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Hafez of Shiraz, “the tongue of the unseen,” is today probably the most beloved of poets among Persian-speakers the world over, and his ghazals are not simply read or recited, as English poetry is, but are also a central element of social occasions, shared between people gathering to mark the winter solstice or used year-round for the purposes of augury (fāl-e Ḥāfeż). Persian speakers, as well as the poet’s admirers and translators, have seen his poetry as expressing the mystical love for God appropriate to someone whose pen-name suggests he had memorized the Qur’an; or they have viewed him as a devotee of earthly love, a libertine even; and many other things in between. These reputations are made possible by the richly symbolic, allegorical, and allusive character of his poetry. If this were not already hard enough to translate, his playful and ambiguous ghazals of course use meter and rhyme in ways impossible in English. Should we conclude with Dick Davis, pre-eminent translator of medieval Persian verse, that translating Hafez is likewise impossible? Or concur with his later practice, and translate this poetry anyway? The fact is that anyone with a decent knowledge of Persian and living somewhere like Los Angeles will be called on to produce ad hoc translations of a beyt or two of one of Hafez’s ghazals sooner or later, so we had better be prepared. We will look at one of the poet’s shorter ghazals, Ruz-e vaṣl-e dustdārān yād bād (103), and compare it with the numerous English translations that exist. To help us in this task, the workshop will be structured as a dialogue with Professors Allison Kanner-Botan and Sahba Shayani.
Philip Grant, is a Persian-English translator, anthropologist, and historian. His translation of Iranian philosopher Seyyed Javad Tabatabai’s Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences is forthcoming with Polity Press. Aside from translation work, Grant teaches linguistic and biological anthropology at the University of La Verne, and is an Associate Scholar of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is working on a history of the Zanj Rebellion (869-83CE, southern Iraq and south-western Iran), on which he has published in al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭāʾ and in a forthcoming volume with Edinburgh University Press. He received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC Irvine in 2012; his dissertation was based on collaborative fieldwork with Iranian diaspora women’s activists. From 2012-16 he was Research Fellow in the Social Studies of Finance at the University of Edinburgh, and co- author of Chains of Finance (OUP, 2017).
Sponsor(s): UCLA Pourdavoud Institute for the Study of the Iranian World