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Good Letters

20100329-that-other-sufi-poety-by-peggy-rosenthalEveryone knows Rumi—thanks in large part to Coleman Barks’ rich, delightful translations. But how many know the other early master of Sufi poetry: Hafiz of Shiraz?

Now, thanks to a new translation, Hafiz too can become a joyously playful companion on our spiritual journeys.

Like Rumi, Hafiz was Persian, living in the fourteenth century—just a century after Rumi. Previous English translations of Hafiz have been mostly infelicitous, leaving the contemporary English reader puzzled about what is going on.

But now we have ninety-nine of Hafiz’s poems made marvelously accessible in all their teasing, intricately tangled array, thanks to the translations of Jeffry Einboden and John Slater in The Tangled Braid, just published by Fons Vitae press.

Cousins Einboden and Slater worked as a team: Einboden, a scholar of Persian, did initial literal translations; Slater, a poet and Trappist monk, then rendered these translations into poetry that speaks to the English ear yet keeps the essence of Hafiz’s imagery and form. For the general reader, each poem stands by itself on the page; for the specialist, scholarly notes are offered at the back of the book.

Hafiz wrote in that notoriously tangled form, the ghazal. Slater has rendered these ghazals as two-line stanzas, not trying to reproduce the intricate rhyme-scheme of the original. As Slater writes in his introduction, these brief stanzas are often little stand-alone poems, and the logical connection to adjoining stanzas is often unclear. This is a large part of the cold-water-in-the-face fun of reading Hafiz. Like this from “Horizon”:

The compass of the heart revolved in all directions,
in dizzy wandering circles it spun without stop.

Drunk with bliss, the vocalist began to sing
and the stiff-necked scholars in the crowd wept blood.

I blossomed like a streamside rose
in the shade of the noble cypress.

Each of these stanzas could be a meditation in itself. Together, they add the mystery of the space between them to meditate into.

The drunkenness of the middle stanza above, by the way, recurs in Hafiz’s verse. Wine is one of his favorite images. (“As to the grape and wine, it’s been written from before the dawn: / some are meant for the market, others for behind the veil” from “A Share in the Cup”) Sufism is famous for imagery of tipsiness in love of the divine, and Hafiz indulges in full measure.

Poetry that attracts me—that I’m drawn to sit with and nestle into—is poetry accessible enough to be welcoming, yet mysterious enough to make me want to spend time musing inside of it. The Hafiz of The Tangled Braid does all this to a T.

From the tip of each eyelash, vast flood of water—
Come, I can show you the river. (“Shelter”)

Haunting my time at prayer: the curve of your eyebrow
like the arch in this quiet prayer-niche…. My concentration’s gone. (“Foundations”)

The Beloved’s eyebrow: as Slater points out in his Introduction, it morphs through these poems from divine gaze to the mosque’s prayer-niche to the bow with which the Beloved shoots love’s arrows. Slater also notes what fun the persona of Hafiz (like Whitman’s) becomes through the poems. Hafiz’s signature-trope is to make himself the subject (often comically) of each poem’s concluding stanza.

We groaned and sighed for days, keening like Hafiz—but it was
no use. Farewell, beloved! long before we arrived, you were gone. (“Gone”)

For God’s sake, a bit of wine for Hafiz!
so his prayer at dawn wins blessing for us all. (“Insurrection”)

Wasted with desire for wine, Hafiz was scorched by love—
where is the breath of Jesus, to raise us back to life? (“Stung”)

I wouldn’t be surprised if, for such fresh and eloquent poems,
the Emperor should clothe poor Hafiz head to foot in gold. (“The Mirror of Princes”)

This last is tongue-in-cheek, of course. Yet truly Hafiz’s poems are “fresh and eloquent.” What a treat to have them now in The Tangled Braid.

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