One of our most acclaimed poets brings the work of the great Persian mystic and poet, Hafez, to a new audience.
There is no poet in our tradition who carries the amount of admiration and devotion that the Persians have for Hafez. Children learn to sing Hafez poems in the third grade, and almost every family has a copy of the collected Hafez on the dining room table. Robert Bly and the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn have worked for 15 years on this book of Hafez, the first that carries into English his nimbleness, his outrageous humor, his defenses of the private life in the face of the fundamentalists, and the joy of his love poems. He writes in the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry. This is Rumi’s wild younger brother, now brought into an English that makes his genius visible.
At last in English is a wide selection from the great Persian poet Hafez, so beloved in Iran that almost every family there keeps his Divan close at hand. When Robert Bly and Coleman Barks visited Iran, they heard schoolchildren singing Hafez poems at his graveside. For some fifteen years, the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn has worked with Robert Bly to produce this translation, which for the first time carries into English Hafez's nimbleness, his fierce humor directed at the mullahs, his astonishing range of thought, and the delight of his love poems. A master of the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry, Hafez may be considered as Rumi's wild younger brother, and is now translated into an English that helps us understand his true genius.
