Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez was born in Shiraz around 1325 and died there around 1390. He earned the name Hafez because he knew the Quran by heart. Persians call him Lisan al-Ghayb, the Tongue of the Unseen, because his verses seem to speak directly to whoever opens his book. His tomb, the Hafezieh in Shiraz, is still visited every day.
Fal is the custom of asking the Divan for guidance. On Yalda night, at Nowruz, or whenever a decision weighs on the heart, a family gathers, someone makes a wish, and the book is opened at random. The ghazal on that page is read aloud as the answer.
A ghazal is not a verdict. Each couplet stands on its own, and usually one of them matches your situation. Take that couplet as your answer. The interpretation offered here is a starting point, and your own heart completes it.
The Persian text of all 495 ghazals comes from Ganjoor, the open library of Persian poetry. The translations and interpretations were written for this site. Translating Hafez always loses music and double meaning, so the original is shown beside every translation.
Hafez spent almost his whole life in Shiraz and seldom left it. He lived through a turbulent century: the city changed hands several times, and he saw the rule of Abu Ishaq Inju, the strict Mubariz al-Din Muhammad, the cultivated Shah Shuja, and finally the arrival of Timur.
These changes are in the poems. The "censor" who closes the taverns, the hypocrite in the patched cloak and the generous vizier are figures of his own time, though he almost never names an event directly.
Hafez is buried in the Musalla gardens of Shiraz, a place he praised in his verse. A memorial has stood over the grave since the fifteenth century, and Karim Khan Zand rebuilt it in the 1770s.
The pavilion seen today was built in the 1930s to a design by the French architect André Godard: eight columns carry a copper dome whose underside is covered in coloured tile mosaic. The rosette on this site is drawn after that ceiling.
Visitors still come every evening, lay a hand on the marble, and take a fal.
A ghazal is a short poem of couplets. Every couplet ends in the same rhyme and refrain, and each one is complete in itself, so the poem moves by association, not by argument.
The last couplet usually carries the poet's pen-name. When Hafez says "Hafez", he is speaking to himself, and so to the reader.
His words hold two meanings at once: the wine is wine and also rapture; the beloved is a person and also the divine. Neither reading cancels the other, and that is why the same ghazal can answer different people.
For centuries the Divan was read from the Balkans to Bengal. In 1812 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall published a complete German translation, and it moved Goethe to write his own "West-Eastern Divan" in reply.
Since then Hafez has been translated into most of the world's languages. No translation keeps the music, so read ours as a window onto the Persian beside it.