Whispers of Love

Whispers of Love
aidaforoutan.blogspot.com/2013/03/whispers-of-love.html
One man’s quest to translate the great poetry of Persia.
Hafez, Iran’s ubiquitous poet, as depicted in 16th Century painting by Sultan Muhammad.
Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum Of Art/President And Fellows Of Harvard College
and The Daily Beast
by Brad Gooch, The Daily Beast
When Dick Davis, the preeminent translator of Persian poetry of our time, was a boy in
Portsmouth, England, in the 1950s, he found on his parents’ bookshelf a copy of Edward
FitzGerald’s swooning Victorian translations of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Its
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presence was not so unusual, as those verses (“A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and
Thou”) had set off a minor craze. If an English middle-class family owned just three
books, along with the Bible and Shakespeare would be FitzGerald. “It was a kind of
universal badge of culture,” Davis jokes. Yet he absorbed so much of what he later
described as “the candied death-wish of FitzGerald” that he knew most by heart. Instead
of anxiety of influence, he experienced an opiated hit of influence.
Teleport forward 60 years, and Dick Davis, white-haired, spectacled professor emeritus of
Persian at the Ohio State University and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is still
adding tile by colored tile to a busy mosaic of translation that former National Endowment
for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia insists is the “most remarkable poetic translation project
in the last 20 years.” He began with epics the equal of The Iliad in Persian civilization—
the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, and The Conference of the Birds, Attar’s flight of Sufi
fancy about various birds in search of the eternally elusive Bird of Birds. Now Davis has
succeeded at the enigmatic 14th-century poet Hafez, along with his contemporaries
female poet Jahan Malek Khatun and dirty-minded Obayd, in Faces of Love: Hafez and
the Poets of Shiraz. Hafez is so beloved in Iran that cabdrivers recite his lyrics by heart
and families at holidays tell fortunes by opening to random lines of his poems—attesting
to both their seductive beauty and their Sphinx-like ambiguity. Davis reminds us by folding
in these two other court poets that Shiraz in Hafez’s lifetime was a poetry genius cluster.
Davis and his wife, Afkham Darbandi, met in Iran when he went to a hospital. Courtesy of
Mage Publishers and The Daily Beast
Not only Davis’s career track, but his entire life, as he tells the tale, has a hint of
FitzGerald’s kismet—“The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,/Moves on”—until he
found his way to Iran and its ancient language. The author of eight of his own books of
poems (in unfashionable meter and rhyme), in “A Letter to Omar” he asks, “Was it for you
I answered that advertisement?” The want ad, for an English instructor in Tehran, caught
Davis’s eye after Cambridge, where as an undergrad he befriended the aged novelist
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E.M. Forster, who filled his head with the glories of Persia’s Mogul culture. In 1970, Davis
arrived in Iran to teach at the University of Tehran. A year later, he met his wife, Afkham
Darbandi, an Iranian who arranged for a blood transfusion when he arrived in a hospital
emergency room. “A doctor said to me, ‘You see that nurse? She saved your life,’” recalls
Davis. “That was worth following up.”
Since fleeing Iran in 1979, Davis has not returned for fear of spoiling his happy memories.
Courtesy Abbas/Magnum and The Daily Beast
Eight years into his romance with both his wife and the Persian language, after living full
time in Tehran, the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 drew a bright red line between past and
future. At first he and his wife “expected things to blow over,” says Davis. “It wasn’t nearly
as dramatic as Argo. The revolutionary crowds were actually very sympathetic to
Westerners. I went to demonstrations, and I never felt in any danger. They would say, ‘Tell
your people what we are doing!’ This was before the hostages, and there was a kind of
euphoria about it all.” Soon, though, Tehran was under martial law, the streets full of
tanks, with shooting. As they lived in a third-floor apartment with big windows on Avenue
Villa, a main boulevard, they moved in with Indian friends from England on a hidden
narrow backstreet, and they devised an exit strategy.
By the time the Davises escaped Iran in November, shortly before the shah’s departure in
January 1979, the tick of drama was much more Argo. One of Davis’s students worked at
the airport and helped him get plane tickets. Another worked at the National Bank, where
all their savings were frozen: “I mentioned this to my student, who said, ‘If you trust me,
Mr. Davis, give me your money, and when you get to England, it will be in your bank.’
Indeed every cent of it was there.” While his wife returns every few years to visit family,
Davis has not. “I am reluctant to go back,” he explains. “I had students who were killed in
the revolution. I can remember faces of people I know were killed, so that gives me an
extremely bitter feeling. I met my wife there and found my intellectual passion for the rest
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of my life. When my wife comes back, she cries for two weeks at the dreadful changes. I
have this very positive image of Iran. I don’t want that spoiled.”
From Iran With Love

A selection of poems excerpted from ‘Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz.’
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My love’s for pretty faces,
For heart-bewitching hair;
I’m crazy for good wine,
A languorous, drunk stare ...
In love there’s no escaping

The burning of desire;
I stand here like a candle –
Don’t scare me with your fire.
I am a man from heaven,

But on this path I see
My love of youth and beauty
Have made a slave of me.
If Fate will help me, I

Will take myself elsewhere –
My bed will be swept clean
By some sweet houri’s hair.
Shiraz is like a mine

Of ruby lips, a store
Of loveliness ... and I’m
A jeweler who’s dirt-poor.
I’ve seen so many drunk

Eyes in this town, I think
I’m drunk, although I swear
I’ve had no wine to drink.
You asked me to explain

Eternity for you –
Well certainly, when I
Have downed a drink or two.
Hafez, my nature’s like

A hopeful bride, but I
Lack mirrors to array
Myself – that’s why I sigh.
—Hafez
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Your face’s absence leaves mine waxy-white,
like a candle;
How long will my tears drip, blearing my sight,
like a candle?
You sleep, and on your pillow I lie broken,
self-consumed,
Awake and weeping till the morning light,
like a candle.
—Jahan Khatun
I’m off to stroll through the bazaar – and there

I’ll see what can be flushed out from its lair;
I’ll lure a rent-boy home here, or a whore;
One of the two – either will do – I don’t care.
—Obayd-e Zakani
From Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz, Mage Publishers. Copyright 2013 by
Dick Davis.
Brad Gooch is a professor of english at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His
latest book is Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor Via Brad Gooch
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Whispers of Love

One man’s quest to translate the great poetry of Persia.

by Brad Gooch, The Daily Beast

From Iran With Love

In love there’s no escaping

I am a man from heaven,

If Fate will help me, I

Shiraz is like a mine

I’ve seen so many drunk

You asked me to explain

Hafez, my nature’s like

I’m off to stroll through the bazaar – and there

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