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An Analysis of Primary and Secondary Significations in the Third Ghazal of Ḥāfiẓ

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

G. M. Wickens
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Extract

In the course of a recently published article, I had occasion to demonstrate, rather briefly and using a comparatively simple poem, what seemed to me a distinct pattern of symbolic allusion in the verse of Ḥāfiẓ. I suggested that this type of pattern (especially in association with certain others, which have recently engaged the attention of scholars) largely invalidated the traditional view of Persian poetry as a random shower of brilliant, but ill-assorted and uncontrolled, ‘fireworks’.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , October 1952 , pp. 627 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1952

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References

page 627 note 1 This is the ghazal beginning Agar ān turk-i shīrāzī, as appearing in the Qazvīnī-Ghanī edition (Tehran, 1319 solar). Though this is in many ways the best critical edition, I am bound to regret that space has not allowed me to compare here other well-known versions of the poem.

page 627 note 2 ‘The Persian Conception of Artistic Unity…’, BSOAS., xiv, 2.Google Scholar

page 627 note 3 That Ḥāfiẓ should have known Turkish (in one form or another) is highly probable in view of the South Persian political scene which formed the background to his life. A knowledge of Turkish is still useful to the traveller in Fars.

page 628 note 1 It is perhaps hardly necessary to attest that every one of the meanings given is supported by one or more of the standard lexicons, both European and Oriental: for Arabic I have used Lane, Dozy, Freytag, Kazimirski and the native lexicons; for Persian Vullers, Dehkhoda (and the older native lexicons), as well as the useful but skeletal Johnson and Steingass; for Turkish I have used Redhouse only.

page 628 note 2 This point is greatly laboured by E. G. Browne in the first chapter of Volume II of the Literary History of Persia (London, 1906)Google Scholar; and by E. J. W. Gibb, in Volume I of his History of Ottoman Poetry (London, 1900).Google Scholar That it is useless to consider such problems merely from the standpoint of logic or etymology is immediately apparent in a work like the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, where the remotest coincidences are made the basis of mystico-theological interpretation: cf. the Cairo edition (1946), p. 70, the discussion of qur'ān and furqān; or p. 218, the meditation on the word nisā'.

page 629 note 1 Disregard of the ‘Turkish’ motif has led previous translators to render this expression, notwithstanding its idiomatic sense, by something rather more gallant: cf. the various renderings quoted in ProfessorArberry, 's article, ‘Orient Pearls at Random Strung’, BSOAS., xi, 4, pp. 699–712.Google Scholar Rosenzweig-Schwannau, in the translation accompanying his edition (Vienna, 1858), vol. i, p. 25, has ‘Nähme… hold…’

page 630 note 1 The likelihood that this secondary meaning was present to the poet's mind is strengthened by the almost immediate proximity of the antithetic I b 3, ‘I will give’. Khāl itself can also connote a ‘generous man’.

page 632 note 1 In support of this sense, one may point out the close proximity of ṣabr (III b 1), in the sense of Ramaḍān.

page 633 note 1 This is not the interpretation of most scholars, who speak of ‘down on the cheek’; but surely an artificial point of attraction is meant?

page 633 note 2 Though this is classed in the dictionaries as ‘modern colloquialism’, there is, as in many such cases, no valid reason to suppose that it was unknown to the poet.