Hafiz's poems, they lend themselves to quite antithetical readings and starkly different understandings. A line such as

"Saki, make our cup blaze with winelight" can be read as either bibulous or sacramental, depending on one's orientation (Gray 45). Thus, we have the eminent contemporary scholar Ehsan Yarshater decrying "mystical interpretations" of Hafiz that have become so extreme as to grow into "an esoteric art, not dissimilar to the explanations offered by the addicts of

'conspiracy theories' in political affairs." Moreover, "it is clear," he says, that Hafiz "does not belong to any Sufi school of thought" and "is very much a man of normal sensibilities with an unmistakable appetite for the beauties and pleasures of life"; he is "eager to have the necessary material means to enable him to enjoy a good life adorned with music, outings, partying

with friends, and having the pleasure of saqis's [cupbearer's] services." Any mystical interpretation of Hafiz, says Yarshater with disdain, "implies a

subjective interpretation of his poetry." We may contrast this view with that of the equally notable Persian scholar Peter Avery, who writes in a recent introduction to Hafiz that the poet "emerges from his Divan steeped in a

Sufism which he counted as genuine, in sharp contrast to the pretensions of those hypocritical Sufis whom he frequently castigates. That he was a

Sufi seems incontrovertible" (9-10). Avery goes on to say that "it is difficult to deny that these lyrics have a spiritual message," and that:

When all is said and done, and in this instance the doing must be perusal of the

poems, what strikes the reader is that Hafiz was genuinely concerned with the Spiri tual Path as the way to the realization of love in release from the distractions and

turmoil of this world. To paraphrase Pascal, he believed that God is "perceptible to

the heart but not to the reason." As for religion, surely like Dante he was inspired

by the overriding power of love. Religious he was. (12)

Contrasting Yarshater and Avery like this does overemphasize their differ

ences, for they share more common ground about Hafiz than is evident here. But their approaches to Hafiz are clearly dissimilar. Avery, however, is

by no means at the extreme end of the spectrum from Yarshater. Far more

insistent cases of Sufic or esoteric interpretations are in fact legion, many of

them stemming from Wilberforce Clarke's influential translation from the

Persian, which he calls a "prose-translation" that "professes to give the literal

and the sufiistic meanings" (Clarke viii). Wilberforce Clarke's rendition is a tour de force of minutely detailed Sufic notation that attributes symbolic meaning to virtually every line, if not word?what Yarshater refers to as



PAUL KANE 117

"a binary reading of his poems at two levels, mystical and mundane" (an

approach that Michael Craig Hillmann also disagrees with, as evident in

his mildly caustic introduction to a new edition of Wilberforce Clarke).10 A good example of this binary mode can be found in the recent en face translation by Reza Saberi, where it is stated that "Even the non-mystical poems of Hafez have some subtleties and imagery which can be interpreted

mystically and spiritually. It will not be far from truth if we state that, for

Hafez, as for all Persian mystics, the whole world with all its diverse forms and phenomena is but a manifestation of God" (ix-x). Or, again?though more circumspect about it in her sensitive translation and notes?Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., by including an introduction by Daryush Shayegan on "The

Visionary Topography of Hafiz," makes clear that she is attuned to a Sufic element in Hafiz.11

This critical division about the status or extent of Hafiz's religiousness reaches back to his own times.12 Upon his death there was controversy about

whether Hafiz warranted a proper burial, given the seeming impropriety of much of his verse. On the face of it, lines like these are hardly pious (but certainly numerous): "What are wine and pleasure in secret? No use at all; / We have joined the rank of the licentious and what will be, will be" (Av ery 139). The issue was finally decided by recourse to bibliomancy, a sortes

Haftzianae, the verses of which exonerated him: "Turn not thy steps / From the grave of Hafiz, / Since though in sins sunken / He expects Heaven"

(Emerson's translation, CPT482). (Hafiz continues to be used in this divina

tory manner, known asfal-e Hafez.)n At the time that Emerson was studying Hafiz, the critical split would have been as apparent to him as it had been to Goethe. As Annemarie Schimmel puts it: "Hammer advocated a plain 'worldly' interpretation of Hafiz while the great French orientalist Sylvestre

de Sacy followed the line of mystically minded interpreters" (163). (Baron de Sacy was on Emerson's list of important Orientalists in his "Notebook Orientalist" (40), and he mentions him in his 1843 Dial essay, "Europe and

European Books'^CM^ 12.365-78). Since Emerson was getting his texts from von Hammer, it's worth quoting at length what Emerson recorded of von Hammer's opinion of Hafiz's poems (in Emerson's translation):

They are for the most part bacchanalian & erotic. Leaving out some few mystic & moral Gazelles, the greater part contain nothing but riotous inspiration of

life enjoyment. Wine & love, butlers & maidens, roses & nightingales, spring &

youth; rapture & separation [,] hypocrites [,] mockery, satire on cloister-life, praise of beauty & selfpraise of the poet, are the poles, round which the world of Hafiz

rolls; amid suns & moons, morning stars & pleiads jubilant. Or, to borrow from

the poet one of his finest pictures, his verses are costly pearls bored by a master

hand & ranged on the gold thread of gazelles, as ornaments of the hair, the neck,




& the hand of beauty & joy. Take them as such, ask not that the pearl band be a

girdle of Venus, wherein still longings & burning desires, caresses, & sweet joys [,] punishing jealousy, & soft words are woven by the hand of graces to an beautiful

whole; ask not that pearl on pearl as silver drops be melted together into a jewelers band of unbroken connexion.

This unity of a beautiful whole [,] this completion of art in a gush is every where wanting in Hafiz's poems[;] but if you loosen the fine frame & scatter the

single verses you may admire them as so many costly pearls. Invenies etiam disjecti membra poeta [You would recognize, even in his dismembered state, the limbs of a poet14]. (0 118)

Emerson's own view of Hafiz is complex and subtle. First, in keeping with von Hammer and contrary to what we might expect, Emerson does not

necessarily embrace the mystical reading of Hafiz. As he himself puts it in his journal, "Hafiz does not write of wine & love in any mystical sense, further than that he uses wine as the symbol of intellectual freedom" (0 120). Or again, quite memorably, in "Persian Poetry":

We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of

Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervish, and throws

his glass after the turban. (PP 249)

For Emerson to imagine Hafiz in such a state of pique as to throw his tur ban and glass of wine at the head of a dervish who has had the temerity to

interpret profane poems in mystical terms is to be fairly certain that such a procedure is not the right interpretative move. And yet?as is always the case with Emerson?the matter is not so simple. We can see this as early as 1846, in the prefatory note to "From the Persian of Hafiz," Emerson's translation of Hafiz's long poem, "Saqi-nama":

The poems of Hafiz are held by the Persians to be allegoric and mystical. His

German editor, Von Hammer, remarks on the following poem, that 'though in ap

pearance anacreontic, it may be regarded as one of the best of those compositions which earned for Hafiz the honorable title of "Tongue of the Secret.'" (CPT104)

This rather nicely finesses the question of where Emerson himself?or, for that matter, von Hammer?actually stands on the issue of allegorical mysti cal interpretation. Emerson simply raises the question and then leaves it in

play. "The Tongue of the Secret" indeed. But in "Persian Poetry," Emerson is more explicit when introducing Hafiz:

Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts adds to some of

the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace and Burns, the insight of a mystic, that



PAUL KANE 119

sometimes affords a deeper glance at Nature than belongs to either of these bards.

He accosts all topics with an easy audacity. (PP 244)

This almost contradicts what he says later about strewing sugar on bottled

spiders, but I think Emerson is being quite careful here. He refers to the

"insight of a mystic" and not to Hafiz as a mystic per se, and the insight, which "affords one a deeper glance at Nature," is not necessarily the same

thing as Sufic ecstasy, where one is "transformed or absorbed into undiffer entiated Unity" (Trimmingham 1). It's not that Emerson would deny such

mystical experience to Hafiz, or that he doesn't recognize that "sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment" (PP261), but I don't believe that such transcendence is what interests Emerson in the case of Hafiz. In the first

place, it's worthwhile remembering that "mysticism" is a somewhat fraught term for Emerson. In "The Poet," he draws a distinction between the poet and mystic, whereby the mystic "nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false." "Mysticism," he

says, "consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an

universal one" (^3.20). Emerson is thinking of Swedenborg as the prime example here, as is clear in his essay on him as "The Mystic" in Representative

Men, where he finds it "remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of

symbols, saw the poetic construction of things, and the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which that perception creates." Was he perhaps like the poet "Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated

him, that the skirt dropped from his hands?" (W4.80). The point is that

poetry ought to proceed naturally from mysticism, and that poetry is what

keeps mystical perception vehicular and transitive. Poets are always already "liberating gods," and if Hafiz is missing from Emerson's list of the high est minds in "The Poet," it is likely because the essay appeared two years before his full acquaintance with the Persian poet. Indeed, Emerson sounds there very much like Hafiz when he writes, "dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our

religion, in our opulence" (W3A9). The main point I wish to make, however, is that Emerson is drawn to

Hafiz not so much for a mode of mystical ecstasy as for a quality of what we could identify as self-reliance. That, for Emerson, is the source of Hafiz's two main merits: his power and his liberty. In "Persian Poetry," Emerson

says of him:

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feel

ing that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitle the poet to




speak with authority, and make him an object of interest and his every phrase and

syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone. (PP247)

That "self-equality," in turn, establishes Hafiz's "fluent mind." For it is not

enough to have "experience and wisdom"; one must have a "large utterance" too. "The difference," says Emerson, "is not so much in the quality of men's

thoughts as in the power of uttering them" (248). Again, from "The Poet": "The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression" (W3A).

Hafiz, in Emerson's eyes, is clearly the whole man, for he has the power of

expression and the "authority" or "intellectual liberty" to wield it; this "com

plete intellectual emancipation" is his "certificate of profound thought," a

"boundless charter" for his "right of genius" (PP 249-50). Hafiz, we could

argue, is Emerson's continued warrant for the viability of self-reliance as a principle and a praxis. It's hard not to think that Emerson saw much in Hafiz that he wished for in himself, including both a strong religious and

skeptical apperception. "Hafiz's skepticism," writes Emerson in his journal, "is only that of a deep intellect" (0 119). The same can be said of Emerson,

whose skeptical turn of mind is always in the service of a deeper truth. To take it further, we could say that Emerson's religious vision is inseparable from his skepticism, that the two are not at odds. The mobility of vision that marks Emerson's philosophical outlook?bis commitment to the idea of "abandonment" for instance?allows for both a radical re-thinking of

any position and a phenomenological openness to experience, much like the "fluid mind" of Hafiz which leads on to an intellectual liberty whereby

the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. It indicates this respect to

absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion. (PP 248)

Emerson, of course, knew at first hand what the accusation of irreligion could be like, but his own respect for "absolute truth" indemnified him and

insured that he would suffer no religion but his own. If Emerson thought Hafiz a kindred spirit it is because "kindred" combines both "kind" and

"kin," going back to the root "to give birth to" or originate. Original they both assuredly were.

Emerson's esteem for Hafiz also encompassed those features that were the most whimsical and passionate. He responds to the "confusion of high and

low" in Hafiz, and compares him twice, in "Persian Poetry," to the figure of

Falstaff for his sense of "riotous fun." "Nothing," he asserts, "is too high,

nothing too low" for Hafiz; "he fears nothing, he stops for nothing" (249). Emerson approves Hafiz's eroticism and love of wine, though they are not

"to be confounded with vulgar debauch." It's a delicate point. The issue is



PAUL KANE 121

not one of behavior but of "spirit," for such verse "is not created to excite

the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelligence" (250). Thus, speaking of Hafiz in his journal, he observes, "Wine stands poetically in his mind for all that it symbolizes, & not as in Moore's verse for Best Port"

(0 119). We see a certain delicacy, too, in his article for the Atlantic Monthly, where he is careful not to offend the decorous sensibilities of his readers,

noting, "Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our

citations, though it forms the staple of the Divan." This nicety is prompted

by the fact that the poetry runs "through the whole gamut of passion,? from the sacred to the borders, and over the borders, of the profane" (259). The implication is that, while they may have symbolic resonances, wine is

still wine, and passion is still physical for all that. But, again, Emerson is

concerned with intent and pragmatic result, as Hafiz draws "sometimes a

deeper moral than regulated sober life affords" and expresses "his immense

hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy" (246, 250). Emer

son's delight in Hafiz stems from the poet's capacity to incorporate high and low together in order to get at something quite tangible and real. At times Emerson seems almost incurious about the high matters, as when he writes to his friend and literary executor James Elliot Cabot in 1856, concerning the Persian poets, that early on "I knew pretty well the 'Mystical' parts, as

we rudely call them, in Von Hammer" (L 5.28). But if Emerson tends to

emphasize the more "worldly" version of Hafiz, he is largely responding to a feature of the poet that scholars refer to as the rend, the persona of the

"inspired libertine."15 We will look at this concept next, and then see what Emerson makes of it.

The figure of the rend in Hafiz's poetry can be bewildering in its complex ity. In its literal acceptation, the term can refer to a thug, gangster, brigand, ruffian, rogue, lout, vagabond, beggar, libertine, rebel, voluptuary, sot or rake, among other possibilities. It is meant to indicate people at the very bottom of the moral and social scale, the dregs. Hafiz uses the term frequently in reference to himself.16 In his usage, the word denominates a wine-drinking amorous derelict ("Come I will be riotous & wasted by wine" [CPT473]). But the rend, for Hafiz, is really more a trickster figure who turns the tables on the hypocrites around him, which include almost all figures in authority, both secular and sacred, from judges to constables, shaikhs to dervishes, ascetics to preachers, and very frequently all manner of Sufis. Next to the trials of love, the great theme of Hafiz's poetry is the denunciation of hy




pocrisy, and he finds no end of examples around him. As Emerson notes,

"Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows" (248). By adopting the identity of the rend, Hafiz accomplishes a number of

things. First, he evades the dead hand of social propriety so as to celebrate life in its most robust form; second, he easily sees through the sanctimonious and dissembling behavior of those above him since he has no illusions about himself for them to exploit; third, by stripping away pretense he quickly gets to the reality of a situation and can render it with biting or comic satire; fourth, he can be frank about love and speak of pleasure with impunity; and

fifth, his intoxication can be an occasion for ecstatic visions and dreams. In

short, as Emerson might say, "he is free and makes free." The complexity of this comes into play when we try to ascertain the degree of sincerity in Hafiz's stance. Is he making free with us in the sense of merely playing

with an adopted persona, or is he truly identifying with the downcast and outcast as more genuine and authentic? Or?more likely?is it a mixture, and if so, what precisely is the ratio of the one to the other? The problem becomes deeper when we take into account that, in the eyes of many readers and critics, Hafiz is drawing upon the lively tradition of maldmati Sufism, which entails a deliberate drawing down of censure upon oneself in order to combat the deeply ingrained pride and self-satisfaction that is the pitfall of religious or spiritual development. Similarly, there is also a tradition of the qalandar Sufi who is utterly asocial and even blasphemous, and who will have nothing to do with proper society.17 Enough evidence can be found in the poetry to suggest that Hafiz, well aware of these Sufic elements, may be

using them against the more entrenched and hypocritical religious authori ties whom he attacks, including sham Sufis. But here, again, scholars are

divided. Franklin Lewis notes that some critics take Hafiz's hedonism "at face value

(von Hammer), or even condemn Hafez as an immoral and socially corrup tive libertine or as a representative of the idle, mendacious and anti-modern

traditions of Sufism (Kasravi)." Yarshater contends that it "requires a great deal of faith to believe that Hafez made a point all his life of decrying and

taunting the Sufis while he was a devotee of their way, even it they were not

all such hypocrites as Hafez thought" (Yarshater 5). But the bulk of opinion does seem to weigh in on the side of a genuine engagement with Sufi ideas in the use of the rend. Shayegan warns us that the "term is liable, because

of its polyvalent cultural content, to interpretations on many levels, which are often contradictory, indeed paradoxical; all the more so because it im

plicitly contains its ugly side," but he sees Hafiz ultimately employing rend in a spiritual sense, through a disinterested and visionary gaze (Shayegan 28fi). More explicitly, Leonard Lewisohn sees in Hafiz a combination of



PAUL KANE 123

the three traditions mentioned above:

Considered in the light of the rich historical background and sophisticated mysti cal doctrines carried by the lives and words of the qalandar, rind [rend], and malamati

traditions, many of Hafez's images no longer appear as mere colorful metaphors, but actually convey quite precise spiritual significances. (76-77)

Interestingly, when Lewisohn expounds the concept of the malamati the best summary by a Westerner he can find is Emerson's, from the essay "Compensation":

The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than

it is theirs to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him, like a

dead skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor. (Lewishohn 76

[misquotations corrected])

Lewisohn is well aware of Emerson's translations of Hafiz and I think he is quite right to see a connection here. Indeed, Emerson's depiction of the self-reliant individual has elements of the malamati or rend in it:

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the

public street or in the friend's parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows, and a newspaper directs. (W2.32-33)

Emerson's description of Hafiz in his journal could have just as easily been inserted into "Self-Reliance": "Nothing stops him, he makes the dare-God

& daredevil experiment. He is not to be scared by a name, or a religion. He fears nothing, he sees too far, he sees throughout" (0 119). The Emersonian

rend, like Hafiz, is fearless because he sees; he is a visionary in both a religious and secular sense: the clarity of his perception penetrates the world. It is this capacity for insight that underwrites the possibility of living in concert

with a "moral sentiment." And such fearless seeing is commensurate with

critique: "For the origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain of the moral sentiment in man, which, amidst the natural, ever contains the

supernatural for men" ("Introductory Lecture on the Times," W1.174). Thus far I must confess that I have been doing what I said ought not to

be done, which is to rely upon Emerson's prose for an understanding of his poetry. But I think we have established a basis upon which to read the




poems with a sense of their context and import. I want to look now at a

few of the many translations Emerson made of Hafiz and see what they yield.

The bulk of Emerson's translations of Hafiz are to be found in his po etry notebooks and in the Orientalist notebook. He published only a few of these poems, and most in the essay "Persian Poetry." The remaining poems are often fragmentary and unfinished, but a surprising number are

complete versions of Hafiz's ghazals. The ghazal is a strict and demanding form. It comprises between five and twelve long lines, or bayts, which are

each divided into two hemistitches. On the page, they look like couplets, and in fact function that way, as the hemistitches all rhyme. Thus, the opening "line" of Hafiz's first ghazal looks like this (reading from right to left):

or, transcribed, from left to right:

ala ya ayyoha saqi ader ka san va navelha

ke 'eshq asan nomud awal vali oftad moshkelha

[O saqi, hand round to me that cup of wine, for love seemed easy at first, but then grew hard.]

The prosody of the ghazal is determined by the first line and the meters are

the traditional and demanding ones of Persian and Arabic verse. A unique feature of the form is that the last line always contains the poet's name, what

Emerson admired as "a mode of establishing copyright the most secure

of any contrivance with which we are acquainted" (PP 252). The ghazal is often compared to the sonnet, in part because both are established lyric forms conventionally concerned with the vicissitudes of love. However, as

Elizabeth Gray points out, "the ghazal underwent a decisive alteration" in

the hands of the Sufi poets (Attar and Rumi in particular) from "a courtly love lyric" to "a vehicle to describe the mystic's loving relationship to God," often in a veiled or allegorical way (Gray 6-7). This Sufi tradition is obvi

ously the basis for reading Hafiz similarly. The form of the ghazal, as well



PAUL KANE 125

Hafiz's sentiments, must have been congenial to Emerson for he translated dozens of them. There is a range of subject matter in Hafiz's poems, but the themes are recurring: the hypocrisy of authorities, the pleasures and difficulties of love, the celebration of wine and ecstasy, the fellowship of the

rend, and others. For the purposes of our argument though, we will look at

just a few instances of what I take to be themes especially congruent with Emerson's own interests.

To begin with, we can note the instances where Emerson presents Hafiz as rebel or rend. (Texts are taken from Collected Poems and Translations [CPT\ and the Orientalist notebook [0]). To identify poems of Hafiz, two notations are used where possible: the Wilberforce Clarke edition (WC), because it is similar to the Turkish text that von Hammer used, and the more recent and

more authoritative edition by Khanlari (Kh). The two texts are frequently quite different and the numbering of them is not the same.)19 An early ghazal Emerson translated (WC199 / Kh97) begins:

Secretly to love & to drink, what is it? tis a dissolute day's work.

I side with the open drunkards, be it as it may, Loose the knots of the heart & cumber thee no farther for the lot

No geometer has yet disentangled this confusion

and concludes, "Come I will be riotous & wasted by wine / Who knows but I shall find treasures in a desolate house" (CPT473). The psychic gain for Emerson in this kind of antinomian stance seems considerable. There is a subterranean?or at least earthy?-delight here, quite different from a transcendental one. At the same time, a heterodox religious impulse is at

work as well. In the fourth bayt we find this curious line, "Hold the glass discreetly, it was put together / Of the skulls of Jamschid, Keikobad, & Behmen." Jamschid is a frequent reference in Hafiz, as a mythic ruler who

possessed a magic wine cup that revealed the world, and Keikobad is the founder of the legendary Kayanian dynasty. The third reference is actu

ally to Bahman, another legendary hero of Iran, but Emerson rather slyly turns it into the name of the German mystic, Jakob Behmen (or Bohme).

To drink wine out of the skull of Bohme, one of the most thoroughgoing practitioners of negative theology, is surely, for Emerson, to "find treasures in a desolate house." Since the poem was never published, it must have been

something of an in-house joke. In another poem (WC549 / Kh unlisted), Emerson begins, "Untruth is

become the mode / And no man knows of friendship & truth," and goes on to use the familiar Kantian and Coleridgean terms: "Yesterday said Reason to the Understanding / Go forth suffer & complain not / In satisfaction




seek thy kingdom. / And drink wine instead of other potions" (CPT470). The wine that Reason recommends to the Understanding is going to be the

truth-telling and "remembering wine" we encounter in the poem "Bacchus":

"Bring me wine, but wine which never grew / In the belly of the grape." But if we allegorize wine too quickly here we'll miss the derelict note that both Hafiz and Emerson insist upon. Thus Emerson writes in one fragment, "Drink till the turbans are all unbound / Drink till the house like the world turns round" (CRT479). Indeed, one can be brought low and humbled by such wine, as in the opening of another ghazal (WC175 / Kh201):

So long as there's a trace

Of wine & banquet house

My head will lie in the dust Of the threshold of the winehouse

Ask thou for grace hereafter

At my gravestone That will be the pilgrim city (CPT480)

And yet, as the last bayt contends, the grave of the dissolute rend will become a shrine for pilgrims seeking the true way of grace. The same contradictory and transgressive impulse is found in the erotic poems, of which there are

also many. Emerson was more circumspect in these, but they are surpris ingly sensuous nonetheless. Perhaps Oscar Wilde is pertinent here: "Give him a mask," he says, and a man "will tell you the truth" (389)?which is a

corollary to Emerson's remark in "Quotation and Originality" that "many men can write better under a mask than for themselves" (CW8. 196). Here, from "Persian Poetry," are two such fragments, the first of which Emerson cites for its "ingenuity":

Ah, could I hide me in my song, To kiss thy lips from which it flows! (CPT265)

In the midnight of thy locks, I renounce the day;

In the ring of thy rose-lips,

My heart forgets to pray (CPT266)

And from the notebooks:

Beggar! the soul-squandering life of the beloved

Knows thy petition. She has no need of explanation Prince of beauty, by God! I am burned up by love. (CPT'467)



PAUL KANE 127

By convention, and as a matter of Persian grammar, there is usually no in

dication of the gender of the beloved. In the case of the saqi, or cupbearer, however, it is understood to be a boy, and many of Hafiz's love poems are

addressed to a generic saqi. Emerson was aware of this practice, and quotes the translator Karl Heinrich Graf on the subject:

Graf suggests, that, as no Persian ever sees the face of any respectable woman, except of his mother & sisters, until his marriage, the passion for beautiful young men which

often makes the subject of poems of Hafiz & Saadi, is natural & inevitable. (0 127)

Emerson himself relates the famous apocryphal story about Hafiz's "Turk of Shiraz" ghazal, for which he was called before an irate Tamerlane who

subsequently was charmed by Hafiz's aplomb:

It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a handsome

youth,? "Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Shiraz!

I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!"?

the verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz with

treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, "Alas, my lord, if I had not been so prodigal, I had not

been so poor!" (PP 251)

Intense same-sex friendships were common in Emerson's circle, and in

nineteenth-century culture generally, and any study of homosocial relations in Emerson would profit from a consideration of his Persian poems. As a

rule, though, Emerson tends to cast the beloved as female, as in "God the Lord has bound / My days to a sweet-lipped girl; / I am her devoted slave / She only is my lord" (0 128); or, again, in working on another translation in the journals we see him change the non-specific "For a warm breast of ivory to his breast" to the gendered "For a white maidenbreast unto his breast"

(0 82). While these poems are hardly shocking, they are a chief part of the character of the rend that Hafiz establishes and Emerson is clearly attracted to them. If we bear that in mind, it is easier to follow what Emerson is up to in the translations as a whole. We will look at a few in more detail.

In the Orientalist notebook we find Emerson at work on one of Hafiz's best known ghazals (Khl79). Although Emerson never brought it to full

completion, it is useful to consider what he has made of the poem, especially as we see it go through several drafts. In the version von Hammer translated, there are nine bayts, though other versions have seven or eight, with some in different order (Khanlari presents seven bayts). Emerson translated all nine from von Hammer, but revised only five:




I saw angels yesterday In the alehouse sup

Their hands beat up old Adam's clay And shed it in the cup.

There, to be sure, those highest masters, Power and purity,

Freely drank, not monks nor fasters, And pushed the cup to me.

I think the heavens could not sustain

The ponderous load of love, So flung they down this lot like rain To me from souls above.

To Allah thanks! henceforth is peace Between me & his face:

A thousand Houris have in turn

Here quaffed the wind of Grace.

Why should not also Hafiz drain

The cup a thousandth time

Since thro' a single black corn-grain Was Adam led to crime. (0 100)

The insouciant and audacious opening is charmingly offensive in context. To

begin with, wine drinking for Muslims is proscribed, and taverns (khardbdt) are by definition profane and dodgy places, often located in deserted or

secret locales. Hafiz, of course, treats them as temples of piety, thus a fitting place for angels to appear. These particular ones are recasting Adam's clay into the mould of a wine cup, as if that were the perfect form for mankind.

(In Islamic tradition, God kneaded man from clay and the angels were

astonished by His solicitude for such a creature. They were later made to bow to man when the divine "Treasure of Love" was deposited in his

heart.) These angelic masters of "Power & purity" befriend the poet and

drink with him, as if they too were rends (or, conversely, Hafiz was equally

angelic). To account for such astonishing behavior, Hafiz speculates that

Heaven was so overloaded with love that the souls above sent their surplus down to him, confirming, for Hafiz, that Allah is at peace with him and that

the Houris celebrating in Heaven have likewise drunk the wine of Grace

he is imbibing with the angels below. The characteristic mixture of high and low that Emerson notes in "Persian Poetry" is in evidence here, and

the next bayt reminds us that this wine drinking, for all its heavenly sanc

tion, is still an emblem of dissolution. According to the Koran, it was not

an apple that brought about the downfall of Adam and Eve, but a simple



PAUL KANE 129

grain of wheat. If that's all the temptation it took to ensnare Adam?so

beloved of God?what chance does a sinner like Hafiz have? He might as

well drain his thousandth cup of wine (or, in the first draft, "Why should not I also err / A hundred thousand times?"). The inversion of religiousness here is like the remark of Emerson's wife, Lydian, when she complained in

bitter exasperation, "On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church" (cited

approvingly in "The Divinity School Address"). In Hafiz, then, to censure

is human, to err divine. At this point Emerson's finished version breaks off. He has been reworking

the first draft of each bayt into rhyming quatrains (abab), but the remainder of the poem exists in rougher form. Though monostitchic on the page, we

can print it here as stanzaic, in accordance with the revised text:

Pardon, thou the quarrel Of two & seventy creeds

Since they knew not the truth, But fell into error.

What from torches laughs on us

Is not true fire; True fire is that

Which burns up the flies.

Love makes the hearts

Of the tavern haunters full of blood

As the mole which adorns

The cheek of the beloved.

None has like Hafiz Unveiled thoughts to the world.

Since the locks of the word-Bride

Were first crisped & curled. (0 101)

We saw in von Hammer's description of Hafiz's poems earlier a standard

analogy for what frequently appears to be a discontinuity between the bayts, the image of a pearl necklace. Each bayt is like a single pearl strung on a

string that connects them, but only incidentally. "The unity of a beautiful

whole," says von Hammer, "is everywhere missing." This is a common cri

tique of Hafiz, yet many scholars argue the opposite, that the connections are there but not readily apparent, that you have to discern the pattern and discover its meaning. This is not the place to take up this debate, though I find the arguments for unity compelling when applied to specific cases. I mention the issue here because one might suppose that Emerson stopped his revised translation where he did because the poem seems to veer off




in another direction. That's possibly the case, but Emerson did complete many ghazals with equally abrupt transitions, and we should note that the

remaining verses do take up and extend the earlier themes of erring and

retribution, love and drinking, and the special status of Hafiz as a chosen

poet. And of course we do not have to look far to find a similar discontinu

ity in Emerson's own verse (and prose). The mottos to the essays and the "Elements" section of May-Day and Other Pieces attest to a penchant for the

gnomic and saltatory. Here, from "Elements," is the little poem "Unity," which could as easily have been entitled "Particulars":

Space is ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two:

Yonder masterful cuckoo

Crowds every egg out of the nest,

Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone,

Night and Day were tampered with,

Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on age and hour. (CPT204-5)

One can imagine Emerson appreciating Hafiz's poetic practice as a mirror of his own, as another instance of their close concord. The putative disjunc tion of the bayts would not have disconcerted Emerson, who was happy to follow the Muse's prompt wherever it led. As he says at the bottom of the

manuscript page we are considering, "Hafiz is a poet for poets. He wrote

with a parrot's quill" (0 100). Returning to the poem, the poet in stanza six asks God to pardon the

wrangling sects of Islam, since they have fallen into error for want of truth

(the opposite, we might say, of Hafiz, who has found truth through error), which in turn leads on subtly to the next bayt, which suggests that the faux

flames of sectarian doctrine are not the true fire of God, for His fire will

annihilate one as fire burns up flies (or moths, as it is usually translated). The last image is apophatic, like something out of Bohme, or more aptly the

Sufi doctrine of fand, the "passing away" or extinction of the self through transformation. Again, it is a subject Emerson has meditated before, as seen

in the manuscript poem of the 1840s, "The Bohemian Hymn," in which

the poet, in the guise of Bohme, sees language, art, wit, power and toil as

inadequate to "find / The measure of the eternal Mind," where both the

capacities of the individual and the efficacy of religious institutions are ne

gated: "Nor hymn, nor prayer, nor church" avails (CPT368). At this point,



PAUL KANE 131

Hafiz's poem moves back to the tavern, where the hearts of the drinkers are full of love (that divine gift given to Adam). But love has also an earthly dimension, as Hafiz calls up the "mole" or "beauty spot" on the cheek of

the beloved (a conventional image but one with Sufic overtones of Unity or, more obscurely, "Ipseity"). And in the last stanza, Hafiz is once more in an assertive mode, claiming that no one has "Unveiled" human thought the

way he has, which may mean either he has brought it to clarity or he has lifted a veil to reveal it for what it is (most translations leave the distinction

ambiguous). The final image, however, is an odd one. Emerson quotes von

Hammer on it:

"Literally," adds Von Hammer, "None has yet, like Hafiz, withdrawn the veil from

the cheeks of thought, since they combed the ends of the locks of the Bride of the

Word." The Bride of the Word is the Beauty of Speech. (0 101)

Gray translates the line as "since men began to comb, with a pen, the curly hair of speech"; Saberi: "Ever since the tress of speech was combed with a pen"; Clarke: "Since (the time when) the tress-tip, the brides of speech? combed"; Avery: "Since the tress-tips of speech were combed by a pen"; Bell: "Yet since the earliest time that man has sought / To comb the locks of Speech, his goodly bride." It would be challenging to find a more awk ward image to translate, but I think Emerson does quite well with "Since the locks of the word-Bride / Were first crisped & curled" (at least for a

contemporaneous readership familiar with the observances of the boudoir). In any case, the intimacy of the poet with the Muse figure is the point here, in that loving gesture of combing. It is, finally, another claim the poet makes for his special relationship with the source of poetry. For Emerson, as we noted earlier, the boundary between the poetic and the religious (and even the mystic) is permeable or soluble. The ghazal, in our reading of it, is itself a mobile and self-transforming work, moving at different levels of refer ence and into different spheres of experience. The density and richness of the poem answers to the literary style and mode of thought that Emerson claims for the domain of poetry Hafiz may turn out to be a poet's poet, as we noted above, but for Emerson he appears to be?to use James Merrill's bon mot about Elizabeth Bishop?"the poet's poet's poet."

Emerson's translations of Hafiz are polyvalent. They show a sensitive

engagement with the poet and an appreciation for his complex, paradoxical and antithetical stances. As translations they are necessarily interpretative as

well?hermeneutical excursions into often oblique but deeply meaningful territory, as we can surmise from this passage in "Poetry and Imagination":




Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities. We see the law gleaming through, like the sense of a half-translated ode of Hafiz. (CW9.9-10)

There is much that Emerson responds to in Hafiz: the full-blooded celebra tion of life, including the joys and sorrows of love; the earthiness, skepticism and irreverence?those antinomian and self-reliant qualities associated with the rend; and the ecstatic and mystic experiences derived from wine, be it actual or symbolic (or both). In addition to these hermeneutical concerns, Emerson also finds correspondences with Hafiz's poetics: the condensed and

elliptical style; the apparent discontinuity of sense from stanza to stanza; the gnomic utterances; the sudden shifts of mood and voice; the flexibility

within strictness of the ghazal form itself. All these characteristics are evi dent early on in Emerson's own verse, but they become more pronounced after the advent of Hafiz in his journals. J. D. Yohannan has shown how

pervasive the influence of Hafiz was on Emerson's poetry, to the point that one isn't always sure if one is reading a translation or an original poem. Once we take notice of the presence of Hafiz he seems to be everywhere in the poetry. He reinforces the heterodoxy of Emerson's verse. That is why it is important to take cognizance of Hafiz when looking at Emerson's own

practice as a poet. On the one hand, the translations stand outside?or off to the side?of the rest of his poetry, while on the other hand, they prove central in thematic, formal and conceptual ways.

When we consider Hafiz's influence in an expanded sense, we need to note as well the other Persian poet Emerson frequently translated and cited, the thirteenth-century poet Sa'di (or, in Emerson's usage, Saadi, or some times Seyd or Said).20 Although we won't go into an analysis of Emerson's treatment of Saadi here, we should bear in mind that Saadi is frequently invoked by Emerson as a representative poet and is sometimes conflated with

Hafiz. Yohannan makes this point in his essay "The Influence of Persian

Poetry Upon Emerson's Work":

Although Emerson called his ideal poet "Saadi" (sometimes Syed," etc.), one must

not assume that the Persian poet Saadi was the only sitter for the portrait. Hafiz, no

less than Saadi, contributed to the composite picture. (Yohannan 37)

Emerson's close acquaintance with Saadi predates his encounter with Hafiz. In 1842, Emerson published his poem, "Saadi," in the The Dial (though, curiously, he doesn't mention him later on in "Persian Poetry"). In "Saadi" we

find the poet figure accosted by "Sad-eyed Fakirs" who upbraid him for not

observing the ritualistic self-lacerations proper to qalandar holy men. (Oddly, Emerson seems to be in the position of Hafiz here, criticizing hypocritical



PAUL KANE 133

Sufis.) But the Muse pays a visit to Saadi and assures him of his divine ap probation to preach through the medium of his poetry, admonishing him to "Heed not what the brawlers say, / Heed thou only Saadi's lay." After a

good deal of encouragement and commentary, the Muse, at the end of the

poem, reveals to Saadi that all the "gray-haired crones, / Foolish gossips, ancient drones" are in fact "blessed gods in servile masks" who have "Plied for thee thy household tasks" (CPT103). All along, the gods have loved this

poet who has "loved the race of men." Within Poems (1847), "Saadi" can

be paired with the two "Merlin" poems as an idealized representation of the poet / prophet. But Saadi makes a second appearance in that book, an

unlikely one in the poem "Uriel." "Uriel" is generally read as a rueful commentary on the controversy that

broke over Emerson's head after he delivered the Divinity School Address, that "latest form of infidelity." Uriel stands in for Emerson, while the "stern old war-gods" evoke Andrews Norton and the outraged editors of The Chris tian Examiner. It is one of Emerson's finest and most charming performances (Robert Frost called it, hyperbolically, "the best Western poem yet" [865]), as out of Transcendentalist subversion comes a new fable of the Fall:

It fell in the ancient periods, Which the brooding soul surveys,

Or ever the wild Time coined itself Into calendar months and days.

At which point, the story proper begins: "This was the lapse of Uriel, / Which in Paradise befell." But what, we might ask, is the poet Saadi ("Said") doing there in the next four lines if this is all prior to the existence of Time itself?

Once, among the Pleiads walking, SAID overheard the young gods talking; And the treason, too long pent, To his ears was evident.

We might put it down to pure whimsy, but the effect is quite disorienting: it's a genuine oddity. But perhaps we should say that it is precisely orienting, in the way this Eastern mystic poet is suddenly outside of linear time and

present within the cyclic or spherical time of eternity, since, as Uriel proposes, giving "his sentiment divine / Against the being of a line":

'Line in nature is not found; Unit and Universe are round;




In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'

As a writer, Emerson is one of our most insistent ventriloquists. Other voices are always suddenly sounding, whether they be mountains or Muses or the Earth in his poems, or Orphic poets or bards in the essays. He finds oracles

everywhere. Here, Uriel is the angelic or devilish prophet, but Saadi is the one who witnesses the event and presumably narrates it subsequently, which

suggests that there is another, unspoken story behind the one of Uriel. It's

merely implied, of course, but that hardly matters. What Saadi represents is an element of discontinuity, one of those "slight dislocations, which ap

prize us that this surface on which we now stand, is not fixed, but sliding" ("Circles" W186). Emerson is fond of these shifts and irruptions, especially in his verse. Saadi in "Uriel" is like Hafiz in Emerson's poetry. He creates difference and cracks open conventional expectations.

We are in a position now to see why the turn to the East in Emerson has attracted renewed interest. As Lawrence Buell argues, remarking upon Wai Chee Dimock's work on Emerson's "passion for classical Persian poetry": "Typically this is put at the edges of discussion of his work. It ought to be at the center" (Buell 151). I have argued for a closer examination of Hafiz in Emerson's poetry, both in terms of the translations themselves and the

way that Hafiz functions in relation to the rest of Emerson's verse. I'm not sure it needs to be "at the center" of our discussion of his work, but then I'm not convinced there is a center, or at least a stable one. But I do think that we learn much more about the poetry and about Emerson generally

when we pay attention to the presence of Persian poetry in his writing. I have suggested, too, that Emerson's poetry is crucial for understanding the

prose, that the two ought to be seen as inseparable. As I suggested at the

outset, Hafiz is to the poetry as the poetry is to the prose. One example of this ratio can be found in the way the poem "Threnody"

relates to the essay "Experience." Both are occasioned by the tragic death of Emerson's young son Waldo, but whereas (to over-simplify) the essay

famously bemoans the inability to mourn, the poem enacts a moaning, with the poet growing "early old with grief." Of course each work in itself is highly complex, but their intricacies are compounded by the relationship between them. Julie Ellison, in her exemplary essay "Tears for Emerson:

Essays, Second Series," examines precisely this issue, showing how the poetry and prose (including letters and journals) can be brought together in illu



PAUL KANE 135

minating ways. The same could be said of Saundra Morris's work on the mottos to the essays, "Poetic Portals: Emerson's Essay Epigraphs," where she notes that when we allow the mottos and the essays to "resonate together, we can begin to hear the dialogical harmonies between and within poetry and prose, text and response, riddle and solution, that Emerson's revision of epigraphic practice invites" (Morris 306). That dialogue can also be

surprisingly disharmonious at times, leading us to question both poem and

essay further. Other pairings of poems and essays that are fruitful in this

way include the Channing "Ode" and Emerson's writings on reform; the "Merlin" poems and "The Poet"; the abolitionist poems from May-Day and Other Pieces and the abolition addresses; "The Discontented Poet: a Masque" and Emerson's correspondence with Margaret Fuller and Carolyn Sturgis (as Albert J. von Frank has done recently). We are accustomed to bringing the prose to bear upon the poetry, but we do not see the reverse process

enough. That is because the poems have not been treated sufficiently as

autonomous, which is the precondition for comparison. Emerson, in an early letter, stated that he was "in all my theory, ethics,

& politics a poet" (L 3.18). He never wavered from that position and that fact throws an interesting light upon all his work. According to his son Ed

ward, Emerson wrote in one of his copies of Poems, the saying from Plato's

Phaedrus, "The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of

poetry" (CW9.443). Emerson was forever looking for that "gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within," the "spontaneous impression" that cannot be willed or mastered (W2.21). His writing bears the mark of that search for lustres, in its pithiness and surprising turns of phrase, and in its soaring passages. It is often, as we say, inspired and inspiring. The

quotation above from Plato was inscribed as a personal motto to the poem "Bacchus," and it, as much as any poem of Emerson's, rises to the condi tion of exaltation, as in the incantatory "Pour, Bacchus! the remembering

wine; / Retrieve the loss of me and mine!" The poem clearly has its origins in Emerson's reading of Hafiz?though it is not, as he was careful to point out to Elizabeth Hoar, a translation (CW9.443). He wrote a second poem later that is similar, beginning with "Pour the wine! pour the wine!" (CPT 403), and in each case he is "Making free with time & size," invoking a celestial wine so as to "float at pleasure through all natures." Like Saadi in

"Uriel," he "Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; / Kings unborn shall walk with me" in a place prior to or beyond time. "Bacchus," in particular, is an ecstatic utterance at the far reaches of what poetry can achieve for the

poet. This "remembering wine" is the "antidote," he says, to the lotus that has drugged us into a despairing stupor, quenching the "memory of ages." This wine will wake us up and revive a "dazzling memory" to:




Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures with the pen Which on the first day drew,

Upon the tablets blue, The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

This remembering is obviously a re-membering, a making whole, like gath ering the "scattered limbs of Osiris," as Milton characterizes the search for truth (742). It is finally, a religious vision, as all such visitations were for Emerson. Whatever else may have gone into this poem, we can be sure it would not have been written but for Emerson happening upon Hafiz.

Vassar College

NOTES

1. LL 1.149. In the original passage, in Emerson's Journal O (JMJV9A0S) for 1846, the list reads: "Some Dante or Angelo, Shakspeare, Hafiz, Rabelais, Goethe, Beranger, Bet

tina, Carlyle, or whatever genuine wit, wit of the old & inimitable class, is always allowed."

2. "Poetry and Imagination" (CW40). "Poetry and Imagination" is deemed "synthetic" because it is one of the late essays cobbled together by James Elliot Cabot and Ellen Emerson

from among Emerson's papers. See Nancy Craig Simmons, "Arranging the Sibylline Leaves:

James Elliot Cabot's Work as Emerson's Literary Executor," Studies in the American Renaissance 1983 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1983): 335-89.

3. See also the two essays by J. D. Yohannan, as well as Wai Chee Dimock's "Deep Time: American Literature and World History," later expanded as ch. 2, "World Religions: Emerson, Hafiz, Christianity, Islam," in Through Other Continents) and Lawrence Buell, "Em

ersonian Poetics" in Emerson, ch. 3.

4. John Hollander, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: The Li

brary of America, 1993); Whitman occupies 220 pages, Emerson 93, followed by Dickinson, 89. Nina Baym, et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th Edition (New York:

W. W Norton, 2002). As one editor explained, "We cut out Emerson's poems this last edition

because market research seemed to indicate that nobody (at least nobody who responded to

our queries) was actually teaching them" (private email, June 3, 2004). The new 7th edition

has restored five of Emerson's poems. 5. Von Hammer's two-volume edition of Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis

was in Emerson's library. In "Persian Poetry," Emerson refers to the translator as "Baron

von Hammer Purgstall," but elsewhere as "von Hammer." "Purgstall" was added after von

Hammer inherited property from the Countess Purgstall in 1835. Emerson also had in

his possession von Hammer-Purgstall's important collection, Geschichte der schbnen redekiinste

Persiens, from which he also translated Persian poetry. 6. "History" (JT2.17); JMN1 Journal E): 457.



PAUL KANE 137

7. (Hereafter West-Eastern Divan). As early as 1820, however, as Kenneth Walter Cameron

notes, Emerson, at Harvard, "examined Volume I of The Asiatick Miscellany (recommended on the early library list), containing the Indian hymns translated by Sir William Jones?notably the "Hymn to Narayena" with its extensive introduction?and also works of Sadi, Hafiz,

andjami" (Emerson, Indian Superstition 19). Cameron also points out that Emerson's father

was interested in Oriental texts, as were other members of the Anthology Club which he

formed in 1804. Orientalism in Boston (and in the Emerson household) was in full swing

during the years Emerson was growing up. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, exchanged letters with him on the topic and clearly encouraged his interest in matters Oriental. See

Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford UP, 1998): 169-70.

8. A note on diacritical marks. There is no consistent use of diacritical marks in English

transcriptions of Persian; in fact, the marks themselves vary. I have kept them to a minimum

here, using diacritical marks in quotations (as they appear) and in names (but not Hafiz's). 9. Baha3-al-Din Khorramshahi, "Hafez vi: Printed Editions of the Divan of Hafez."

Encyclopedia Iranica.

10. As Hillmann puts it, "Hafez's ghazals have never seemed to me as rhetorically or

culturally complex or 'mystical' as many readers assume" (CC). It is curious that the publisher chose the hostile Hillmann to write the introduction. In a parenthetical aside, referring to

Wilberforce Clarke's notes, he lets drop: "(the argument in most of which I disagree with)"

(Hillmann, EE). 11. Gray also points out that "Hafiz used imagery from many sources: stories and say

ings from the Islamic tradition, from pre-Islamic Persian epics, Sufi literature, astronomy,

astrology, alchemy, and the flora and fauna of Shiraz's gardens" (8). Gray's introduction and

notes are especially helpful, and her translation one of the most attractive.

12. For an interesting discussion of this long-standing controversy (which also alludes to

the article by Yarshatcr), sec Carl W. Ernst, 'Jalal al-Din Davani's Interpretation of Hafiz"

in Hafiz and The School of Love in Persian Poetry, Leonard Lewisohn, ed. (London: I. B. Taurus,

forthcoming). See Ernst's website: www.unc.edu / -cernst / .

13. One encounters reports that Queen Victoria consulted Hafiz in this way before

making major decisions, but the claim is surely spurious. It is probably an Internet rumor

stemming from a confusion of the poet Hafiz with Abdul Karim, Victoria's close "Indian

secretary," who was given the honorific title "Hafiz" (which literally means one who knows

the Koran by heart). Victoria would be more likely to have consulted Tennyson than Hafiz.

14. The Latin is from Horace, Satire 4: 62.

15. The phrase "inspired libertine" gained currency after its use by Daryush Shayegan in

his essay, "The Visionary Topography of Hafiz," reprinted in Gray, The Green Sea of Heaven.

16. There are other terms in addition to rend that Hafiz uses for the down and out char

acters that appear in his poems, such asgadd (beggar), faqir (poor man), meskin (outsider), and

mqfles (hobo). Rend is being used here as a general term for all these, as they share fundamental

characteristics of the unorthodox or despised outsider.

17. J. Spencer Trimmingham claims the malamati character has been misunderstood and

that "the foundation of the malamati tendency is the absolute nothingness of man before

God. Contrary to the sufi, the true malamati conceals his progress in the spiritual life" (265). He goes on to say that, "The distinction between the malamati and the qalandari is that the

former hides his devotion and the latter externalizes and even exploits it, going out of his

way to incur blame" (267). Even using Trimmingham's definitions, most commentators on

Hafiz would maintain the presence of both malamati and qalandari tendencies in the poems.




18. The first line of this ghazal is in fact Arabic, not Persian. The sixteenth-century Turk

ish commentator Sudi claimed it was a quotation from the caliph Yazid ibn Mu'awiya, but

recent scholarship suggests it is taken from Saadi. See Avery 18, n. 1. The English translation

is my own rendering of the line.

19. Von Hammer's German edition is based on three Turkish translations, including the

important sixteenth-century translation and commentary by Sudi Busnavi (of Bosnia). The

preferred modern edition in Persian is Diwdn-i-Hafiz, ed. Parviz Natel Kanlari. The English

spelling of the author's name is generally Khanlari.

20. Muslihuddin Abu Muhammad Abdullah ibn Mushrifuddin Sa'di of Shiraz (c. 1200-c. 1292, though his proposed birth date varies considerably), author of two important

didactic works, the verse Bustan and the verse and prose Gulistan, both still popular in Iran

as works of wisdom.

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