Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 poems of Hafiz,
translations by Thomas Rain Crowe.
Shambhala Publications, 2001.
$12.95 - 106 pages.

I met Thomas Crowe — poet, publisher, editor and translator of French poets Guillevic, Yvan Goll, Marc Ichall and Hughes-Alain Dal — many years ago when I sought him out after reading an essay he had written called “You Must Go Home Again,” a rebuttal, as well as homage, to Thomas Wolfe’s novel whose title had become an unchallenged truism about American life: everything changes, every place soon becomes unrecognizable, it is inevitable that we are rootless in time and space. Thomas Rain Crowe said “no, it is not necessarily so.” He went back home to the mountains of North Carolina, homesteaded in a more basic fashion than did Thoreau, rooted himself and his work in the basic elements of spirit, land and language.

And now, with these translations of the 14th century Persian Sufi poet Shams-id-din Mohammed, known as Hafiz, he takes us home to the truths that transcend political factionalism, religious fanaticism and literary provincialism.

About Hafiz, he says in his introduction that “No spiritual institution could contain him. He was raised a Shiite Muslim but also praised Jesus, Abraham and Moses in his poems, as well as Zoroaster and other prophets, saints and martyrs of all the great religions.” And the essential subject of his poetry is love. What we have then, is an essential message of Union, not divisiveness, not a life of fragmentary experience, not the ego-centric emphasis of most contemporary life. In short, Hafiz, through these translations, is taking us home again.

How is it possible that 700-hundred-year old Persian poems can do such a thing? It is through the combination of voice (Hafiz is an oral poet), theme (love and desire for the Beloved as the essence of salvation) and the poet’s language faithfully translated into our own.

The oral poet understands with each utterance that it is the human voice that unites us. Unlike how it is with seeing, we cannot help but hear. And unlike sight, when we are with others we cannot hear alone.
Not only do we hear what others hear, but when the poet speaks, his presence is an intimate part of the poems. Print made possible and required a distance between writer and reader. Such fragmentation has led to untold benefits; even having these poems before us is but one among countless others. It has also enforced an alienation into our lives that causes us to hunger for the authentic, unifying human voice. There is danger in such hunger; witness the dictator’s hypnotic appeal. But there is also the religious poet’s appeal, using the hunger for unity to allow us a feel for the Divine.

Hafiz, in nearly every poem, speaks of “the wine of unity” but also allows us the necessary reflection that the printed word alone allows. Typical is this line, illustrating the poet’s self-reflection and warning against bad faith:

“O Hafiz, in this desert, you have fallen victim to your own illusions./When was a pilgrim’s thirst ever quenched by a mirage?”

The Hafiz poems are seductive, as they must be to ensure we share his desire for the Divine, but they seduce without ego-driven desire and with the realization that the voice unites: “O Hafiz, if it is union with the Beloved that you seek,/Be the dust at the Wise One’s door, and speak!”

Truth, love, compassion, selflessness. These are the themes of Hafiz’s poems, all centered around the image of wine. Wine is a metaphor for the intoxicating state produced by the Beloved, the breakdown of the ego, but it is also meant to be taken as literal as one takes the story of Christ turning water into wedding wine. Hafiz wrote:

“When I asked the Winemaster about the path to Truth,
He told me to keep quiet and took my glass away.
To proved his point, He poured my wine into the water
Destroying my reflection, and I lost all sense of who I was.
“Now,” He said, “you can search for truth.”
[#461]

Wine becomes a rebuke to those who use religion to control and confuse people, and who fear the ability of the supplicant to find her own way to salvation:

“When you are a guest here in the Winehouse it is a rule
That you must respect all drunks, even those drinking from the dregs.”
[#220]

And wine becomes the common, and ultimate, symbol for the necessary selflessness that makes the heavenly journey possible:

“The condition of the winedrinker is happiness; he doesn’t know
Whether it is he, his head, or his hat that he has thrown away.
The fundamentalist fanatic is ignorant because of all that he desires
It is only when he takes up the winecup that enlightenment prevails.
[#153]

For us Western readers of English, none of the poems are possible without the translator who can make 700-year-old Persian contemporary. Hafiz composed in a rigid, oral couplet form called the ghazal. This is a foreign form that must be transformed (as much as we need to be transformed to perceive the Beloved). Thomas Rain Crowe takes this ancient form and makes it alive with our own language while still retaining the echoes of the old ways embodied in the ghazal. Though, of necessity, the poems are printed, he manages to keep them alive to the original voice and Hafiz’s original form. There is no better example than the following poem. Speak it out loud and participate in the 700-year-old journey, sharing wine with the poet Hafiz.

#125
Like the morning breeze, if you bring to the morning good deeds,
The rose of your desire will open and bloom.
Go forward, and make advances down this road of love;
In forward motion, the gain is great.
To beg at the door of the Winehouse is a wonderful alchemy;
If you practice this, soon you will be converting dust into gold.

(Joe Napora is the author of several books of poetry, founder and editor of the literary journal BullHead, whose book reviews appear in publications nationwide. His book 1917 will be published by Cedar Hills Publications later this year.)

 

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