According to his own statements, these poems are not translations. They are entirely his own,[207] and were originally not an independent collection, but part of the biographical romance Tausend und ein Tag im Orient.[208] This should be kept in mind if we wish to estimate them at their true value.
Nevertheless the poems are genuinely Oriental and owe their existence to the author's stay in the East, particularly in Tiflis, during the winter 1843-44. But for this residence in the Orient, so Bodenstedt tells us,[209] a large part of them would never have seen the light.
In form, however, they are Occidental—the γazal being used only a few times (e.g. ii. 135, or in the translations from Hāfiḍ in chap. 21: ii. 70=H. 8; ii. 72=H. 155, etc.) In spirit they are like Hāfiḍ. "Mein Lehrer ist Hafis, mein Bethaus ist die Schenke," so Mirza Schaffy himself proclaims (i. p. 96), and images and ideas from Hāfiḍ, familiar to us from preceding chapters, meet us everywhere. The stature like a cypress, the nightingale and the rose, the verses like pearls on a string, and others could be cited as instances. Other authors are also laid under contribution; thus the comparison of Mirza Schaffy to a bee seems to have been suggested by a maxim of Saʻdī (Gul. viii. No. 77, ed. Platts; K.S. p. 268), where a wise man without practice is called a bee without honey, and the thought in the last verse of "Die Rose auch" (vol. ii. p. 85), that the rose cannot do without dirt and the nightingale feeds on worms, is a reminiscence of a story of Niḍāmī which we had occasion to cite in the chapter on Rückert (see p. 43). In one case a poem contains a Persian proverb. Mirza Schaffy criticises the opinions of the Shāh's viziers in the words: "Ich höre das Geklapper einer Mühle, doch sehe ich kein Mehl" (i, 85), a literal rendering of
آواز آسيا می شنوم وآرد نمی بينم
Of course the mullās and hypocrites in general are roundly scored, especially in chapter 27, where the sage, angered by the reproaches which the mustahīd has made to him for his bad conduct and irreligious poetry, gives vent to his sentiments of disgust in a number of poems (vol. ii. p. 137 seq.). Bodenstedt undoubtedly had in mind the persecutions to which Hāfiḍ was subject, culminating in the refusal of the priests to give him regular burial and giving rise to the famous story of the fatvā.
The tavern and the praise of wine are, of course, bound to be prominent features. In the same credo where Mirza Schaffy proclaims Hāfiḍ as his teacher he also proclaims the tavern as his house of prayer (i. p. 96), and so he celebrates the day when he quit the mosque for the wine-house (i. p. 98; cf. H. 213. 4). The well known poem "Aus dem Feuerquell des Weines" (i. p. 106) is in sentiment exactly like a quatrain of ʻUmar Xayyām (Bodl. ed. Heron-Allen, Boston, 1898, No. 78; Whinfield, 195); the last verse is based on a couplet of Saʻdī (Gul. i. 4, last qiṭʻah, Platts, p. 18) which is cited immediately after the poem itself (i. p. 107).
A collection of Hafizian songs would scarcely be complete without a song in praise of Shīrāz. This we get in vol. ii. p. 48, where Shīrāz is compared to Tiflis; and just as the former was made famous through Hāfiḍ, so the latter will become famous through Mirza Schaffy. Little did the worthy sage of Ganja dream that this would come literally true. Yet it did. The closing lines of the poem—
Berühmt ist Tiflis durch dein Lied
Vom Kyros bis zum Rhein geworden—
are no empty boast; they simply express a fact.
None of Bodenstedt's later poetic publications ever attained the success of the Mirza Schaffy songs, and, it may be added, none of them equalled those songs in merit. In 1874 the author resolved once more to try the magic of that name and so he launched forth a collection called Aus dem Nachlasse Mirza Schaffy's, and to emphasize the Persian character of these poems the Persian translation of the title, از اشرار بازماندهً ميرزا شفيع, appeared on the title-page. In spite of all this, however, the Orientalism in these poems is more artificial than natural; it is not felt as something essential without which the poems could not exist. The praise of wine, which is the main theme of the second book,—for the collection is divided into seven books,—is certainly not characteristically Persian; European, and especially German poets have also been very liberal and very proficient in bibulous verse. The maxims that make up the third and a portion of the fourth book are for the most part either plainly unoriental, or else so perfectly general, and, we may add, so hopelessly commonplace, as to fit in anywhere. Some, however, are drawn from Persian sources. Thus from the Gulistān we have in the third book, Nos. 8 (Gul. Pref. p. 7, last qiṭʻah), 9 (ibid. p. 6, first three couplets), 12 (ibid. iii. 27, maθ. p. 89) and 36 (saying of the king in Gul. i. 1, p. 13). No. 31 is from the introduction to the Hitōpadēśa (third couplet).[210] "Die Cypresse," p. 103, is suggested by Gul. viii. 111 (K.S. 81).