Application of Michael Riffaterre's Poetry Reading Model in Settling the Disputes over the Verse “Our Guide Said ‘the Pen That Designed Creation Committed No Mistakes …’ by Hafez

The verse “Our guide said, ‘the pen that designed creation committed no mistakes’/blessed be his saintly and error-covering appraisal” is one of the controversial verses of Hafez that has widely attracted the attention of commentators. The history of the description and interpretation of this verse is about five centuries old. That is, from the time Jalaluddin Davani explained the meaning of this verse in the second half of the ninth century AH, many commentators have attempted to elucidate and clarify its meaning. The existence of these endless disputes motivated the researcher to explain the meaning of the verse based on the textual evidence and also semantic relationship between different parts of the sonnet, via adopting descriptive-analytical method and Michael Riffaterre's model. Riffaterre, with his dual design of heuristic and hermeneutic reading, considers the understanding of the latent meanings of a poem to depend on focusing on the way the main idea is represented in the form of "accumulations" and "descriptive systems" of the text. Accordingly, the sonnet was divided into four sections, and after examining the lexical accumulations of these sections and finding the focal idea or "matrix" of the work, the disputed verse was read to identify and present the most documented interpretation for it. The results showed that the meaning of "covering error", as a praiseworthy attribute in the eyes of the guide, is “not seeing” worldly deficits and vices as errors rather than "ignoring" them as real errors that challenge the existence of a good system. Another point is that if the whole sonnet is read with the focus on the fourth verse, there is strong textual evidence that shows Hafiz composed this sonnet with the genuine intention of requesting Shah Shoja to overlook the mistake that was falsely attributed to him; an error-covering which is the result of not seeing that false accusation  as error rather than ignoring that as a real error.