PODCAST #5: BISEXUAL HAFIZ | be the scripture you sing

by

Martin Bidney

The Be-loving Imaginer interviews Hafiz, one of the world’s great poets, greatly treasured in his homeland, Persia, or Iran. As shown in my opener to the book Poems of Wine and Tavern Romance (p. ix), 14th century Sufi pub poet Muhammad Shemseddin Hafiz and his translator, Joseph von Hammer, have become my two newest teacher-mentors.

Poem 8, opening 2 lines, had a momentous effect on the future history of European, indeed of world, literature. Hafiz wrote: “I, if the youth from Shiráz took my heart in his hand, for his beauty- / Mark would bestow Samarkand and Bokhara,” and with this homoerotic love declaration he inspired his future translator, Hammer, to write the magnificent tribute on pp. xii-xiii.

I, in response to both Hafiz and Hammer, wrote, to sum up, the significance of the tribute in my “Reply.” Bisexuality is central, say my mentors.

We noted in our Goethe-Hafiz podcast that the German honors the Persian for his attitudes toward poetry-writing, drinking, and loving – all interrelated, each a symbol of the others. Let’s hear what Hafiz can show us on each topic. First: poetry. In “Unbounded” Goethe praised Hafiz for ensuring total unity of world-view and form in a poem: the beginning, end, and middle are all the same. That is what happens in the ghazal, where each couplet ends with the same rhyme word or phrase (refrain). In “You in a thousand forms yourself may hide,” the refrain was always “I acknowledge you.” In Hafiz’ poem 67 it is “candle.” Same in my “Reply.”

Wine? In poem 33 Hafiz calls on attenders of church and mosque – each the “house of love” – to show kindness to pub-attenders. In poem 3 the transition from wine to homoerotic love is clear. In poem 19 love and wine empower Hafiz to identify with the Prophet Muhammad himself. In poem 32 he worries that, with a new regime in power, the Wine Police may come back! Poetry is the only defense against bad luck; compare, in my “Reply,” another medieval lyric on bad luck, “Fortune Plango Vulnera” from Carmina Burana.

Love? When heterosexual, it is a marvel, even though such lyrics are in the minority with Hafiz: see poem 66. In poem 50 and my “Reply” we see the same problem of censorship that plagued Shakespeare; in the love poems, even the admiring Hammer couldn’t resist turning Hafiz’ male addressees into females. In poem 68 the Persian bard celebrates going on a picnic with a man, and in the “Reply” I in turn tell what a picnic it has been to “be the scripture I sing,” entering into the fun lifestyle of a world-class poet of expansive enjoyment, Goethe’s “twin.”