Introduction by the editor and translator
It is well known that Meher Baba greatly appreciated Persian poetry, particularly the poetry of the great poet Hafiz. It is less well known that he himself wrote poetry in Persian shortly before He met Hazrat Babajan, when He was still simply known as “Merwan”. A small group of nineteen poems in Persian was in fact preserved in a notebook (known as “the Songbook”) kept by Khorshed Irani, a close woman disciple who recorded them in a transcription in the Gujarati alphabet. It is clear that Khorshed did not understand the Persian text, because her transcription does not divide the words as they appear in Persian. It is also apparent that the text had been corrected, to judge from penciled comments added on the margins and between lines. It is not clear who made the corrections, possibly Meher Baba himself. All the poems have the pen name “Mihraban” as a signature in the final line. This is a distinctive feature of this set of Meher Baba’s Persian poems; his Urdu poems have the pen name “Huma.”
To make these previously unpublished poems available for readers, it was necessary to restore the Persian text from a transliteration of the Gujarati transcription. A number of people contributed to this complicated task. Drawing on the transliteration, I have taken on the task of proposing a credible version of the Persian text as the basis for offering these new English translations. This task has been complicated by the word divisions in the transcription, which do not clearly identify the Persian words. Ambiguities occur because Persian short vowels are often recorded as long vowels, and the Persian alphabet has four T’s, four S’s, two H’s, and a silent W, so it can be difficult to restore the Persian original in a convincing fashion; sometimes the Gujarati handwriting can be read in different ways. Where difficulties have been encountered in the transcription, plausible alternative readings have been proposed. The transliteration of the Persian text into Roman script follows the system used by the Perso-Indica project.
In the 19 poems in this collection, there are a total of 153 verses plus 90 half verses. The majority of the poems (17 in all) are ghazals, ranging from five to ten verses in length. The ghazal form, which originated in Arabic poetry, has been popular in Persian poetry for over a thousand years. The ghazal follows a rhyme scheme in which both halves of the first verse rhyme, and the rhyme continues in the second half of each subsequent verse. One poem is a qiṭʿa or occasional piece, which follows the ghazal in having the second half of each verse rhyme, but not in the first half of the first verse. Poem P1 adopts a different form, the muḫammas or quintuple verse, arranged in stanzas of five half verses, all rhyming in the first stanza, and in subsequent stanzas with another rhyme for the first four half-verses, and the repetition of the rhyme of the first stanza in the fifth half verse of each later stanza. The meters of classical Persian poetry are followed in a relaxed fashion. These forms were widely used by poets such as Hafiz, Saʿdi, and Rumi. The poems feature a vocabulary highlighting Sufi themes of the wine of love, detachment from the world, and the beauty of the Divine Beloved. The tone of the poems is informal, addressing the reader with intensity, with frequent use of colloquial expressions. This style may reflect the spoken Persian that young Merwan shared with his father Shahriar Mundegar, who grew up in Persia. Notable features of the text include references to Persian and Zoroastrian themes, along with the poet Hafiz and Sufi figures such as Mansur Hallaj.
Carl Ernst, March 2026
Contents
P1. ġāfūr o . . . raḥmān mī-bāšad (muḫammas, 18 stanzas, 90 half-verses).
P2. ḫudā yiksān . . . mī- bāšad (ġazal, 9 verses).
P3. dil-am ẓāhir buwad . . . dānī (ġazal, 7 verses).
P4. bi-dih šakkar . . . baḥas dāram (ġazal, 7 verses).
P5. giriftār-am . . . āšnāʾī kun (ġazal, 10 verses).
P6. az dil murād . . . rīša kun (ġazal, 6 verses).
P7. may dih bi-jām . . . bahār šud (ġazal, 9 verses).
P8. hīč kārī . . . kār-i ʿišq (ġazal, 10 verses).
P9. čirā jānā . . . raḥīm astī (ġazal, 9 verses).
P10. na dīdam gulistān . . . gulzār-i yazdānī (ġazal, 10 verses).
P11. daraḫt-i ʿīd . . . bi-bār āmad (ġazal, 10 lines).
P12. čirā ranjī . . . fanā bašad (ġazal, 10 verses).
P13. ārzū dāram . . . mayḫāna šawam (ġazal, 6 lines).
P14. čū rāh-i ʿišq . . . šarr mī-dīdam (ġazal, 10 lines).
P15. pīr-i mā . . . ast o bas, (ġazal, 10 lines).
P16. ṣanam ki . . . niẓām āmad (ġazal, 8 lines).
P17. ay ṣanam . . . darmān-i man (ġazal, 9 lines).
P18. jām-i may . . . ḥayāt ast (qiṭʿa, 5 lines).
P19. kuja rušan-dil . . . ī nūr ast (ġazal, 8 lines).