Publishing and Translating Hafez Under Empire

Abstract

The publication history of the Persian poet Hafez, contemporary of Petrarch and Chaucer, in England and India from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth is a fascinating test-case for Edward Said’s theory of western orientalism and illustrates both orientalism’s apparently innocent aesthetic surface and its internal complexity in the shifting power-relations between cultures. This involves not only imperial interventions, but the Persianate Asian world’s varying appraisal of one of its own unconventional and ambiguous writers, who called himself rind and qalandar, ‘vagabond’. Even so, throughout the Islamic world Hafez was regarded as the supreme poetic craftsman, whom to quote was a sign of the cultured Ottoman or Mughal courtier. So for an Englishman to know and refer to him was a badge of diplomatic ability as well as linguistic skill and informed taste.