(b) - HĀFIZ AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Summary

One of the great experiences in Iran is a visit to Shīrāz and the delightful garden that is laid out around the tomb of Hāfiz; to enter under the white marble baldachin that covers the tombstone on which some of the poet's verses are engraved in elegant nasta'līq, and to open the Dīvān-i Hāfiz to look for a fa'l, an augury, according to well established rules that have been followed for centuries. During such a moment the visitor may perhaps recall the beautiful lines written by the “last classical poet” of Turkey, Yahya Kemal Beyatli (1881–1958), who uses one of Hāfiz's central concepts, that of rind (“vagrant”), in his poem Rindlerin ölümü:

In the garden at Hāfiz's tomb there is a rose

Which opens every day with blood-like colour

At night, the nightingale weeps until dawn turns grey,

With a tune that reminds us of the ancient Shīrāz.

Death is a calm country of spring for a vagrant;

His heat fumes everywhere like a censer – for years…

And over his tomb that lies under cool compresses

A rose opens every morn, every night a nightingale sings.”