[1] It was the first poem of Hafez to appear in English,[2] when William Jones made his paraphrase "A Persian Song" in 1771, based on a Latin version supplied by his friend Károly Reviczky.
This story first appears in a work called Anis al-Nas by Shoja' Shirazi (1426),[4] and it was elaborated on in a collection of biographies of poets (Tazkerāt aš-Šo'arā) completed in 1486 by Dawlatshah Samarqandi.
The transliteration given here is based on that approved by the United Nations in 2012, which represents the current pronunciation of educated speakers in Iran, except that to make scansion easier, the long vowels are marked with a macron (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū).
One of those who interpreted it mystically is Clarke (1895), who explains that the Turk symbolises God, Samarkand and Bukhara signify this world and the next, the wine is the mysteries of love, and so on.
Gertrude Bell, for example, in her Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (1897), p. 129, wrote: E. G. Browne in volume 3 of his Literary History of Persia wrote:[16] Similarly in the 16th century, the Turkish commentator on Hafez, Ahmed Sudi, adopted a literal approach to Hafez's poetry, rejecting the excessively mystical interpretations of his predecessors Süruri and Şemʿi.
[12] He compares this poem with another of Hafez's ghazals, Sīne mālāmāl ("My heart is brimful of pain"), which is more obviously Sufic in character.
Bashiri also draws attention to certain apparent astronomical references: the Sun (which was sometimes known as Tork-e falak "the Turk of the firmament"), Saturn (sometimes referred to as Hendū-ye čarx "the Indian of the sky"),[20] Venus and other bright planets (Lūlīyān), the seven planets (Torkan), the Pleiades (Sorayyā), and the firmament itself (falak), all of which can be given Sufic meanings.
The question of the intent of the poem therefore is open to interpretation, some scholars taking it wholly as a physical description of love, others like Arberry as a "grand philosophical utterance".
[23] Herman Bicknell (1875) is an exception, writing "If that Shirâzian Turk would deign to take my heart within his hand, To make his Indian mole my own, I'd give Bokhára and Samarḳand.
The 16th-century Bosnian-Turkish commentator on Hafez, Ahmed Sudi wrote:[34] But Sudi also reports another theory: A suggestion by Hafez's editor Qasem Ghani that the Turk might have been the son of Shah Shoja', one of the rulers of the time, is dismissed as "improbable" by Hillmann since "Turk" usually simply means "beloved" and that the phrase had already been used by Saadi.
[35] Arberry (1946) points out that most of the features of this ode are traditional stock motifs from Persian love poetry, and he quotes some lines of Saadi where the same themes recur.
The phrase also appears in a ghazal of Saadi, quoted by Arberry, in which Saadi contrasts the darkness of the mole with the paleness of the beloved's face:[36] The internal rhyme in the first half of this verse (bedeh, sāqī, mey-ē bāqī) is similar to the internal rhyme in the Arabic poem which Hafez quotes in ghazal no.
"[38] The idea behind this line is that the "Turk" (beloved) plunders the heart of the poet, as in this verse of Saadi:[39] The idea that a beautiful face has no need for cosmetics or jewellery is contained in the following verse of Saadi:[40] The translator Herman Bicknell, who spent some months in Shiraz in 1868,[41] points out that the word آب ("ab"), besides signifying "water," is applied to powder for the complexion.
[42] He also reports that women in Persia in his day made artificial moles or beauty spots, either permanent by tattooing them, or temporary ones.
[48] It is a frequent theme of other Hafez poems[49] that it is love ('ešq ), not reason or intellect ('aql ), which helps the seeker on his spiritual journey and provides the answer to the riddle of life in a perplexing world.
[51] A well-known instance is in the rhymed prose in the introduction to Saadi's Golestān:[52] Bicknell explains "heaven may scatter the necklace of the Pleiades on your poetry" as meaning "may fling as largess to express her delight".
"[54] Hillmann writes: "A first impression of the 'Turk of Shiraz' is of a texture of hyperbole, paradox, a sense of the ultimate or perfection, eloquence, and seriousness, with familiar images and conceits given new vitality through new combination and given form by means of verse patterning.
The subsidiary theme is – wine (and music) are the sole consolation of the lover, to compensate his sorrow over the incapacity of his love, and the transitory nature of mundane affairs.