The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz
Authoritative edition of Hafiz’s most important poems, including original Persian and brilliant English translations

Recent translations of Hafiz have been controversial. Omid Safi, an Islamic studies scholar at Duke, notes that “there are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering ‘versions’ that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth Gray offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar.”

A “ghazal” is usually understood to mean lyric poetry concerned with love. But what had been a courtly love lyric concerned with wine and physical beauty became, in the hands of Sufis like Farid ud-Dín ‘Attar and Jalal ud-Dín Rumi, a way to describe a mystic’s relationship with God. Ghazals also became a means of veiling from theological and political conservatives the Sufi belief in the possibility of an intuitive, personal union with God.

Háfiz became the greatest of all Sufi poets, called the “Tongue of the Invisible” and the “Interpreter of Mysteries.” His command of the ghazal’s traditional imagery and themes blends eroticism, mysticism, and panegyric into verse of unsurpassed beauty. His eighty ghazals are presented in this book. Persian originals appear on facing pages to brilliant English translations of Gray and Anvar.

In the afterword, Persian scholar Daryush Shayegan notes how “there is no antagonism between the earthly wine and the divine wine, just as there is none between profane love and the love of God, since one is the necessary initiation to the other.”

1144973298
The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz
Authoritative edition of Hafiz’s most important poems, including original Persian and brilliant English translations

Recent translations of Hafiz have been controversial. Omid Safi, an Islamic studies scholar at Duke, notes that “there are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering ‘versions’ that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth Gray offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar.”

A “ghazal” is usually understood to mean lyric poetry concerned with love. But what had been a courtly love lyric concerned with wine and physical beauty became, in the hands of Sufis like Farid ud-Dín ‘Attar and Jalal ud-Dín Rumi, a way to describe a mystic’s relationship with God. Ghazals also became a means of veiling from theological and political conservatives the Sufi belief in the possibility of an intuitive, personal union with God.

Háfiz became the greatest of all Sufi poets, called the “Tongue of the Invisible” and the “Interpreter of Mysteries.” His command of the ghazal’s traditional imagery and themes blends eroticism, mysticism, and panegyric into verse of unsurpassed beauty. His eighty ghazals are presented in this book. Persian originals appear on facing pages to brilliant English translations of Gray and Anvar.

In the afterword, Persian scholar Daryush Shayegan notes how “there is no antagonism between the earthly wine and the divine wine, just as there is none between profane love and the love of God, since one is the necessary initiation to the other.”

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The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz

The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz

The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz

The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz

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Overview

Authoritative edition of Hafiz’s most important poems, including original Persian and brilliant English translations

Recent translations of Hafiz have been controversial. Omid Safi, an Islamic studies scholar at Duke, notes that “there are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering ‘versions’ that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth Gray offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar.”

A “ghazal” is usually understood to mean lyric poetry concerned with love. But what had been a courtly love lyric concerned with wine and physical beauty became, in the hands of Sufis like Farid ud-Dín ‘Attar and Jalal ud-Dín Rumi, a way to describe a mystic’s relationship with God. Ghazals also became a means of veiling from theological and political conservatives the Sufi belief in the possibility of an intuitive, personal union with God.

Háfiz became the greatest of all Sufi poets, called the “Tongue of the Invisible” and the “Interpreter of Mysteries.” His command of the ghazal’s traditional imagery and themes blends eroticism, mysticism, and panegyric into verse of unsurpassed beauty. His eighty ghazals are presented in this book. Persian originals appear on facing pages to brilliant English translations of Gray and Anvar.

In the afterword, Persian scholar Daryush Shayegan notes how “there is no antagonism between the earthly wine and the divine wine, just as there is none between profane love and the love of God, since one is the necessary initiation to the other.”


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781958972359
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Publication date: 12/03/2024
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet and translator whose selection of poems by Iran’s iconic female poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022) was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her own books of poetry include Salient (New Directions, 2020). She serves on the boards of The Beloit Poetry Journal, Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, and from 2009-2015 served as chair of the board of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard Universityand an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in New York City. www.etgrayjr.com.

Iraj Anvar is an actor, singer, stage and film director, writer, translator, and educator. He completed his first diploma in Genoa, Italy at the Swiss School, then gained a degree in acting and directing at Alessandro Fersen's Studio di Arti Sceniche in Rome, Italy. On returning to his native Tehran, he co-founded the Tehran Theater Workshop where he directed and performed in many stage and television productions and translated plays and film dialogue into Persian, including European plays he directed for the stage. He also taught acting and diction at Tehran University. A few months before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he moved to New York City, where he received his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU where he taught Persian language and literature for several years. In New York, he has read and sung Rumi, Hafiz, and other classical poets in Persian and in his own translations at the Asia Society, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Bartholomew's Church, the Long House Preserve Garden, the Bowery Poetry Club, Stony Brook, and several other institutions.

Read an Excerpt

From the Introduction

Háfiz could draw upon, and was constrained by, the rich array of images and analogies that had been used and developed in the preceding centuries. To the well-educated courtly listener each image held, embedded within it, a host of associations, and recollections. Delighting an audience demanded that the verse act like a prism, bringing different light from new angles to a rich and familiar image. Háfiz used imagery from many sources: stories and sayings from the Islamic tradition, from pre-Islamic Persian epics, Sufi literature, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, geography, commerce, and the flora and fauna of Shiraz’s gardens. To offer here a lengthy explanation and analysis of the various elements that make up the ghazals canon of imagery would not be fruitful. Some are discussed in Daryush Shayegan’s Afterword, others in the footnotes to the individual ghazals. Nevertheless, a brief sketch of the cast of characters and primary images will be helpful to the reader encountering these poems for the first time.

There is the Beloved, who has the tall and swaying stature of the cypress, a lush snare of dark curls on his/her head, and the radiant, pure, and perfect face of the moon. The Lover seeks union with the Beloved, to give up his soul to the Beloved, to become lost or annihilated in the Beloved as the moth is consumed by the flame to which it is attracted. The Beloved is the source and incarnation of love and beauty, the ultimately beautiful rose unfolding in the garden, and the Lover, pining in separation or loss, begs the dawn wind or the hoopoe to act as a messenger or go-between, to bring him news of the Beloved, to carry a message or plaint to him (or her).

The true Lover understands the ecstasy and the pain of loving, for him it is both his elixir and his daily bread. He is the one for whom Love is the sole spiritual imperative, the ultimate intoxicant, the only law that governs an enlightened soul. Lovers are the disciples of Beauty, the disciples of the Beloved, and the disciples of Love. They take up the path of Love and pass through its waystations under the guidance of a Master, a wise elder (the pír). The rends are Lovers: they adhere only to Love’s law, and to the uninitiated their behavior seems dissolute and blasphemous.

Arrayed in opposition to the Lover are the false Lovers and the enforcers of orthodoxy. The orthodox scholars and judges preach and enforce the Islamic law, or sharí’a. They condemn intoxication, they demand penitence, they insist on correct behavior. Háfiz mocks them because in their blind adherence to the letter of Islamic law they miss God and His message completely. Their own corrupt behavior is at variance with their preaching and prohibitions. They are blind to what matters.

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