| dbo:abstract
|
- Shirazi Turk is a ghazal (love poem) by the 14th-century Persian poet, Hāfez of Shiraz. It has been described as "the most familiar of Hafez's poems in the English-speaking world". It was the first poem of Hafez to appear in English, when William Jones made his paraphrase "A Persian Song" in 1771, based on a Latin version supplied by his friend Károly Reviczky. Edward Granville Browne wrote of this poem: "I cannot find so many English verse-renderings of any other of the odes of Ḥáfiẓ." It is the third poem in the collection (The Divān of Hafez) of Hafez's poems, which are arranged alphabetically by their rhymes. More recently, this ode has been the object of both a number of scholarly articles and controversy. Should it be taken at face value? (As a poem in which the poet describes his unrequited love for a handsome youth, and turns to wine as a consolation?) Or does it also conceal a hidden Sufi meaning describing the path of Love leading to union with God? Is the Turk male or female? Was he or she a real person or an imaginary one? Another topic that has been discussed is whether the poem is coherent, or whether it fails to have a unified theme. In the century after Hafez's death, a famous anecdote was told on how the Mongol conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) met Hafez and criticized him for writing so disrespectfully of Bokhara and Samarkand in this poem. This story first appears in a work called Anis al-Nas by Shoja' Shirazi (1426), and it was elaborated on in a collection of biographies of poets (Tazkerāt aš-Šo'arā) completed in 1486 by Dawlatshah Samarqandi. It has been argued that the poem is likely to have been written after 1370, when Tamerlane began to develop Samarkand and make it famous as his capital. If so, it was probably written later in Hafez's life, since in 1370, he would've been somewhere between 53 and 55 years old. (en)
|
