Hafez of Shiraz

Shams al-Dīn Muhammad was born in Shiraz around 1320, the city he left only twice in a long life and to which he returned exhausted both times. He earned the title Hafez — "one who has the Quran by heart" — as a young man, and supported himself by teaching and copying manuscripts at the courts of the Injuid and Muzaffarid dynasties.

The 14th century was a violent age for Iran: Mongol successor wars, puritan princes, Tamerlane's invasion. Hafez wrote through all of it, addressing his ghazals to the beloved, the wine-server, the dawn breeze and, more obliquely, to the hypocrite-preacher (zāhed-e riyā'i) who haunts his pages.

"Preachers who display their piety in prayer and pulpit / behave differently when they are alone. / I have a question to ask of the learned of the assembly: / why do confessors of faith have so little faith?"

For seven centuries readers have debated whether Hafez's wine is literal or mystical, whether the beloved is a Shirazi boy or the divine. The classical Persian answer is: yes. The ghazal is built for layered meaning — iham (intentional ambiguity) is its highest virtue. A single line can address a courtly patron, a human lover and God simultaneously, and a great ghazal works on all three registers at once.

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall's 1812–13 German translation reached Goethe at the height of his powers; the result was the West-östlicher Divan (1819), a book-length poetic dialogue across centuries and languages. Emerson read Hafez next, and through Emerson Hafez entered American Transcendentalism. Today his Divan remains the most-printed Persian book after the Quran, and his tomb in the Musalla Gardens of Shiraz — the Hāfezieh — is one of Iran's busiest pilgrimage sites.