CHAPTER X

.

BODENSTEDT.

Lieder des Mirza Schaffy--Are Original Poems--Nachlass--Aus Morgenland und Abendland--Sakuntala, a Narrative Poem.

The H̱āfiḍ tendency was carried to the height of popularity by Friedrich Martin Bodenstedt, whose _Lieder des Mirza Schaffy_ met with a phenomenal success, running through one hundred and forty editions in Germany alone during the lifetime of the author, besides being translated into many foreign languages.[204] These songs have had a remarkable career, which the author himself relates in an essay appended to the _Nachlass_.[205]

According to the prevailing opinion, Mirza Schaffy was a great Persian poet, a rival of Saʻdī and H̱āfiḍ, and Bodenstedt was the translator of his songs. Great, therefore, was the astonishment of the European, and

## particularly the German public, when it was discovered that the name of

this famous poet was utterly unknown in the East, even in his own native land. As early as 1860, Professor Brugsch, when in Tiflis, had searched for the singer's grave, but in vain; nobody could tell him where a certain Mirza Schaffy lay buried. At last, in 1870, the Russian counsellor Adolph Bergé gave an authentic account of the real man and his literary activity.[206] Two things were clearly established: first, that such a person as Mīrzā Šafīʻ had really existed; second, that this person was no poet. On this second point the few scraps of verse which Bergé had been able to collect, and which he submitted in the essay cited above, leave absolutely no doubt. So, in 1874, when Bodenstedt published another poetic collection of Mirza Schaffy, he appended an essay wherein he explained clearly the origin and the nature of the original collection bearing that name.

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 H̱āfiḍ in chap. 21: ii. 70=H̱. 8; ii. 72=H̱. 155, etc.) In spirit they are like H̱āfiḍ. "Mein Lehrer ist Hafis, mein Bethaus ist die Schenke," so Mirza Schaffy himself proclaims (i. p. 96), and images and ideas from H̱āfiḍ, 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