SOURCE: "Hafiz and His English Translators," in Islamic Culture, Vol. XX, No. 2 and 3, April, 1946 and July, 1946, pp. 111-28, 229-49.

In the following essay, Arberry, who has himself translated Hafiz's works, traces the history of English translations of the poems of Hafiz.

I

A century and a half ago, when the East India Company had but recently stumbled into a great Imperial inheritance in Bengal, and its servants were concerned to equip themselves linguistically for the onerous responsibilities that had settled upon their shoulders, it was a mark of polite culture in the brilliant society of Calcutta to be able to illustrate a point or adorn an argument with quotations from the Persian poets. War-ren Hastings was himself an early convert to the fashion, which continued well into the nineteenth century, until in fact Persian ceased to be the common medium of politics and business in the ruined Mughal...