Hafez's aybé rendān makon

salām bé hamegee! Hello and welcome to Part 5 of our discussion of Hafez’s beautiful poem ʿaybé rendān makon! We’re going to start off the lesson today as always listening to my khālé Farnaz recite up to this point of the poem and also the two lines we’ll be covering today:

ʿaybé rendān makon, ay zāhedé pākeezé seresht,

ké gonāhé deegarān bar tu nakhāhand nevesht!

man agar neekam ō gar bad, tō borō, khod rā bāsh!

har kasee ān deravad ʿāghebaté kār ké kesht.

hamé kas tālebé yār-and, ché hoshyār ō ché mast.

hamé jā khānayé ʿeshgh ast, ché masjed ché kenest.

na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.

pedaram neez behishté abad az dast behesht.

All right, and as always, hopefully you understood everything up to those last two lines. Now we’re going to listen to those two just by themselves, and afterwards, go over it word by word and phrase by phrase together! Here we go:

na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.

pedaram neez behishté abad az dast behesht.

All right, so the first line, “na man az pardé-yé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.” Okay, so this part is challenging for me as well! This is where we’re getting into just poetry, but let’s just take it piece by piece, and I’ll leave the interpretation for you. So first, the word “na” simply means ‘no’. na.

na

“man,” we’ve learned before, means ‘me’ or ‘I’. man.

man

And “az” means ‘from’. az.

az

Simple enough! Now, we have “pardéyé taghvā.” Okay, so “pardé” means ‘curtain’ or ‘veil’. pardé.

pardé

And “taghvā” means ‘piety’. taghvā.

taghvā

So “pardéyé taghvā” means ‘the veil of piety’. So we’ve covered that “-é” sound between words before. It’s called the ezāfé and stands in for ‘of’; it links the two words together. So “pardéyé taghvā," ‘the veil of piety’. pardéyé taghvā.

pardéyé taghvā

Then “dar oftādam” means ‘I fell away from’. dar oftādam.

dar oftādam

And “oftādam” is ‘I fell’ in the first person singular form. So together, “dar oftādam,” ‘I fell away from’. dar oftādam.

dar oftādam

So “na man az pardé-yé taghvā bé dar oftādam” means ‘not I fell away from the veil of piety’, but then he ends it with “ō bas.” “bas” means ‘enough’, or ‘that’s it’, or ‘it’s finished’. “ō” means ‘and’. So “ō bas” means ‘and that’s it’. ō bas.

ō bas

So put together: na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.

na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas

‘Not I fell through the veil of piety, and that’s it’. So the way Muhammad Ali translated this is ‘it’s not only me who fell from the veil of piety’. So it’s an interesting way of structuring things. It’s not what we would do in conversation, but for example, if I were to say “na man bastanee khordam ō bas,” it would literally mean ‘not I ate ice cream, and that’s it’. I’m implying, it’s not only me who ate ice cream. I did eat ice cream, but others did, too. So same thing here: “na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.” ‘Not just I fell through the veil of piety’. Let’s repeat this whole thing together bit by bit: na man az. 

na man az

pardéyé taghvā.

pardéyé taghvā

bé dar oftādam.

bé dar oftādam

ō bas.

ō bas

And now, let’s say the full sentence: na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.

na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas

Wonderful! And the next sentence: “pedaram neez beheshté abad az dast behesht.” So you can hear it has the word “behesht” in there with two different meanings, which we’ll get to in a second. First, “pedaram.” This means ‘my father’. pedaram.

pedaram

And then “neez,” which means ‘also’. neez.

neez

And then “beheshté abad.” “abad” is the word for eternal. abad.

abad

I often say “tā abad,” which means ‘until eternity’ or ‘for forever’. tā abad.

tā abad

And “behesht” means ‘heaven’. behesht.

behesht

This first time around, I should say, it means ‘heaven’, so “beheshté abad” means ‘eternal heaven’. beheshté abad.

beheshté abad

And then “az dast behesht.” So first, “az dast.” “az” means from. az.

az

And “dast” means ‘hand’. dast.

dast 

So in modern Persian, the expression “az dast dādan,” meaning ‘from my hand I gave it’, means ‘to lose’. az dast dādan.

az dast dādan

But in this older language of this poetry, “behesht” means the same thing: ‘to lose’. “az dast behesht” means ‘let go from hand’, again, with the meaning of ‘to lose’. az dast behesht.

az dast behesht

So then altogether, it’s “pedaram neez beheshté abad az dast behesht," meaning ‘my father also lost the eternal heaven’. So basically, it wasn’t just me that gave this up; so did my father. As Muhammad Ali said in the introductory lesson, ‘my father’ here is meant to be Adam, giving up the Garden of Eden.

So how does this relate to the rest of the poem? I am really looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts in the discussion section for the poem. We’ll have a link to that on the show notes. For now, let’s listen to these two lines again read by my khālé Farnaz:

na man az pardéyé taghvā bé dar oftādam ō bas.

pedaram neez behishté abad az dast behesht.

All right, and that’s it for this week! Next week, we’ll be learning the final two lines of the poem, so tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion of Hafez’s ʿaybé rendān makon! Until then, khodāhafez from Leyla!