HAFIZ.*

" WHO drives fat oxen should himself be fat" was said in jest, but in sober earnest, the critic ok a translation should himself know something of the language from which that translation is made. We do not know a word of Persian, and our task is to review a translation of the greatest of Persian poets. It is obvious that we can perform such a task but imperfectly, and it is only fair to say at starting that any depreciatory criticisms we may make on the verses of Hafiz must be taken cum grano sails. For who could glean the faintest notion of the curiosa felicitas of Horace from Lord Lytton's translation of the Odes? Yet it may well be that this translation by Mr. Bicknell does as little justice to the genius of the bard of Shiraz, as Bulwer's halting and stumbling version did to the genius of the bard of Venusia. But we are incapable of forming a correct opinion on this point. It is only on the English side that we can approach this translation, and we must perforce address ourselves to the matter rather than the form of these celebrated poems. From this point of view, we feel constrained to say that we do not rate the Persian Horace so high as many do who have never read him. He has "damnable iteration," and the wine-cup, the rose, and the bulbul are apt to pall on us, when neither palate, nose, or ear are tickled by their several perfections. But, indeed, this eternal repetition of the same ideas seems to be an ingrained fault in Oriental literature. Highly valued and loudly praised as this literature is by scholars who have made it the business of their lives to master the languages in which it is written, the tzninitiated, who can judge only from translations, fail, as a rule, to appreciate it with enthusiasm. There is one brilliant exception —for obvious reasons, we say nothing here about the books of the 'Old Testament—and that is the Arabian Nights Entertainments. But the epics and dramas and sacred writings of the East strike us as wearisome in the extreme, while its metaphysical ontology is —when not engaged in pietistic but impertinent apostrophes to the Source of Life—nothing but the fabric of a vision, more baseless, if possible, than the visions of a Hegel or a Schopenhauer. Be this as it may, there can hardly be two opinions about the fact that the poetry of "the immortal Hafiz, the Oriental Anacreon," • Rads of Shiraz: Selections front ids Poems. Translated by Herman Bicknell. London: Tritbuer aud Co.

as Byron called him, is, to say the least, monotonous. The same string, as even his warmest admirers must admit, is harped

upon too frequently by Horace himself, in his Odes ; but the Roman lyrist varies his expressions with such exquisite dexterity,

that we are fain to excuse the monotony of his thoughts, on ac- count of the inimitable beauty of the words in which they are clothed. Whether this is also the case with Hafiz, we are, we repeat, unable to decide or discuss, but the impression which this translation leaves upon us would incline us to think that it is not. The initiated indeed, although on this point, too, we find that doctors differ, explain much of his poetry in a non-natural sense ; but their explanations savour too much of the comments

made by the expounders of the Apocalypse, who carry coals to Newcastle d'un cceur /iger, and add a darkness to " transpicuous gloom." Hafiz sings thus, for instance :— "If the ant casts reproach on Asaf, with justice does her tongue upbraid, For when his Highness lost Jam's signet no effort for the quest he made."

Now for the explanation. "Solomon confided to his Vazir,' Asaf, the guardianship of the imperial signet-ring, which descended as an heir-loom to Jamshid ; but it was stolen by one of the Dios, and its magical virtue enabled him to usurp the authority of the King. When Solomon granted an audience to animals, and even insects, the ant, it is related, brought as an offering a blade of grass, and rebuked Asaf for having guarded the royal treasure so carelessly." So far so good, but mark the sequel ! By .Asaf, Hafiz symbolises, in the present instance, his friend, a favourite ; by the ant is implied a small hair upon the face ;

and by the lost signet of Jam, a beautiful mouth, so small and delicate as to be invisible. This may be true, for aught we know, but then, in comparison with such conundrums as these, the darkest sayings of Lycophron seem lucid and the conceits of Callimachus clear. And poetry, said Cowper, must be clear ; if the meaning does not stare you in the face, it is worthless. If he was right—and we would take the bard's word for a thousand pounds—many a modern Western poet may look to share the fate which we prophesy for this translation. But a poet has

honour in his own country, if a prophet has not. Hafiz has been loved and reverenced by his countrymen from the day of Dante, whose contemporary he was, to the present day, and it is no exaggeration to say that greater and sincerer homage is paid to his tomb at Shiraz than was ever paid by the Italians to the tomb of the Florentine. lieu, therefore, evidently has ' merits which satisfy the Persian standard of poetical excellence. Whether the Persians themselves are good judges of really first- rate poetry is quite another question. We should answer it in the negative boldly enough, were it not for the reason which we have already given, which haunts us continually, but which we shall not again refer to. Making, however, due allowance for all shortcomings on the translator's part, what can a mere Occidental critic, who has no Persian, make of such poesie as this ?—

• "I have a nest to hold thee, 'tis in my eye's bright centre ; My hall is but a hell for thee, I pray thee deign to enter. Thy mole and down, so winsome, a sage's heart may plunder; And, lo 1 beneath the grain and net are charms that raise our wonder. Thy heart, 0 morning bulbul, while smiles the rose should rally ; On every side the song of love resounds in the green valley. My king's dragoon, my sweet one, what doll shows half thy graces ? Urged by thy whip, the steed-like sphere its rapid circle traces."

We dimly see that this is an impassioned address to the lady of the poet's love, but we express so differently in the West—not necessarily better, only a narrow-minded blockhead would assert that—but we do express so differently in the West that language of the heart which makes the whole world kin, that these Orientalisms seem quaint and ludicrous to us. Still more quaint and ludicrous, perhaps, seems another love-burst :—

" Endurance, intellect, and peace have from my bosom flown, Lured by an idol's silver ear-lobes and its heart of stone. With a fierce glow within one lit, in amorous frenzy lost, A culinary pot am I, in ebullition tost."

The whole question as to how far translations from the languages of the East should be literal or paraphrastical—a most important

question, as regards the rendering of certain passages in the poets and prophets of the Bible—is one we cannot touch upon here. We believe, though, that Mr. Bicknell is right in letting us see how they manage these things in Persia. Briefly, we demur to their way, but modestly, be it understood, and politely. "It is affectations," as Parson Hugh Evans might say. The best love poems have ever been the simplest and plainest, simplices munditiis, not tricked and frounced. Burns is as superior in this respect

to Petrarch as Byron is to Dante, whose beatified Beatrice has been taken or mistaken, if we err not, for Virtue personified, for the Holy Catholic Church, and for something even still " mak awfu', which e'en to name would be unlawfu'."

But if Hafiz is mystical and enigmatical, and as we should say, affected, in his love-ditties, he is the reverse of all that in his drinking-songs. There he pours out all himself, as plain "as downright Shippen or as old Montaigne." Burns is reticent and Anacreon coy when compared with this bold reveller. "Laudibus arguitur vini vinosus Homerus," wrote Horace, but his heart must have smote him when he penned that line. For he, too, had praised wine, as far as it lay in him to do so, and it is not hard to see from his praises that he was, as we know he was, a very temperate man. But Sir Wilfrid Lawson, we think, would have found a hard nut to crack in Hafiz of Shiraz. There is the true toper's ring in his staves, so different from the gentle tinklings of the Venusian lyre. He starts a long way in front of the gentleman whom all school-boys know, who called for goblets of old Massie before business hours were over, and takes his "morning" like a true Caledonian or Californian :—

"Tie morn: the clouds a ceiling make, The morn-cup, mates, the morn-cup take."

His candour is really charming :— "Forgive me, if I quit the mosque and to the tavern go ; I've weary of the sermon grown, and time not slow shall go."

it is possible that evil communications may have corrupted his good manners :— " A wine-drinker am I, to giddiness prone, whose glances and manners are free ; And where among those who inhabit this town is one who resembles not me ?

Withhold from the Muhtasib's knowledge, I pray, the story of error like mine ; He also, with ardour that equals my own, unceasingly searches for wine."

There is nothing new under the Sun: the Muhtasib, alas ! was the imperintendent of police, appointed to suppress the scandals of wine-drinking interdiefed by the Koran.

But Hafiz would have scorned such a line of defence. He was an orthodox fatalist, and believed himself to be, in the exactest meaning of the words, a drinker "to the manner born" :— " Zealot, avannt I 'gainst lee-imbibers no more for all their faults inveigh ; No special gift, the cup excepted, I gained upon Alastu's day."

.A.m1 in another ode :— " At no time in sobriety, We find him to be sunk :" (This is very neat, and reminds us of Charles Lamb's always stopping short on this side of abstemiousness.) "Wine of the lJnereated Day Has made oar Hafiz drunk."

The meaning is that on the "day of _Mast," a day of eternity,—as weshould say, from all eternity,—Hafiz was destined to drink wine. And wine, it seems, supplied him with philosophy, as well as with more carnal pleasures :— " Drink awhile, Hafiz, How and Why despise : What room for How and Why,

When God is wise ?"

Nay, even in his ashes live his wonted fires :— " Make fast my goblet to my shroud, that at the morning's ray Of pealing doom, a draught of wine may nerve me for the day."

We cannot help noting with some satisfaction that this life of "beer and skittles," as Sam Weller would have called it, had its drawbacks :— " Lord, give me wine which I can drink uneloyed, Such as with head-ache's pangs is unalloyed."

But much better things are to be found in Hafiz than these

Landes vini. The following lines breathe the very spirit of Elizabethan gallantry, and might, wefancy, in the original challenge comparison with any quatrain in Herrick or Lovelace :—

" 'Tis a deep charm which wakes the lover's flame, Not ruby lip, nor verdant down its name, - Beauty is not the eye, lock, cheek and mole; A thousand subtle points the heart control."

Pope surely would have been charmed with :— " 0 Hafiz! if the grace of God Give help that shall suffice,

Be free from every fear of hell, Nor care for Paradise."

And what a happy life Cowper's might have been, could he have written those verses ex animo ! Goethe might have smiled approval on these lines,—

" At Being and Non-being fret not, but either with calm temper see; Non-being is the term appointed for the most lovely things that he ;" and on these :- "Learn good and evil from thyself alone : A watchman wherefore in some other own ? God helps the creature that Him glorifies, And, whence he hopes not, all his wants supplies."

These, again, remind us of one of the sweetest poems in English, literature :— "'Tis writ in golden letters upon the silver sphere,— Save noble actions, all things here

Shall not remain."

"Only the actions of the just," sang Shirley, "smell sweet and blossom in the dust." It is only reasonable to suppose that high' thoughts like these are clothed in fit and noble language in the- original, and we know that the beat of all poetical critics—the

vox populi—haila Hafiz as Persia's greatest poet. U we thought much more about him, we should probably have to say still more

in his favour, and we most certainly have nothing whatever to. urge against the enthusiasm of admirers like Mr. Bicknell. From

the poet himself, too, we can part con la bocca doke. He was called by Byron "The Oriental Anacreon," and by Sir John Malcolm "The Horace of the East." In many respects we think

that he resembles Burns even more than he resembles Horace, or the pseudo-Anacreon, for, of course, it was he whom Byron

meant. Hafiz was a merrier and a lighter-hearted man than Burns, and as he died at a very advanced age, he probably lived *- far happier life. His wine was doubtless a much more harmleatt fluid than "Scotch drink," and his cheerful pietism—with which the climate of Persia had, perhaps, much to do—seems to have protected him from the melancholy of which Burns was so often, the victim. But on the other hand, his poems breathe the very spirit of that hate and scorn of fools and hypocrites which marks-

the poetry of Burns, and is entirely absent from the jingling trifles of the pseudo-Anacreon and the delicate mosaics of Horace.