Quick Answer
The Odes of Hafiz are the 495 surviving ghazals of a fourteenth century poet from Shiraz, and the Aryanpur Kashani bilingual edition is one of the few English versions that shows you the Persian it came from. Before you buy any Hafiz, know that the best-selling English versions were written by a man who cannot read Persian.
Key Takeaways
- The most quoted Hafiz in English is not Hafiz. Daniel Ladinsky's bestsellers are original poems published under a dead Persian poet's name, and he has said so himself in his own introductions.
- The Aryanpur edition prints the Persian facing the English and adds the divinatory reading Iranian households expect from each ode, which tells you what the book is used for.
- A ghazal does not argue. Each couplet stands alone under a shared rhyme, so the shape English readers look for in a poem is simply not there.
- The wine question has no answer and was never meant to have one. Six centuries of Persian commentary have failed to settle it because Hafiz built the poems to hold both readings at once.
- Fewer than five hundred poems survive, the manuscripts disagree about which ones, and the critical editions differ. Textual certainty about Hafiz does not exist.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad lived in Shiraz from roughly 1315 to 1390 and almost never left it. He worked as a court poet under rulers whose tastes swung between patronage and prohibition, taught in a religious college, recited the Quran professionally, and produced a body of lyric poetry so small that the whole of it fits in one modest volume.
Hafiz is a title, not a name. It belongs to a person who has committed the Quran to memory, and the tradition holds that he did so in fourteen readings, one for each canonical recitation. That detail matters for reading him. The man who spent his life inside a sacred text is the same man who wrote about taverns, and the poems assume you know both things about him.
The Divan, meaning the collected poems, was assembled after his death. No copy in his own hand exists. The version most scholars work from is the 1941 edition prepared by Mohammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani, built on the Khalkhali manuscript of 827 AH, which is to say 1423 or 1424, some thirty five years after the poet died. That edition accepts 495 ghazals as genuine. Parviz Natel-Khanlari's later critical edition prints 484, including a few Qazvini and Ghani left out and omitting a few they kept.
On the numbers: when a source tells you Hafiz wrote roughly five hundred poems, it is reporting an editorial decision rather than a fact about the poet. The manuscripts contain more, later hands added material, and deciding what is authentic has occupied Persian scholarship for a century.
The edition under review here is Odes of Hafiz: Poetical Horoscope, translated and annotated by Abbas Aryanpur Kashani with an introduction by Manoochehr Aryanpur Kashani, published by Mazda in 1984. It gives the Persian and the English on facing pages, footnotes the passages that need help, and supplies a short interpretive reading for each ode aimed at readers who use the book to tell fortunes.
That last feature looks strange to an English reader and is completely ordinary in Iran. It is the single clearest signal of what this book is for.
The Problem You Need to Know About First
Search for Hafiz in English and the results will be dominated by three titles: The Gift, I Heard God Laughing, and The Subject Tonight Is Love. All three are by Daniel Ladinsky. They have sold in numbers no scholarly translation approaches, they supply nearly every Hafiz quotation you have seen on a card or a wall, and they are not translations of Hafiz.
Ladinsky does not read Persian. He worked from Henry Wilberforce Clarke's 1891 English rendering of the Divan, a literal Victorian crib, and produced free English poems from it. He has also described receiving the poems from Hafiz in a dream. In his own introductions he calls the results renderings faithful to a living spirit rather than translations, which is a fair description of what he did and considerably fairer than what his publishers put on the covers.
Before you quote Hafiz: the line beginning "Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, you owe me" is a Ladinsky original from The Gift in 1999. Readers have gone through the Persian looking for it and there is nothing there to find. In 2009 an Ontario premier recited a Hafiz poem at a public event that turned out to have no Persian original either. If you are about to attribute a line to a fourteenth century poet, check which book it came from.
The scholarly response has been blunt. Christopher Shackle described the output as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry." Murat Nemet-Nejat called the poems what they are, original work masquerading as translation. Omid Safi, writing for Al Jazeera in 2020 under the title "Fake Hafez", put the objection in terms that go past literary quality: the sensual, Muslim, Persian-speaking sage of Shiraz has been displaced, and an American with no access to his language now speaks in his place to millions of readers.
Two things are true at once and both should be said. Ladinsky's poems have given real comfort to a great many people, and some of them are good poems. They also stand between English readers and an actual body of work that has survived six hundred years, and they have made the real Hafiz harder to find rather than easier. Readers who fell in love with the Ladinsky voice and then opened a literal translation frequently report that the Persian poet seems colder, stranger and less immediately consoling. That reaction is accurate. The Persian poet is those things.
The pattern worth noticing
This is the third or fourth time the same shape has appeared in our reading. A source makes a difficult, qualified, culturally specific claim. A popular version strips the qualifications, smooths the difficulty, and reaches a hundred times the audience. We saw it in Gitanjali, where Yeats shaped a Bengali poet into something English readers could receive. We saw it in The Nature of Personal Reality, where a careful argument about belief became a slogan about wishing. The mechanism is the same each time, and the popular version always wins on distribution.
What a Ghazal Actually Does
English readers arrive at Hafiz expecting a poem to go somewhere. A ghazal does not.
The form is a sequence of five to fifteen couplets. Every couplet ends on the same rhyme, called the qafiya, and usually on a repeated word or phrase after the rhyme, called the radif. So the sound of the ending returns and returns, which in Persian is the engine of the whole thing. The poet names himself in the final couplet, a signature called the takhallus, which is why the word Hafiz appears inside so many of these poems as if he were addressing himself.
The critical feature is that each couplet is syntactically complete and semantically independent. A ghazal is closer to a strand of separate jewels than to a woven argument. One couplet can be about a tavern, the next about the Day of Judgement, the next about a beloved's hair, and the Persian tradition does not consider this a defect. The unity is tonal and sonic rather than logical.
This produces a genuine difficulty in English, and it is why so many translations feel disjointed. Translators who impose a through-line are inventing one. Translators who do not are handing English readers something that reads like fragments.
If you have read the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in FitzGerald's version, you have seen the other solution to this problem. FitzGerald took independent quatrains and arranged them into a narrative arc that Khayyam never wrote, producing one of the most beloved poems in English and a very unreliable guide to the Persian. Every English Hafiz sits somewhere on the line between FitzGerald's freedom and Wilberforce Clarke's literalism, and neither end of that line gives you the poem.
Hafiz is celebrated in Persian above all for iham, the deliberate double meaning. A single word carries two senses that both work in the couplet and pull in different directions, and the reader holds both. This is the specific effect that dies fastest in translation, because English can render one sense or footnote the other, and doing either destroys the simultaneity.
The Wine, the Beloved, and the Rend
The recurring furniture of these poems is a tavern, a cup, a beloved, a hypocritical preacher, and a figure called the rend.
The rend is difficult to translate and central to everything. He is a libertine, a rogue, a disreputable man who drinks and does not pretend otherwise. Hafiz sets him against the zahid, the ascetic, and against the professional Sufi, and the rend always wins. The argument running underneath hundreds of couplets is that a man honest about his appetites stands closer to God than a man performing piety in public. Hafiz spent his life in a city where rulers alternated between funding wine houses and closing them, and he wrote under a puritan who did close them. The satire had targets with names.
Whether the wine is wine has been argued in Persian for six centuries. The mystical reading takes the cup as divine intoxication, the tavern as the Sufi lodge, the beloved as God, and the whole apparatus as a coded spiritual vocabulary in the tradition running through Attar's Conference of the Birds and Rumi's Masnavi. The literal reading takes it as wine, in a city with vineyards, written by a man who liked drinking. The Aryanpur introduction states the position that Persian criticism has largely settled on, which is that the ghazals sustain both readings and were constructed to.
The English reader should sit with that rather than resolve it. A poem built to mean two things is not a puzzle with a hidden answer.
The pronoun that has no gender
Persian has no grammatical gender. The word for the beloved, and the pronoun that follows it, tell you nothing about whether the beloved is a woman, a young man, or God. English forces a choice in the first line and cannot avoid it. Victorian translators reliably chose a woman. Devotional translators reliably chose God. Both are additions to the text, and the ambiguity they resolve is one of the load-bearing features of the original.
For the broader vocabulary these poems draw on, our overview of Sufi mysticism covers the technical terms, and the Mevlevi sema shows what the intoxication language looks like as practice rather than metaphor. Al-Ghazali's Alchemy of Happiness gives the orthodox theological frame that Hafiz is needling from the inside.
Why the Book Comes With Fortunes
The subtitle of the Aryanpur edition, Poetical Horoscope, is not a marketing flourish. It describes an established use.
Fal-e Hafez is the practice of putting a question to the Divan, opening it at random, and reading the ghazal you land on as the answer. It happens at Nowruz, on Yalda night in the depth of winter, at family gatherings, and at his tomb in Shiraz, where practitioners sit with the book and sometimes a small bird trained to draw a card. The saying that a Persian home holds two books, the Quran and the Divan of Hafez, is repeated so often because it is close to accurate.
The practice has a name in the comparative literature, bibliomancy, and versions of it attach to the Bible, to Virgil, and to the I Ching. Our guide to bibliomancy covers the mechanics, and the survey of divination methods places it among the others.
What makes Hafiz unusually suited to it is the structure described above. Because the couplets are independent and the imagery is deliberately ambiguous, a ghazal opened at random will speak to almost any question put to it. A Western sceptic reads that as an indictment. Iranian practice reads it as the point. The book is not being asked to predict. It is being used to give a person something specific to think against.
Practice: consult the book properly
The Iranian form has steps and they are worth following. Hold the question clearly rather than vaguely. Recite the Fatiha or say something to the poet, which sounds superstitious and functions as a way of taking the act seriously. Open the book without looking and take the ghazal on the right-hand page. Read the whole ode, not the first couplet that flatters you. Then read the interpretation Aryanpur supplies, and notice where you resist it. The resistance is more informative than the agreement.
What Does Not Cross Into English
The most useful thing written about this problem is an essay by Dick Davis called "On Not Translating Hafez", published in the New England Review. Davis is a scholar of Persian, a translator of the Shahnameh, and a poet in English, which puts him in a position to explain the failure precisely.
His argument is not that cultures are incommensurable. It is technical. Persian and English poetry make opposite demands, and he states it plainly: "The Persian and English sensibilities here make directly opposing demands of verse." Persian rewards ornament, verbal density, and conspicuous artifice, and the poet who deploys the conventions most skilfully appears the most inspired. English since Wordsworth has rewarded the opposite, plainness read as sincerity. A faithful rendering of a great Persian poem produces an English poem that sounds overwrought.
On the puns and resonances that Hafiz is prized for, Davis offers the sentence that ends the argument: "To explain a resonance is like explaining a joke; when the explanation is over, no one laughs." Footnotes preserve the information and destroy the effect, and there is no third option.
He is also honest about what earlier translators did to the wine imagery, which in their hands "can seem little more than a kind of rowdy undergraduate hijinks." That is the failure mode of the literal school, and Ladinsky's success is partly a reaction against it.
The instructive part is what Davis did next. Having argued at length that Hafez cannot be translated, he published Faces of Love in 2012, translating Hafez alongside Jahan Malek Khatun and Obayd-e Zakani. The book is the best English Hafiz in print. A translator who understands exactly what is being lost produces better work than one who believes nothing is.
Which Translation to Read
There are roughly six English Hafizes worth knowing about, and they serve different purposes.
Dick Davis, Faces of Love (2012). The default recommendation. Real English poems, scholarly accuracy, an introduction that explains what he did and why. If you buy one Hafiz, buy this.
Abbas Aryanpur Kashani, Odes of Hafiz (1984). The book reviewed here. Facing Persian, plain English, notes, and the divinatory readings. Buy it to study the poems or to use the book as Iranians use it. The English will not move you on its own.
Peter Avery, The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz (2007). The complete Divan in English with substantial apparatus. Thorough, valuable, and not where a first-time reader should start.
Gertrude Bell, Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (1897). The finest English poetry anyone has made from Hafiz, wrapped in Victorian diction that will either enchant you or stop you at the second page. Bell knew Persian well.
A. J. Arberry, Fifty Poems of Hafiz (1947). A scholar's selection assembling multiple translators, useful for comparing approaches to the same ode.
Daniel Ladinsky. Read these as Ladinsky if you enjoy them. Do not cite them as Hafiz, do not quote them in a wedding as Persian, and do not use them to represent a fourteenth century Muslim poet's view of anything.
A test for any Hafiz book: look for the translator's account of their method and their relationship to Persian. Honest translators say what they worked from. When a book offers no such statement, or offers a dream instead of a source text, you know what you are holding.
Goethe, Emerson, and the Long Detour
Hafiz reached Europe through German. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall published a complete German Divan in 1812 and 1813, and Goethe read it in his sixties with an effect on him that is hard to overstate. The West-östlicher Divan of 1819 is his answer, a book of German poems in conversation with a Persian poet dead four and a half centuries, in which Goethe addresses Hafiz as a twin and writes as though the two of them were contemporaries with a shared quarrel against clerical narrowness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson then translated Hafiz into English from Hammer-Purgstall's German. The American reader of the 1850s was receiving Persian at two removes, filtered through a German orientalist and a New England transcendentalist, and Emerson wrote of him with an admiration bordering on awe. Our piece on Emerson's mysticism covers what he took from the Persians and what he did with it.
The point of this history is that the chain of intermediaries is old. Ladinsky is not a modern aberration in the transmission of Hafiz. He is the most recent link in a line of English speakers receiving this poet through other people's versions, and the difference is that Goethe and Emerson said openly whose translation they were working from.
Who Should Read It
Read the Aryanpur edition if you want the Persian in front of you, if you intend to use the book for fal, or if you are studying the ghazal form and need a crib you can trust. It is a working text rather than a beautiful one, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Read Davis instead if you want to find out why Iranians consider this man their greatest poet and you have one book's worth of attention to spend.
Read Hafiz at all if you want a religious sensibility that has no interest in being respectable. He is inside the tradition, fluent in its scripture, and merciless about its functionaries. That combination is rare in devotional literature of any culture, and it is why the poems have outlasted every regime that has tried to claim or suppress them.
Our position: a first-rank body of work that English has never adequately received, currently represented in the bestseller lists by a writer who does not read the language. The Aryanpur edition is honest and modest and shows its workings, which makes it more valuable than its plain English suggests. Start with Davis for the poetry, keep Aryanpur for the study, and treat everything circulating under the name Hafiz on the internet as unattributed until proven otherwise.
For the surrounding literature, see The Sufis by Idries Shah for the popularising tradition and its own accuracy problems, and The Key of Solomon for another text whose reputation was built on translations of translations.
The Persian on the facing page, and a reading for every ode.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Odes of Hafiz?
The lyric poems, called ghazals in Persian, written by Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez of Shiraz in the fourteenth century. The standard Qazvini and Ghani edition of 1941 accepts 495 of them as genuine. Each ghazal runs five to fifteen rhymed couplets and signs off with the poet's pen name in the closing line.
Is the Aryanpur Kashani edition a good translation?
It is honest and useful, which matters more here than elegance. Abbas Aryanpur Kashani prints the Persian on the facing page, annotates the difficult passages, and adds the short divinatory reading that Iranian readers expect from each ode. The English is plain rather than beautiful. If you want to know what the poem says, this edition tells you.
Why do people say the popular Hafiz translations are fake?
Because the best-selling English Hafiz, the versions by Daniel Ladinsky, are not translations. Ladinsky does not read Persian. He worked from an 1891 literal English crib and has said the poems came to him in a dream. Scholars including Christopher Shackle and Omid Safi have documented the gap between his texts and anything in the Divan.
What is a ghazal?
A Persian and Arabic lyric form built from rhymed couplets sharing one rhyme and usually a repeated end-phrase called the radif. Each couplet is syntactically complete on its own, so a ghazal does not develop an argument from beginning to end the way an English lyric does. The poet names himself in the final couplet.
Is the wine in Hafiz real wine or a symbol?
Persian criticism has argued this for six hundred years without settling it, and the ambiguity is deliberate rather than accidental. Hafiz wrote under rulers who both funded taverns and closed them. The wine works as intoxicant, as sacrament, and as a rebuke to religious hypocrisy at the same time, and the poems are constructed so that no single reading can evict the others.
What is fal-e Hafez?
The Iranian practice of opening the Divan at random to receive an answer to a question. It is done at Nowruz and on Yalda night, at his tomb in Shiraz, and in ordinary homes. The Aryanpur edition supplies an interpretation for each ode precisely because readers expect to use the book this way.
Who was Hafiz?
A poet of Shiraz who lived from roughly 1315 to 1390, worked as a court panegyrist and Quran reciter, and served several rulers of shifting temperament. Hafiz is a title rather than a name, given to a person who has memorised the Quran. He rarely left his city and was buried there.
Which English translation of Hafiz should I actually read?
Dick Davis in Faces of Love for readable poetry that stays honest about the Persian. The Aryanpur bilingual edition for study and for divinatory use. Peter Avery for completeness and scholarly apparatus. Gertrude Bell's 1897 versions remain the finest English poems anyone has made from Hafiz, at the cost of considerable Victorian ornament.
Did Hafiz influence Goethe?
Directly and enormously. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall published a complete German Divan in 1812 and 1813, Goethe read it, and the West-Eastern Divan of 1819 came out of that encounter. Goethe wrote of Hafiz as a twin. Emerson then translated Hafiz into English from Hammer-Purgstall's German, at two removes from the Persian.
How many poems did Hafiz write?
Fewer than five hundred survive as accepted work, which is small for a Persian master. The Qazvini and Ghani edition prints 495 ghazals, Parviz Natel-Khanlari's critical edition prints 484, and the two differ over a handful in each direction. The manuscripts disagree, and no autograph copy exists.
Is Hafiz a Sufi poet?
He works inside a Sufi vocabulary and mocks professional Sufis relentlessly. His recurring hero is the rend, the disreputable libertine whose honesty about his own appetites makes him truer than the ascetic on the prayer mat. Reading the poems as straightforward devotional literature loses most of what they are doing.
Can Hafiz be translated at all?
Dick Davis argued at length that the essential effects do not cross, then published a fine translation anyway. Persian rewards ornament and verbal density where English rewards plainness, and the puns Hafiz builds a couplet on die when explained. What survives is real, and it is not the poetry itself.
Check the attribution before you keep the line
Take the Hafiz quotation you love most, the one on your wall or in your notes, and find out which book it came from. If it traces to Ladinsky, keep it and credit him. If it traces to the Persian, you have found a door into six hundred years of argument about what it means. Either outcome leaves you better off than not knowing.
Sources & References
- Hafiz. Odes of Hafiz: Poetical Horoscope, trans. A. Aryanpur Kashani, intro. M. Aryanpur Kashani. Mazda Publishers, 1984.
- Qazvini, M. and Ghani, Q. (1941). Divan-e Hafez. Tehran. The standard critical edition, 495 ghazals.
- Davis, D. "On Not Translating Hafez." New England Review.
- Davis, D. (2012). Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Penguin Classics.
- Safi, O. (2020). "Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased." Al Jazeera, 14 June 2020.
- Shackle, C. Review commentary on Ladinsky's Hafiz renderings.
- Encyclopaedia Iranica. Entries on Hafez: manuscripts, printed editions, and poetic art. iranicaonline.org.
- Avery, P. (2007). The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz. Archetype.
- Bell, G. (1897). Poems from the Divan of Hafiz. William Heinemann.
- Goethe, J. W. von (1819). West-östlicher Divan.