Hafez's payāmé naseem

Leyla: Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation, payāmé naseem by Hafez with Fared Shafinury

Fared: Hi leylā jān!

Leyla: salām fared jān, thank you for joining me today!

Fared: It's good to be here.

Leyla: Yeah, we haven't done a poetry episode in a long time. This is the first of many, many that we're planning to record in the near future. And so this is a poet that is one of the most famous or the most famous Iranian poet, is the reason that a lot of people even learn the Persian language to begin with, a lot of the reason people fall in love in the Persian language and listen to music in the Persian language, and somehow, we have neglected to cover this poet until now, so if you can introduce what our poet is and take it from there...

Fared: Hafez. And rightfully so; I believe Hafez should have been left at a riper time and the progression of our lovely students around the world, because Hafez, as you know, is not as straightforward as Rumi would be. Rumi, for example: straight from the heart, lands in the heart. Hafez is a bit of a word magician that can really hit all levels of society as he is still talking about love, but it's talking about all the different levels of what a society is going through, enduring.

Leyla: Right, but he does permeate every single bit of Iranian culture, so you'll hear Hafez all the time. You'll hear “fālé hāfez” all the time. What is “fālé hāfez”?

Fared: Right. fālé hāfez is a tradition, as you know, especially around Nowruz and Yalda, which is a winter solstice and the spring equinox. We use Hafez to go and get answers for our woes and tribulations throughout life. If there's ever a question in doubt, we receive the deevān, deevāné hāfez, which is his book of ghazals that has been compiled, and we pick a random poem, and we allow for that poem to speak to us, Hafez speaking to us about what we should probably do or how maybe an outcome will be.

So essentially, it has a fortune-telling kind of quality, and I remember summer, summers past in our twenties, when we visited Tehran, we went to Darband, and they had these cute little birds that would sit on top of the the cages, and they would pick a poem out, and you would purchase a poem. And you'd walk away from the mountain reading a poem and understanding what your fate may be for that day or that year.

Leyla: Right, so these poems are, in a way, prescriptive. Like, they can be a prescription to any ailment of life that you have, be it an ailment of love or of your career, or just general life ailments. You can read the poem and it really provides enough. They're generic enough, but very specific in that they really do answer your specific questions at times that you need it. It's very fascinating, but let's step back, and since this is the first poem by Hafez we're doing, let's provide an introduction to who Hafez was, what his role was in Iranian society then and now.

Fared: Hafez was a 14th-century poet who lived primarily in Shiraz. Actually, the saying is that hāfezé shirāzi never left Shiraz, unlike his, you know, peer or his contemporary at the time, Saadi, who was always traveling around the world and coming back with stories and riddled with love affairs and lost loves on the trails or the caravans he would take. Hafez, however, never left Shiraz, and the saying is that Hafez was actually a poet that had a career as a poet, so his poetry was somehow maintained financially by the royal court at the time. So Hafez would be going around from one party to the next, drinking wine, and just like every Iranian mehmooni that we see, someone stands up and recites a poem. And Hafez probably had a very similar vibe at his era.

And because of that, he uses poetry to also dissect the issues at hand in the society, need it be the hypocrisy that he would see with the clerical, you know, the leaders at the time. And he would also poke fun at the leaders and people's basically duplicities. But Hafez, essentially, he serves as a symbol of Iranian poetry, more so than any other poet. And I believe it's because of the way he plays with the words. Just as you know, there could be multitudes of meanings behind even a Rumi poem, for example. But yet, with Hafez, the complexity of the spider web of where this could lead can really, really be interesting. So I'm excited to, to read this specific poem we've picked. And I, as you know, I come from a musical angle, leylā jān, and the poem that I was thinking we should study is one sung by Mohammad Reza Shajarian, who wrote, basically, a song based on one of his poems that deals with Nowruz.

Leyla: Yes, which we're releasing this for Nowruz; it's now 2024. So for Nowruz of this year, which is coming right up. So you chose this poem as a good welcoming for the new year. Your family's also from Shiraz. What relevance does Hafez have in Shiraz and in Iran right now?

Fared: Well, my mother was born in Shiraz and lived there till the age of seven. And then she moved to Isfahan and lived there until the age of 19, when she met my father. And then they migrated to Tehran for about a year, and then they migrated to South Texas, of all places. But my...the stories of Shiraz, I remember when I went to go visit Shiraz one summer, specifically at that time, I might have been maybe ten years old. I was visiting as a child with my mother, and my uncle decided to drive us from Isfahan to Shiraz. To make a long story short, my uncle got into a car accident, and our car, you know, tripped over itself several times into the desert. And it really kind of dampered my first experience of going to Shiraz. But we did, somehow, eventually hitch a ride with a farmer.

We arrived in Shiraz, and we, we go to the tomb of Hafez. And I remember I bought my first book of Hafez that was translated into English, and I couldn't understand a word of this book. The translation was all over the place because it was a very rudimentary, literal translation, and it was complete jibber-jabber to me. And so I was like, okay, I'm not going to even try to understand these translations. So I delved even deeper into the Persian, and I was like okay, I'm just going to read this Persian, and eventually, I think, through osmosis, I'm going to come to some understanding of it until later, I took classes, and actually, we took classes at UT and studied with Dr. Hillman.

But it was interesting, at the tomb of Hafez, that it was really a pilgrimage for people from all over the world. I saw a global diaspora of Muslims that had come from all over, from Africa, and they were, they were there to visit Hafez as if they were visiting a prophet of some sort. But, but definitely, Hafiz is not considered to be a spiritualist or a mystic in the same right that Rumi was, for example. Hafez dealt with, with the world a little bit more and dealt with human nature and the expanse of the human character in ways that I think can be considered more relatable in some ways.

Leyla: And I think one point that you just brought up that's so interesting is that it is, you know, this, these were written in the 14th century, and we've brought this up before, but maybe not exactly like this. I feel like the poetry, Hafez’s poetry in particular, does use these words that, in the beginning, it's like to-, you don't understand at all. If you're just new to it and you're looking at it, it's like a fuzzy picture. And then you slowly, slowly discover these keys, and you slowly turn it, and it becomes more and more in focus until when you understand how to read Hafez, it's like you've unlocked a key, and these things just kind of come clearer into focus.

And so for the listeners who are going to be reading this poem to us at first, just when we read this poem for the first time, it's okay if you do not understand a word. And a lot of you are complete beginners to the Persian language, a lot of you even that know the Persian language, may not understand anything, but just let the words wash over you and just know that as we continue to talk about it, as we continue to learn about each of the words one by one, phrase by phrase, it will come clearer and clearer into focus. And eventually you, too, will be able to pick up a book of Hafez, and, using these kind of keys and secrets that you've discovered, you can kind of understand the poetry better.

Fared: Yes, I, and I believe the key that, that we're going to be picking up on is key words that eventually, you're going to see that as a repeating metaphor throughout all the different ghazals and then...So when you come across the word, for example, “bolbol,” which is a ‘nightingale’ or a bird of some sort, that's a bird of song, you begin to associate certain meanings with “bolbol” or, for example, “gol,” which is the word for ‘flower’, and then the relationship between these two. And so whenever you see the bolbol and the gol being thrown out at you, you automatically begin to fall into this pattern of what these metaphors are supposed to evoke.

Leyla: Absolutely, patterns, there's key words, there's, there are some words that aren't really used in modern Persian that are used often in Hafez, and we'll learn those as well and, again, give you more and more keys and tools in your tool belt. But why do you think it's important for people to understand Hafez? What's important about this?

Fared: Hafez is one of the most...it's like a family member in every Persian household, and more so than any other poet.

Leyla: Absolutely. Like we talk about Rumi a lot, Rumi is very popular in the West, and...but the book that you put on your Nowruz table, you might not put a Qur’an if you're not religious, but you will have a deevāné hāfez. Every household will have a deevāné hāfez in their house, every single one, without fail!

Fared: The beauty in Hafez’s ability to strum at the strings of the heart really surpasses almost any, any individual, any poem, any poet, any poetry that I've ever come across. And for me, one of, one of my blessings as a songwriter has been to associate with Hafez, because Hafez is music, and the poetry really just begs for singing, begs for a melody.

And here, Mohammad Reza Shajarian has done a beautiful job bringing this to, to light in a musical sense, and, and the fact that it has to do with Nowruz, it, it’s beautiful because it's very rare to find a poem that really just evokes a sense of Nowruz and, and, and the newness of the day that comes with it. It's something that I'm excited to, to share with everybody.

Leyla: And of course, if you don't know, Nowruz, the Persian New Year, happens on the first day of spring, and so it's a time when naturally everything becomes new. The world is like waking up. So it happens on the Spring Equinox each year, which this year, it's going to be March 21, I believe. I'm not sure.

Fared: Yeah, right around there.

Leyla: Or somewhere around there. Yeah, the 19th through the 21st at the exact moment- It happens at the exact moment everywhere on earth, so...so also...So I guess let's, let's get into our specific poem, but also, let's go over who is Shajarian, and we'll have a link to the song that Fared is referring to, by the way, on the show notes for this episode. And so I encourage you, as you're learning this poem, to listen to this song on repeat, but who is Shajarian and what...? Tell us a little bit about the song.

Fared: Shajarian, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, the father, because his son now also sings, Homayoon - he is an authority on classical Persian āvāz, and he was a radifdān, and he has a repertoire that spans decades and decades, from pre-Islamic revolution till, till the, till years before he passed away, which, which was a few years ago, Mohammad Reza Shajarian. And one way to really compare him would be like somewhat of a Pavarotti kind of character for the Iranians, and they chose to bury him. If this shows any significance of who he will be remembered and our history as we move forward, he was buried next to Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi is, as you know, he wrote the shāhnāmé, which is the Book of Kings, right? The Letters of the Kings, which has over 70,000 lines of poetry. So Shajarian is, is going to be remembered as a, as a man who has significantly contributed to Iranian culture.

And he carried the wisdom of our musical tradition, the ra’dif, in ways that no one can really even come close to. And definitely, this song is one of my favorite ones of his. I, I believe he actually composed the melody. He...some of the best songs of his are the ones that he's actually composed himself. This one is in dastgāhé abu atā, which is the name of the mode that he sang it in. And Shajarian, we saw him at, at University of Texas, Leyla. I believe we were both there at his shows. We were like, what, in our early twenties? And I remember the, just the mass of people coming at him to, to get signatures...and dollar bills! “Sign my dollar bill!” I remember Iranians bringing dollar bills to Mohammad Reza Shajarian. They would take his signature. I had nothing but a Hafez book with me, which was my first deevāné hāfez, very small, rectangular book. And I, and I had brought that with me in the hopes to have him sign my Hafez book. So in the beginning of...and I definitely must show photos of that so we can show, we could show his signature on, on the deevāné hāfez.

Leyla: Yeah. So this also plays into this selection of this poem that we chose because, you know, these poems, this poem in particular has several lines. And what Fared did is he chose lines for us to learn. So it's not that, we're not learning necessarily every single line of this poem. We will have it available on the lesson page for this poem. We'll have the full thing available with the translation and the English phonetic spelling if you want to understand the full poem, but why did you choose these certain lines, and can you tell us about the little switch that you did, too, and why you did that?

Fared: Right, so, so within these poems, specifically in Hafez, there is a term we use called “shāh bayt,” and...“shāh” meaning ‘king’, “bayt” meaning a ‘line’ or a ‘verse’, “shāh bayt” meaning ‘the verse of the king’, meaning that within a ghazal of Hafez, you're going to find certain lines that really stand out. And those are the ones that I believe, when one wants to write a song or compose a song based on Hafez, they go through a poem and they're like, this one has some Arabic words that are a little bit maybe too much for the mouth to really grasp for the Iranian ears, right? So they go over that, and then they find the, the lines that actually speak a little bit more clearly and have the most wit, right? So one of the defining characteristics of a shāh bayt would be a line that is extremely witty and extremely to the point and very easily understood. You don't want to...A shāh bayt, for example, would be....

Leyla: What’s the definition of...yeah, what's the definition of a shāh bayt? What is that?

Fared: A shāh bayt would be the best line of the poem.

Leyla: Gotcha. And often, it ends on that sharp beat, like it kicks you.

Fared: You are- exactly. And, and, and again, it's somewhat unanimous. Like I think every Iranian that, that, that understands Hafez and reads poetry regularly, they're all familiar with the shāh bayts throughout the deevān, so it's very rare that everyone is memorizing the whole ghazal. They, they know- the first line usually is very much emblematic. Usually, the first line of each, each poem in the deevāné hāfez, each ghazal, the very first bayt is considered a shāh bayt on its own. And that's actually how people remember because these poems don't have names. The name of the poem is actually just the first line.

Leyla: Right, and so Iranians in general, we've talked about this so many times, but Iranians have a lot of poems memorized, but like Fared’s saying, this one...so if you're watching this, you'll see the entire poem on the screen right now. You'll see it has 16 lines, but it's very rare that anyone's going to have all 16 lines memorized. It's just those key parts of this poem that they'll have memorized. They'll always have the first line memorized. And then, like Fared said, there's some shāh bayt in there that they will have memorized.

So, Fared, of these- we're looking at the 16 lines right now, which ones are we going to learn together?

Fared: First, second, fourth, tenth, and ninth.

Leyla: So why do we flip the tenth and the ninth? Can you do that? Are you allowed to do that?

Fared: Absolutely. As a musician, you absolutely can. So I've, I’ve, I've written many songs on Hafez, and in my first album, Behind the Seas, I, I have a, I have...three to four, I believe. I don't know the exact number, but I'm just going to go with three; I think that sounds correct. I have three Hafez poems that I, that I composed music to, and essentially, you get to paint with the shāh bayts of Hafez.

So I get to decide where I want- what's, what's my message of this? What am I taking out of this poem of Hafez? Do I want to focus on this? Is it the...you know, in many ways, you can make Hafez your own in that sense, because Hafez has a ghazal with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten lines, each of them going down. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to, like, “if I'm going to sing Hafez, I need to sing it in order and I need to sing all of it,” no. I get to paint.

Leyla: Yeah. I do feel like through my, like, Western brain, this just, like, doesn't make sense that we could just flip things around, but it's okay. So it's not wrong to do it this way, and it's very calming.

Fared: You know what it is, Leyla? Let me, let me put it this way. It is a little bit, for our Western upbringing and literature, I think it does sound a little confusing, and it seems like we're taking a liberty with someone else's work. But the reason why it specifically works with Hafez in a very beautiful way is because each line on its own is a poem.

Leyla: Mmm, okay.

Fared: Right, and sometimes, there is a line that leads into another line that brings extra meaning to the next line. So not all of them are that way, but the shāh bayts stand on their own right. It's like, it's like Khayyam. Khayyam has those, the robayyāté khayyām: just a small bit, bam! So the meaning oftentimes can be encapsulated for the whole 12 lines, or ten lines of a poem can be encapsulated in just one line.

A beautiful thing my father always says is one difference between the Persian language and the English language is that sometimes, in Farsi, in Persian, we can say ten sentences with four words. Like, the immensity of, of, of something that's so complex can be really thrown at you in a witty way, almost like kind of like a saying goes. And a lot of Persian sayings and idioms actually come from Hafez in that sense.

Leyla: Okay, so with that awesome introduction, I think let's just get straight into the poem. So, well, as we’ve said, Fared has chosen a few lines of the poem for us to learn. He's going to read the Persian line, and I'm going to say a crude translation that we came up with. Of course, these poems are so difficult to translate because there's so much in each word, in each phrase. It's, that's why we learn it in their original language, and so, after we read it and hear this crude translation, we are going to go over it, we're, li-, line by line so that we can get more of a feeling. And of course, as you all know, this first lesson is only the first of a series of lessons on this particular poem. In this one, Fared and I are together, and in the next ones, it'll just be me by myself going over just two or three or four lines at a time and telling you exactly every single word.

And again, remember, right now we're at the doctor's office looking at this, looking at these lines of text that are teeny, teeny-tiny, very far away from us. Maybe you will not be able to see any of it, but we'll put those lenses down and eventually just get it more and more in focus until you can really see this poem in pure focus. And I'm very excited for this process as I will be going through this process, too, as we read it. So, fared jān, with that, please read us the first two lines, and then I'll say the translation afterwards.

Fared: zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi.

az een bād ar madad khāhee cherāghé del bar-afroozee.

Leyla: From the beloved that comes the winds of the new beginning,

If you need any help from this wind, light the fire within your heart.

Fared: chō gol gar khordé-ee dāree, khodā-rā sarfé eshrat kon

ké ghāroon-rā ghalat-hā dād sowdāyé zar-andoozee!

Leyla: If you are the flower that has sorrow from the lover, expend your love for God on joy, 

For the richest man made many mistakes while threading his gold!

Fared: bé sahrā rō ké az dāman ghobāré gham beeyafshānee!

bé golzār āy k’az bolbol ghazal goftan beeyāmoozee!

Leyla: Go to the desert so that you can beat the dust of sorrow out of your clothes!

Come to the meadow of flowers so you can learn to say poetry from songbirds!

Fared: jodā shod yāré sheereenat; konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’?

ké hokmé āsemān een ast agar sāzee va gar soozee.

Leyla: Your sweet lover has left you, and now your candle burns alone,

For the skies have ruled for it to be this way, whether you build or burn.

Fared: may-ee dāram chō jān sāfee ō soofeee meekonad ‘aybash.

khodāyā heech āghel-rā mabādā bakhté bad roozee!

Leyla: I have wine that is as clear as my soul,

But yet the hypocrites are judging me.

Oh God, all these enlightened ones, don't bestow upon them this misfortune of blindness!

Fared: Beautiful.

Leyla: So now, as we do, let's start from the very beginning.

Fared: “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi.” ‘From the beloved, from the lover comes the message of the new day, which is written on the breath of the wind, the breath of the new day.’ “az een bād ar madad khāhee,” ‘and if there is anything you desire’ - “ar madad,” “madad” meaning ‘help’, “ar madad,” if there is any help you need from this wind that you’re sensing from the new day, “cherāghé del bar-afroozee.” So instead of seeking it from the outside, you need to be seeking from the inside. So Hafez here, in the first line, is saying that the world is changing around us, but what about within us? What about within our own hearts?

Leyla: Wonderful, so let's look at this in detail a little bit more. There was another poem I don't remember that we did together that interchange “kooyé” and “pā.” Remember that?

Fared: That was Rumi in “rooz ō shab.” sar zé kooyat- sar zé pāyat bar nadāram rooz ō shab, and here, so “kooyé yār” is ‘from the beloved’...

Leyla: “yār” is the word for ‘love’. ‘Lover’, sorry, ‘lover’!

Fared: Yeah, ‘the lover’, ‘the beloved’, however you want to put that, if...however you want to interpret this, if it's one of divinity and mysticism, then you would probably strip the word “yār” from any worldly inkling. And our Dr. Hillman, professor at UT, University of Texas, he was very adamant that believe Hafez when he says who he is, what he writes is, and I think it's very fair. And actually, I was talking to a friend the other day about believe people when they, when they show you who they are the first time.

Leyla: I hear that a lot, but I've never thought about it from Hafez. That's a great point!

Fared: Yeah! Like Hafez is, Hafez is a little bit of a, like, excuse my French, like a no-bullshit character. He's just giving it to you straight. “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi.” So it's, it's his lover, it's his beloved on Earth. “az een bād ar madad khāhee,” if there's anything you want from your husband or your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or whatever, “cherāghé del bar-afroozee.” Don't seek it from your partner in life. Seek it from yourself. Become photosynthetic with your heart. Light comes from within.

Leyla: Right, and so we chose to do this poem for Nowruz, and so let's kind of talk about that one word as well. So we have that in the very first line: “bādé nowruzi,” so this wind of change. “nowruz” literally means ‘new day’, “nō,” ‘new’, and “rooz” is ‘day’, but it's also the name of this holiday where it's the new year, the first day of spring.

Fared: And also, if we look at the geography of Shiraz and we talk about what Shiraz actually looked like, and what it does look like is...it's surrounded by mountains and the distance on the horizon. And when the Nowruz comes about and, and...the wind actually shifts, so from winter to spring, there's an actual shift of wind, directionally, and the wind is channeled down through the mountains and down from the mountains into the valley and into Shiraz.

So you can imagine, Hafez is sitting in his beautiful Persian garden, and it's Nowruz, and he's invited to a party, to a mehmooni the same night. So he's sitting there, he's like, oh God, I got to come up with a poem about Nowruz. It was probably just as like, matter of fact as that is.

Leyla: Wow!

Fared: And he's like, okay, oh wow, this wind, huh! Oh, and then I'm going to the richest men's house tonight! I want to also stick it to him at the end with some, some messages of how he thinks society is filled with hypocrites. So here, “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi”; he probably actually felt a wind on his cheeks, and he wrote this! You can, you can imagine that. “az een bād ar madad khāhee cherāghé del bar-afroozee,” meegé...āshegh, tō bād āshegh bāshee! You have to be the one that's in love! You can't expect other people to make you happy. You gotta be able to make yourself happy! It starts from within.

Leyla: So really, like you said, like, the shāh bayt, and everybody has the first line memorized. I mean, this one line could give you the answer that you wanted if you said, you know, “Should I take this new job?” The answer is within you. I mean, that's the answer to everything, isn’t it?

Fared: Exactly, so that's, you know, that would be how a fortune would be read, so...So Shajarian sings this, and in abu atā. He goes:

“zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi. az een bād ar madad khāhee cherāghé del bar-afroozee, bar-afroozee!"

And, in the musical sense, he’s repeating “bar-afroozee” twice at the very end right there. “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi.” And one, one of the suggestions I would like to give to the lovely listeners, leylā jān, is that when they're reciting these poems, is to do it in a mantra style, like, don't stop. And again, Leyla's right; don't get bogged down by “I need to understand every word literally.” Understand the flow and the music that runs through Persian poetry! And when that lands and sits within you, then the meaning starts, kind of like through an osmosis-like effect, you're going to begin to really feel it.

So I really want to invite people, as they recite, to think in a musical sense. “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad,” notice the word “yār” with the alef in the middle! “zé kooyé yāāāār meeyāyad naseemé bāāāādé nowruzi”! So right there, “yār” and “bād,” they're creating this lift in the wind. I actually see the wind from the mountains of Shiraz within the first line. That's why Hafez is who he is. It's so immaculately connected. “zé kooyé yāāāār meeyāyad naseemé bāāāādé nowruzi. az een bāāāād ar madad khāhee cherāghé del bar-afroozee.”

Leyla: Wonderful! So now, let's talk about “cherāghé del,” and also, I have to just stop and say what a treat it is to be able to have Fared with his immense talent on these! I mean, we are the luckiest people in the world to be able to talk about these poems with you, fared jān.

Fared: It's my honor to be here with you, leylā jān. You're doing beautiful work.

Leyla: Oh, because he brings such, you know, talent and, you know, so many years of history of his music along! And as many of you know, he composed and wrote our theme music as well, so we get to hear that as a treat whenever we listen to these lessons. But he brings in, he's studied with some great musicians in Iran, years and years and years of study.

So that all comes into being able to understand and tell these poems to us. And you really cannot understand this music, cannot understand these poems without understanding this musicality. So it's wonderful to know. So then “cherāghé del bar-afroozee,” can we talk about these words, too? “cherāghé del,” ‘the light of the heart’!

Fared: Yeah, ‘the light of the heart’, “cherāgh” meaning ‘light’, “del” meaning ‘heart’. “bar-afroozee,” so “afrookhtan.” It comes from the word, “bar-afroozee” comes from the verb “afrookhtan.” Right? So something I've been, some, some women's names is Afrooz. I have a cousin named Afrooz, which means she's, she's lit with the fire, right? Or she's a fire, which is beautiful. I always love that word, “afrooz.” “bar-afrooz,” “bar” means ‘to’, ‘to lift’ almost with, “bar afrooz.” Bring it to fire, make it make, make it into a inferno. “cherāghé del bar-afroozee.” So whatever you're seeking from this new day, now, 2023 is over. It's 2024. Those what is it, we make those yearly...?

Leyla: Resolutions.

Fared: Resolutions, which I'm very, I'm very good at making them, very bad at following through! It's probably because I'm not, I'm not seeking this. I'm like, ah! I'm blaming it on, like, my lifestyle, right? But again, that's...more than likely, I'm thinking about going to the gym every day. But, but definitely, “cherāghé del bar-afroozee,” I must love myself in order to be able to figure this out. 

Because when you go into your heart and you light your fire, what does that mean? That means you start caring about things. You start caring about, it's a very practical, the thing about Hafez is it's very practical. He's like the Dr. Phil of Persian poetry! I, I don't really want to equate him to that, but there is a practicality to him. That's why in every household he is on, he is on everyone's shelf. He is on the haft seen. He is on the Nowruz traditional spread that we have.

Leyla: Yeah, and so I want to point out also the themes of fire and light come up a lot in this poem, so let's note that. So “cherāghé del,” that's one. So now, let's go to the next.

Fared: And just, just a quick note on that, because that's a beautiful point you make, leylā jān. That probably is a very pre-Islamic influence that we have. Persian poetry really, really, really points to fire in so many ways. So some of, some of the mysticism that we see, and Persian mysticism, you know, it's actually a, a convolution of Zoroastrianism and Islam right, so I just wanted to make that point because good, good observation. So, second line: “chō gol gar khordé-ee dāree, khodā-rā sarfé eshrat kon!” Here’s, now, earlier, we talked about key words and key metaphors and key symbolisms that's going to help you as you start studying classical 14th-century Persian poetry. 

There is a relationship between the “gol,” being ‘the flower’, and the “bolbol,” being ‘the songbird’ or ‘the nightingale’. The bolbol and the gol have always been used historically throughout the Divan and Hafez's literature as a relationship between the āshegh and the ma’shoogh. Who is the “āshegh”? The āshegh is the one that's giving the love. The ma’shoogh is the one that's always being coy and receiving the love. The flower that is mute by its nature is the coy one. And with the wind, and again, you gotta understand this poetry really comes from their real-life observations. If you sit next to a rosebush on a nice windy day on the first day of spring, probably that same wind that ran through the meadows that came down into the garden is moving that flower about.

And almost when they move around, it always has, like, this willow tree effect where you almost think, oh, there must be some coyness; well, what's wrong? You know, you come to someone who's kind of like “chee shodé? What's going on?” So “chō gol gar khordé-ee dāree,” “khordé,” “khordé dāshtan,” ‘to have’ a khordé. “dāree” means ‘to have’; “dāshtan” is the noun of that. “khordé-ee dāree,” which means you have some sort of sorrow or a gripe or...

Leyla: Something eating at you.

Fared: Something eating at you, exactly! Because this is the new day, right? Hafez is writing this poem to go and party at night, and he needs to tell everyone how to be a better human being because he's fed up with all these hypocrites running around. So we get “chō gol gar khordé-ee dāree, khodā-rā sarfé eshrat kon!” So, if you...so, if you're like this flower that's sorrowful and, like, woeful, take your love of God and expend it on real joy! “sarf” is ‘to expend’. “khodā” is ‘God’; “khodā-rā,” ‘the God’; “khodā-rā sarfé eshrat kon!” “eshrat” is ‘joy’; it's ‘happiness’. It's, it's ‘exuberance of existence’, right? “eshrat kon!”

And so here, it moves on into the second line of this bayt: “ké ghāroon-rā,” and who is ghāroon? ghāroon is noted in history as a very, very rich man who had a lot. He had a lot of land; he had a lot of gold. He was very, very wealthy. “ké ghāroon,” so he's become a symbol of wealth. So the word “ghāroon” is synonymous with ‘wealth’. There's actually a, a movie, a feelmé fārsi from pre-Islamic Revolution called “ganjé ghāroon,” and that's actually an interesting movie that talks about a man by the name of Gharoon who had a daughter and who had a son that left, and he turned out to be his son. And it's a whole long story, but “ké ghāroon-rā ghalat-hā dād,” so the word “ghalat” means a...

Leyla: ’Wrongdoing', ‘mistakes’.

Fared: Or ‘mistakes’, right? And then there's another word that Shajarian uses, because as you know, a lot of these poems in the deevāné hāfez was a compilation of poems that they found over the years that they attributed. And there has been some real forensic work to really be able to pinpoint this and attribute it to Hafez. So they can tell which lines are more Hafezian than others, because there is some, you know, there is some other person that has maybe decided, maybe I like the words “ghalat-hā” verses “zarar-hā.” They’re synonymous.

So Shajarian, in his singing of this, he uses “ké ghāroon-rā zarar-hā dād sowdāyé zar-andoozee.” The word “sowdā” is ‘sadness’. “zar-andoozee,” “zar-andoozee,” “zali,” my mother's name was Zali. Rest in peace. Zali means ‘a golden thread’. That was my mom's name. That is my mom's name still. 

“zar-andoozee,” “dookhtan,” “doozee” comes from a verb, ‘to stitch’: “dookhtan,” “doozee.” So he's threading the sadness of sitting there all day by himself, the richest man, you know. If you're sad like this flower and you can't get over yourself, which...if there's something going on, be joyful, because you don't want to sit there like the richest man in the corner with his gold threading by himself like a miser! He's basically telling the people that are supposed to pay him at the end of the night, “Don't be a miser!” This is an actual interpretation of many people who read Hafez, like, just read it as it is, but if you take him out of the equation, he is saying real truths about how to live.

Leyla: So let's go back to this idea of the gol being the coy...I think that one frame of reference that a lot of people have is the story of The Little Prince, which is this, you know, universal story now. And remember the flower in that story. It was also this, like, coy figure. So I kind of keep that in mind whenever I hear, you know, this was this rose that the little prince loved. And it was the recipient of all the love of the little prince. So I think that that's something, I mean, that theme came into that story from all these poems. So, like Fared is saying, it's this figure that can't talk, that can just receive.

Fared: Yeah, and that's historically known as the “ma’shoogh.” You have the “āshegh,” which is the giver; he's the one that's always in pain and suffering, and it's the ma’shoogh that can always say yes or no, right? But yeah, like, he could either receive or not.

Leyla: So, Fared, do you want to show us how this is sung?

Fared: Yeah, so this second line is sung:

“chō gol gar khordé-ee dāree, khodā-rā sarfé eshrat kon

ké ghāroon-rā ghalat-hā dād sowdāyé zar-andoozee, zar-andoozee!”

Leyla: Wonderful! And you said that...did Shajarian replace “ghalat-hā” with another word?

Fared: Absolutely.

Leyla: So “ghalat-hā” means ‘mistakes’ or ‘wrongdoing’? Whereas “zarar-hā” means actually a...

Fared: ‘Deficits’.

Leyla: ‘Deficit’.

Fared: Yes.

Leyla: So instead, he puts “zarar-hā,” which is an actual deficit, so an actual, like, losing. So that changes the meaning a little bit, but...

Fared: It does, it does. I think maybe one of the reasons why he used “ghalat-hā” versus...he uses “zarar” versus “ghalat,” because the term “ghalat” has more of a normative value, “yak taraf ghalat kardé.” ‘That person made a mistake’, right? “taraf zarar dādé.” One could do a “ghalat,” whereas one has a “zarar,” right? So one is a deficit, whereas one is an action. Like I could, right…?

Leyla: Gotcha. Yeah, it's, like, more judgmental. It's like...

Fared: It's a little...

Leyla: Like a moral...

Fared: It has a moral, moral backing to it a bit more.

Leyla: Got it. Okay, well, let's move on to the next couple lines.

Fared: The third bayt here that we're focusing on, to follow the structure of the song, actually: “bé sahrā rō ké az dāman ghobāré gham beeyafshānee!” So here, again, Hafez is saying that ‘go to nature! Get out, get out! Be alone! Go! Go to the desert! Go to the meadows! Go to the vastness so that you can actually beat the dust of sorrow out of your clothes!’ And I always think of taking our rugs out during Nowruz time and as we're doing “khooné takoonee,” we're cleaning the house and reviving the house, we take our rugs out, and we clean, and we beat the dust out of them. Or you could just easily vacuum it, whichever. “bé sahrā...!”

Leyla: Absolutely! But yes, “sahrā” is the desert, and then “dāman” is your clothing, and the “ghobāré gham.” So that's a beautiful, first of all, I like “ghobāré gham.” I like that alliteration there. So “ghobār” is this ‘dust’; it’s like ‘dirty dust’, and “gham” is ‘sorrow’. So it's taking this idea of this ghobār which you find in the “sahrā,” in the desert, you find this dust, but it's saying, go out there and beat that dust out of your clothing! It doesn't have to be on your person. It doesn't belong there.

Fared: “bé golzār ā!” ‘Come to the meadows of where the flowers are!’ “k’az bolbol ghazal goftan beeyāmoozee!” ‘Then you can learn how to tell poems, how you can recite your own poems from the birds!’ Come do what I do! It's not that special! You're focused on making money. You're focused on doing that, but if you want to be a poet and you want to be in love, you want to be president, if you want to be in the now, go to the desert, beat the sorrow out of yourself, go to the flowers, and listen to the birds!

Leyla: Beautiful, and “ghazal goftan beeyāmoozee!” So “āmookhtan” is ‘to learn’, and you learn how to say specifically this type of poetry, “ghazal.”

Fared: Moving on to the next slide.

Leyla: And do you want to sing this line as well?

Fared: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

“bé sahrā rō ké az dāman ghobāré gham, ghobāré gham beeyafshānee!

bé golzār āy k’az bolbol ghazal goftan beeyāmoozee!"

Leyla: Wonderful. Okay, next two lines.

Fared: “jodā shod yāré sheereenat. konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’? ké hokmé āsemān een ast agar sāzee va agar soozee.” So here, he’s saying that ‘listen’, “jodā shod yāré sheereenat!” I get it! I get it! Your beloved left you, high and dry! “jodā” means ‘to separate’. “shod,” ‘became separated’. “yār” is your ‘lover’, your ‘beloved’. ‘Your beloved separated from you!’

“konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’?” Why do you sit alone like this candle burning by yourself? You're burning...so the candle, again, a symbol of the candle in Persian classical 14th-century poetry, “sham’,” “sham’ ō parvāné,” just like “bolbol ō gol.” So you have “parvāné” being the moth to the flame, right? So “sham’” here is saying the āshegh, again, he's talking to the āshegh. This poem is not addressing the ma’shoogh, and...Well, he is, actually. In the line prior, I take that back, he's talking about the flower, but here, in this line, he’s not addressing the ma’shoogh. He's addressing the āshegh. “jodā shod yāré sheereenat. konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’? ké hokmé āsemān een ast.” Now he's saying because, since it's always been, ‘the skies’, “āsemān hokm dādé.”

Leyla: “ké hokmé āsemān,” so ‘the ruling from the sky’.

Fared: “jodā shod yāré sheereenat. konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’?” ‘Why do you sit alone burning there like a candle just because your beloved left? It's always been this way!’ “ké hokmé āsemān een ast!” ‘The sky has always ruled as such!’ The sky being, sitting in the seat of the judge. “hokm dādé,” it has given a ‘law’ that this is the way it's always been. Whether you build or whether you burn, whether you stay or whether you burn, however you choose to be, the only constant is that one day, things will change. We will all separate. It’s...

Leyla: We are born alone, and we die alone!

Fared: We, yeah! Yeah, we are born alone; you die alone! Go back into here!

Leyla: Right, so let's go back. How does this relate to the first one? Because, so, “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi.” So this wind of change came through the, you know, it came through the lover. So what happened to the lover by the fifth line?

Fared: Well, again, the continuity of the message will remain, but you're never really talking about the same subject matter. So I couldn't really say that this is supposed to answer the first line specifically and in a literal sense, but basically...and the first line, “zé kooyé yār meeyāyad naseemé bādé nowruzi. az een bād ar madad khāhee cherāghé del bar-afroozee.” Here, he’s saying that hey, the new day has come, and we're receiving this, but listen, it's not the new day that's going to change anything for you. It's you that needs to change. And then in this line, he's saying, “jodā shod yāré sheereenat; konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’?” Just because your outside world is not going “vafghé morādé,” it's not going in a happy way, the way you want it to be, you can't just sit there and burn by yourself. This is the way it's always been!

Leyla: Mm-hmm! Yeah. There's, like, an inevitability of it. The hokmé āsemān, it's just inevitable. This is the inevitability. So then it is related to that first one, because it's saying, you know, you have to find these answers from within. So then by this line, it's saying, well, the lover's gone. Like, that wasn't the continuity, but that light from within is still there.

Fared: Exactly. Exactly. And here Shajarian sings this as such, meegé:

“jodā shod yāré sheereenat.”

Those are called tahrir. And again, I want to say how much Classical Persian āvāz singing is related to 14th-century poetry because he's talking about learning how to recite poems from the birds, and the singing is an actual emulation of the birds. So when we do this tahrir technique, meegé:

“jodā shod yāré sheereenat; konoon tanhā nesheené-ee, sham’?

ké hokmé āsemān een ast agar sāzee, agar soozee.”

Leyla: Wonderful! That leads us to our shāh bayt.

Fared: So Shajarian chose to end his composition and his song on this specific line out of the poem. And we can talk about why we think, and I would love to actually hear from everyone what they think, and why, out of all these lines, would Shajarian choose to end on this specific line? And we'll talk about Shajarian in a little bit too, because he was very much the face of the protest, both in the Green Movement and throughout his career. And he got shunned by the Islamic Republic since 2009. But this go-, but he's saying this way back in the day and in the late eighties or early, yeah, mid-to-late eighties: “may-ee dāram chō jān sāfee ō soofeee meekonad ‘aybash. khodāyā heech āghel-rā mabādā bakhté bad roozee!” So here, he's saying, “may-ee.” “may-ee” means ‘wine’, a glass of intoxication of some kind, pretty much red wine, I'm fairly certain. Shiraz wine! “may-ee dāram,” ‘I have a glass of wine’, ‘I have wine’, “chō jān sāfee,” ‘as clear as my spirit’. “jān,” ‘my life’, ‘my spirit’, ‘my force’. “sāf,” “sāfee” means something that you “sāf,” it goes through, what's the word we were using? The...

Leyla: Colander!

Fared: A colander...

Leyla: And you said cheesecloth, but yeah, it purifies!

Fared: Yeah, so in Persian winemaking technique, or as in any winemaking technique, there is a layer at the bottom of the wine, which, in Classical Persian terms, is called the “dord.” “dord” is where all the skin and whatever physicalities that's left, the impurities, sits at the very bottom of the glass. So here, he's saying, “may-ee dāram chō jān sāfee.” ‘My wine is clear. There is nothing here that is impure because it's like my spirit.’ He’s equating the intoxication of the wine to being within his spirit. But then he goes on in the same line to say, “va soofee meekonad ‘aybash.” “soofee” here is not a good term to say “soofee” as in someone who's a Sufi, S-U-F-I, right? When the term “soofee” is used in Classical Persian poetry, especially by someone like Hafez, very rarely is he saying it in admiration of them for being such pious, religious people. He's saying it in a hypocritical way. He's saying, “va soofee meekonad ‘aybash.” “’ayb” means ‘to find fault’, right?

Leyla: Right. So I'm drinking this wine, and this “enlightened one,” in quotation marks, is finding fault with what I am doing. And can you speak a little bit about what does wine symbolize in these poems, to being drunk? What does it symbolize?

Fared: So, one of the goals of mysticism, whether it's Kabala, whether it's Zoroastrianism, whether it's Sufiism, mysticism as a whole, is to reach a state of some sort of ecstasy so that you can become closer to God, closer to the divine, where you're somehow removing yourself from this physical realm of destruction and just mania and terribleness, right? So, wine, here, can be thought of in a couple of different ways. Like earlier in our discussion, we said believe Hafez the first time, what he says.

So according to our wonderful professor from back in the day, one of the interpretations, one of the many interpretations of this would be, say, he's actually talking about a glass of wine. He's saying that, listen, if I go down to the taverns and I have a glass of wine, that doesn't make you any more righteous than me, right? He's saying that it's not within that. So one of the interpretations here can actually be a glass of actual physical wine, right? Because I'm sure everyone drank wine in Shiraz at that time. They still do. But “may-ee dāram chō jān sāfee,” he's saying, ‘listen, I may be drinking my wine, but it's as clear as my soul. Who are you to sit here and judge me?’

Now another interpretation can be of mysticism, as I was saying a little bit earlier, which is that “may-ee,” it's not that it's a glass of wine; it's a symbol for God. It's a symbol for the drink of the divine that isn't to intoxicate. You hear, like, well, that's another way to think about it. I highly doubt that. I think he's straight up making a comparison about these righteous people in his town, running around, making them feel bad for being, you know, “he's just a poet,” you know.

Moving on to the second part of the story.

Leyla: And then the last, yep.

Fared: “khodāyā heech āghel-rā,” again, here, and he's using the term “āghel,” almost in a way that's, like, he's being sarcastic. He's saying these “intellectuals,” these people who “know,” “khodāyā!” ‘God, now he's, now...!’ So Shajarian chose to end on this line, which for me is very interesting, right? Because Shajarian continued to sing. He sang before the Revolution in ‘79, and he continued to sing, and he was one of the praised and one of the most valuable voices of Classical Persian music ever, right? But still, I think one of his ways to subliminally, just like many of the great directors we know, Kiarostami, when Persian movies were made, they would find subliminal ways to still stick their point.

So he's like, okay, I have to sing Hafez, I'm singing Hafez. I'm going to find the shāh bayts that specifically communicate what I'm trying to say, which is, he's trying to end on...This is his level of protest, possibly, ‘cause first of all, a) it's about Nowruz, Nowruz, predating Islam. So this, being a theocratic Islamic state, doesn't really celebrate Nowruz in the same ways that a lot of Persians do, that wanna uphold their, the pride of the Persian, you know, predating having to live in a theocratic state. But also here, he’s making fun of the hypocrites and the people that claim to be one way, but yet they're another way. “ay khodāyā!” ‘God!’ “heech āghelee-rā een soofeeyān-hā, een ādam-hā, mabādā bakhté bad roozee!” ‘Don’t’, but yet, it's almost like he's also praying for them to, he's saying, please don't give them a "bad roozee”; “bakhté bad roozee” means, “bakht” means your ‘fortune’.

Leyla: You know what it is? It's ‘bless their hearts’! We say this in...we say this in Texas. That's when we want to be like ‘oh, bless your heart!’. It's like a ve-, it's an insult! It is a backhanded insult!

Fared: “Oh, bless your heart!” Yeah, I love that.

Leyla: ‘May God have mercy on your soul!’

Fared: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I absolutely love that! “khodāyā heech āghel-rā mabādā bakhté bad roozee!”

Leyla: ‘God, bless their hearts!’

Fared: But yet, I want to talk about something here, though, leylā jān, because it's interesting for me as I dive deeper into this ghazal with you. What I find is that the musical interpretation of this is so dramatic, so he's singing it in abu atā, and especially this last line, he goes...I want to sing it for you, and I actually want to get your take on it. Because for me, how we're interpreting it right now, if I...as a songwriter, I don't know if I could really sing it with such drama. He goes:

“may-ee dāram chō jān sāfee, soofee meekonad ‘aybash.”

So beautiful, though.

“khodāyā heech āghel-rā, khodāyā heech āghel-rā mabādā bakhté bad roozee!”

Leyla: What is the overall, like, message that you think that we should be getting from this poem? And what was it that made you want to choose this for this Nowruz in particular?

Fared: I'm working on a play, right? I'm a playwright these days, writing a play about Persian mysticism and predating, mythology predating Islam, and one of the running themes that I seem to be running into with some of the projects that I'm involved in right now is turning the magnifying glass onto ourselves. You know, there is so much to gripe about. There's so much strife in warfare, there's so many factions being pinned up against each other. They've been pinned up against each other for decades and decades and decades, and dragging all the rest of us into their warfare in all parts of the world. And I'm seeing a frown upon everyone's face these days. Wherever I go, I see, I feel this heaviness in people's hearts.

So as we approach from Winter Solstice to Spring Equinox, and as we are going to talk of Nowruz, I find the message of self-empowerment very vibrational and very much in congruence with how I feel, how things are going. So here the message of Hafez really resonates with me, that we must actually search within our own hearts. We must search within our own psyche and stop taking the point of blame onto others. It's an opportunity for wherever you fall, on whichever side of whichever aisle in whichever warfare, it doesn't matter.

At a certain point, for the sake of our children, leylā jān, for the sake of our humanity, we must all take it upon ourselves to start with ourselves...start...these slogans that we're consistently being fed and we're consistently spewing out upon the world. I find it that here, Hafez, many times in the deevān, in his deevāné hāfez, he speaks of this. But here, very clearly, he is making a poignant point. And I can envision him in the 14th century, dressed in his funny Hafez gear. We don't even know what he looked like, but there's all this depictions of him with the turban. I don't know, I don't know what he look like, but I can see him standing around a group of some of the elites of his town reciting. He was probably one of the most prized poets of his era at his at his time in Shiraz, and he was probably just sticking it to the big man, but in a way, he's basically saying, hey, take it upon yourselves! Figure it out! Bless your hearts!

Leyla: That's nice, and I can see, like, each one of these lines kind of has that, like, now that I'm going back and looking at it, I'm seeing that each one of these lines, you can take that interpretation. Like that second line that we had, “chō gol gardee...” Can you read that one?

Fared: chō gol gar khordé-ee dāree, khodā-rā sarfé eshrat kon!

Leyla: So I like that a lot because even, you know, from that second line, it introduces that concept of, like, if you're alone. You know, if you are this flower that has been neglected, then take that love that you have and expend it on joy.

Fared: Absolutely, absolutely. I also want to say, leylā jān, that within the book of deevāné hāfez, that his ghazals, there are certain poems that are very famous. It's like the very first one: “allāh yā ayyohas-sāghee ader ka’san va nāvel-hā, ké eshgh āsān namood aval vali oftādé moshkel-hā,” which Shahram Nazeri has sung. And then there are some other ones that are very famous, for example, “naseemé bādé sabā moshk feshān khāhad shod. ālamé peer degarbāré javān khāhad shod.” This would be a great twin to this poem in its own way, but it's saying a totally different thing. But yet again, he's using the same metaphors of wind and flowers and bolbol. And so once you start picking up, like you said in the beginning of our chat, I would plead everyone not to be too put off or worried about not getting it all now, but over time, if you commit to like, let's say five poems, five ghazals, you're going to start figuring out a little jigsaw puzzle, and you're going to be able to see oh, okay, I'm beginning to really understand how they spoke and how they thought in the 14th century.

Leyla: Wonderful. Well, we’ll, like I said, we'll have this poem. We’ll parse it out word by word, line by line. It'll become more and more in focus. This is just a little introduction to this world of this poem. And, you know, we ask you, of course, like every time, to record yourself reciting this poem and in a beautiful location, as Fared says, and send it to us. So we'll have instructions on that on the lesson page for this poem. And as you learn it, as it becomes a part of you, as you become, as it becomes a part of your memory and your being, you know, it'll change the meaning of this poem for you, and you'll be able to tell us how you feel about the poem, what you think each of the lines means, and that's always a big joy for us.

Fared: Absolutely, and I just wanted to add, leylā jān, if anyone's interested in learning how to sing this poem, we are starting up our Ra’dif Retreat this week, actually, and we do have a master class on every Thursday moving forward. So if anyone from Chai and Conversation would like to join us, they’re more than welcome to join our classes, and we can teach you how to sing and see the musical structure and the rhythm of this song.

Leyla: Perfect. Well, fared jān, thank you so much as always for being here with us! So this was Part One of this poem, and we look forward to seeing you all on the next part, and we'll have more Hafez poems with Fared in the future as well.

Fared: Awesome, thank you!