oem.

The Hafid 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 Sa'di and Hafid, 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 Berge gave an authentic account of the real man and
his literary activity.[206] Two things were clearly established: first,
that such a person as Mirza Safi' had really existed; second, that this
person was no poet. On this second point the few scraps of verse which
Berge 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 _gazal_ being used only a few
times (e.g. ii. 135, or in the translations from Hafid in chap. 21: ii.
70=H. 8; ii. 72=H. 155, etc.) In spirit they are like Hafid. "Mein
Lehrer ist Hafis, mein Bethaus ist die Schenke," so Mirza Schaff