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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Diwan-i-Khwajah Hafez-i Shirazi: The Works of Dewan Hafez; with an account of his life and writings (Calcutta: Printed by A. Upjohn, 1791)
Examples are Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (Paris, 1950; tr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1984
Account of the formation in 1828 of Oriental Translation Committee, in Sir Gore Ouseley, Biographical Notices of Persian Poets (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1846), ccxx.
John Haddon Hindley, Persian Lyrics, or Scattered Poems from the Diwan-i-Hafiz (London: Oriental Press, 1800).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Kitty Scoular Datta
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Datta, K.S. (2008). Publishing and Translating Hafez Under Empire. In: Fraser, R., Hammond, M. (eds) Books Without Borders, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289130_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289130_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30290-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28913-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)