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FOUND IN TRANSLATION

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: HAFEZ OF SHIRAZ – HASSAN SHABANI & FARZAN RADFAR

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment6 min read542 views

 

INTRODUCTION

As an education officer with Cheshire Education Authority, I worked with David Selzer for fifteen years or more  – David was my line manager. We worked on many educational initiatives mostly related to 14-19 years old curriculum, and all aspects of work related learning.

During these years, I always admired David’s calm attitude and fair choices during busy times. He was the master of creating a positive workplace where everyone felt safe to share ideas.

As a native Iranian, I must confess that David’s knowledge and understanding of Iran’s history, geography,  culture and customs/traditions are impressive indeed and deserve respect. Thank you, David.

HASSAN SHABANI

 

I have known Hassan for a long time and it was his suggestion for David and I to meet because of our mutual love of poetry. It was great to meet and get to know David. I felt very excited when he asked me to translate into English some poems of one of the greatest Iranian poets, Hafez, and also contribute with some of my own poetry at a later date. I am really thankful for the opportunity.

FARZAN RADFAR

 

 

HAFEZ OF SHIRAZ: HASSAN SHABANI

 Name: Shams-ud-Din Mohammad;
Birth: Circa 727 AH in Shiraz- Iran

Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez—known as Hafez of Shiraz—is the most renowned poet in the history of Iran; his beautiful poems enjoy a vast following across the globe. The themes of his poetry are remarkably diverse: mysticism, love, spiritedness and unconventional wisdom, and criticism of hypocrisy and dissimulation – and his verses are frequently incorporated into traditional Iranian music, the visual arts, and calligraphy.

To Iranians, Hafez of Shiraz is regarded as a sage who possesses knowledge of hidden mysteries and the unseen realm. People turn to him—seeking omens through his poetry—when facing life’s challenges or dilemmas, as well as during various national observances.

Hafez’s mausoleum is located in Shiraz and is known as Hafeziyeh. It attracts thousands of literature and culture enthusiasts every year.

 

NEW TRANSLATIONS OF FIVE POEMS BY HAFEZ: FARZAN RADFAR

Hafez is, in the main, famous for writing some of the best ghazals in Persian poetry. Ghazal is a form of classic structured Persian poetry. It is normally around 8 to 13 couplets. The first couplet consists of two rhyming lines. As for the following couplets the first line of each does not rhyme but the second line rhymes with the very first couplet. The final couplet normally contains the poet’s name or pen name, which is a form of taking ownership of the ghazal.

In ghazals, like other forms of Persian structured poetry, the lines do not always have the same number of syllables. The syllables are either short or long. For instance dar, shen, bon, baa, buu and bii are long syllables but na, ke and cho are short syllables. In a ghazal or other forms of structured poetry the rhythm of the poem is created with a series of long and short syllables that have been put together in a particular form. This form applies to every line and hence the rhythm of the poem is the same throughout.

When I translate a poem the meaning of the poem is at the forefront of my mind. In translating a rhyming poem, I play with the format of each line so that I can find rhyming lines. So what happens is you end up with a poem in English that rhymes but not in the exact rhyme of the Persian one. The corresponding lines though have the same meaning but rhyme with different words to the original.

There is a tradition in Iran that people use Hafez’s ghazals to predict their fortune. So they open the book of Hafez’s ghazals randomly and read the corresponding ghazal. This is, in fact, the way I chose the five ghazals that I have translated. I hope you enjoy reading them.

 

I

The happy news came that sorrow shall not remain
It didn’t remain like that, and like this it shall not remain

Though to my lover I seem like some dust
My rival too so respected shall not remain

As the chamberlain slays all with his sword
Tenants of the privacy of harem shall not remain

No place to complain nor thanksgiving for good or bad
As on the pages of life a trace shall not remain

The anthem of the assembly of Jamshid* is said to have been
Bring the cup of wine that Jam* shall not remain

O candle appreciate your friendship with the moth
As this companionship till dawn shall not remain

O wealthy man console the hearts of the poor
As your treasure and cache of gold shall not remain

It is written on these sapphire pages in gold
But for good deeds nothing shall remain

The angels of the world unknown brought glad tidings
That all in this living world sorrowful shall not remain

The amorous gestures of dawn gave the good news
That one in the hands of sadness shall not remain

Hafez of love’s kindness don’t disregard hope
As the tyrannous acts and signs of oppression shall not remain

*Jamshid is the name of a Persian mythical legendary king. Jam means shining and shid means sun so Jamshid means shining sun.

 

II

From my head love of the dark eyed will not go
This is the heavens’ decree and another way it will not be

The rival tormented, left no room for peace
Perhaps moving heavenwards the sigh of early risers will not be

From the first day I was ordered to be nothing but insightful
Wherever I go more than that it will not be

For God’s sake Mohtasib* pardon the clamour of drum and reed
As the instrument of ritual from this tale lowly will not be

A safe abode, a kind barmaid and ruby wine
O heart when will you feel better if now it will not be?

My only chance is to secretly love her
How can I talk of her embrace, bosoms and kiss as this will not be

O my eyes do not wash the sorrow from Hafez’s heart
As it is a cut from the lover’s blade and the colour of blood it will not be

*Mohtasib is the title of the city’s sheriff.

 

III

Every vision’s sun may your beauty be
Lovelier than beauties, may your lovely face be

The charm of your tresses like the falcon’s beam
May the heart of kings of the world beneath its wing be

May anyone who is not tied to your tresses
Like your tresses tangled be

O idol when your glance throws an arrow
Against it may my injured heart a shield be

As your sweet ruby lips give a kiss
From it may the taste of my life sweet be

Because of you every moment I am in love anew
Every hour yours another merit be

Hafez is desirous of your beauty with his life
On the state of all your suitors may your glance be

 

IV

I have felt the pain of love
Don’t ask me how
I have tasted the poison of separation
Don’t ask me how

I have travelled the world and finally have chosen a lover
Don’t ask me how

For the dust of her abode, I have cried my eyes out so
Don’t ask me how

Why do friends bite their lips, do not say
I have chosen ruby lips
Don’t ask me how

I heard her with my own ears last night
I heard such words
Don’t ask me how

Like Hafez, a stranger in the path of love
I have reached such a status
Don’t ask me how

 

V

If from your musky tresses a fault passed, it passed
And if from your dark mole a cruelty passed, it passed

If love’s lightening the harvest of a wool clad man consumed, it consumed
If injustices of a king against a beggar passed, it passed

If a heart from the amorous gestures of a lover a load carried, it carried
And if between the lovers a story passed, it passed

From the gossip mongers much hurt was caused but
As when between companions an insult passed, it passed

In your ways there is no heart ache, bring the lover’s wine
Every hurt feeling like all purities passed, it passed

O heart for love making, endurance is a must remember
If there was a heartache, it was. If a mistake passed, it passed

O preacher do not censure Hafez, he has left the cloister
How can you tie the feet of the free, if somewhere it passed, it passed

 

 

 

©Farzan Radfar 2026         ©Hassan Shabani 2026

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POETRY

REASONS TO LAMENT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read368 views

For David Alexander

 

‘Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?’

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING William Wordsworth

 

An old friend lives in a village recorded

in the Domesday Book. Thirty miles due north

is RAF Fairford. The stones of his house

reverberate at night from the roar

of cataclysmic Stealth Bombers, darts

of death to destroy with fire and ruin

the land of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafez.

 

Monmouth’s rebels were cut down in Cheevers

aka Bloody Lane on the village’s

northern edge, and Hanging Judge Jeffries

meted out the sentences of death

to their survivors at the temporary

assizes held in the village’s

mediaeval tavern – once a hostelry

for a Carthusian priory, a place

of solitude, silence, and self-restraint.

 

 

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POETRY

HISTORY RHYMING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read608 views

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years,

was always really only about oil.

Iraq had its Arab allies, the US,

and the USSR supplying cash,

know-how, arms. The war was a reprise

of the Western Front, with trenches and

chemical weapons. Machine guns scythed

line after line after line of young men.

A city was wrecked, a refinery,

many more than a million wounded and dead,

but no reparations were sought or given,

nor any territory exchanged –

a defensive war that accidentally

bigged-up a Cleric, and the hegemony

of zealotry and blood; an aggressive war

meant to big-up the hegemony

of the American Empire, but,

instead, made a Tyrant think he was

an ally not a useful idiot

with a regime of blood and torture.

 

The following two so-called Gulf Wars

were also about oil – as well, of course,

as caprice, rhetoric, spite and racism –

as is the current one. So, perhaps, at last,

Pax Americana will properly

be rendered as Clades Americana –

where ‘clades’, according to Google Translate,

may be translated as: ‘calamity’,

‘damage’, ‘defeat’, ‘discomfiture’, ‘disaster’,

‘loss’, ‘mutilation’, ‘overthrow’, ‘rout’, ‘ruin’,

‘scourge’, according to context, of course  – think

Afghanistan, Vietnam.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SATANS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read5.4K views

Is there some primate imperative, some

genetic human want, need, reverence for

so-called strong leaders, those masters of

othering, destroyers of order,

adepts in venality and stupidity,

casual slaughterers of innocence?

 

Israel attacks Iran on a pretext from the

loan library of Pretexts – more or less

the same pretext Alexander the Great

borrowed when he burned Persepolis,

(city of the Persians). Iran borrows

from the library of Virility

and attacks Israel – the same library the Crusaders used

when they captured Jerusalem and slaughtered

Jews and Muslims, men, women, and children.

 

And the world’s self-appointed Policeman –

in hock to Christian Evangelists

and Fossil Fuel Companies and the concept

of Full Spectrum Dominance – plays his trump card,

a TV series entitled THE END

OF DAYS, with seven full length episodes:

‘Iraq’, ‘Libya’, ‘Somalia’, ‘Sudan’,

‘Lebanon’, ‘Syria’, ‘Iran’; the seven

countries of the apocalypse; repeat.

 

Opportunists and fanatics, rich boys

and malignant narcissists, greedy shits

and unhinged rhetoricians, sadists

and chaps with things to prove are, it seems,

like the poor, always to be with us

to the very end of history.

 

 

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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.6K views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

 

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

 

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

 

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

 

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

MOST WANTED, MOST NEEDED

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

I

 

We know what happened to ‘the end of history’

and ‘the peace dividend’ but what will we do now

that Osama sleeps with the fishes? Gladly, there

is no shortage of men, for they do tend to be

men, for the role of bogeyman. The myth of the

ruthless, devious, almost supernaturally

efficient enemy endures, for all wars make

money for some and wars of choice – Afghanistan,

Iraq – make even more for the same some, so war

with Iran is probably, definitely not ‘if’ but ‘when’.

 

How many of us dare to publicly expose

our leaders’ new clothes, reveal courageous death and

injury under fire as pointless, immoral,

unnecessary, avoidable, in this still

bellicose and jingoistic nation with its

tinsel patriotism of drums and flags muffling,

obscuring reason – its manipulation

of so much righteous anger and genuine grief!

 

 

II

 

According to legend, Hafiz of Shiraz, Fars,

Persia – the Sufi mystic and lyric poet,

an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer,

and popular still with speakers of Farsi

in Afghanistan and Iran, who learn his work

by heart as proverbs, sayings – was summoned

by Timur Leng aka Tamburlaine, who ruled

an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to China

and south from Kazakhstan to the mud flats of Sindh,

whose conquests, it is estimated, caused the deaths

of seventeen million men, women and children.

 

‘How could you prefer the mole on your lover’s cheek

to Bokhara and Samarkand, cities of gold,

the very jewels in my crown?’ questioned Tamburlaine,

making reference to one of the master’s ghazals.

‘I am profligate,’ replied Hafiz, ‘so am poor.’

The tyrant paid the poet many gold dinars

for his diplomatic wit. So let there always

be war by any other means, by doing what

we do best. The last couplet of the lyric reads:

‘O Hafiz, you have made a poem, so recite it well!

Be rewarded with the pearls of the firmament.’[1]

 

 

 

 


[1] The last two lines have been adapted from ‘TEACHINGS OF HAFIZ’ translated by Gertrude Lowthian Bell, 1897.

 

 

 

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