Translators of Eighty Ghazals – from the Díwán of Háfiz – about their book: Wine, Prayer and Hafiz of Shiraz
Who is Hafiz?
EG:
Hafiz of Shiraz, (d. 1389) is quite simply the most important lyric poet in the Persian-speaking, Eastern Islamic world. He is one of the greatest mystical and lyric poets to write in any language. In most Persian households, his díwán stands on a shelf next to the Qur’an. His poems are not only memorized, recited, and sung by individuals of every sort, they are used for divination. It has been said that everyone who reads or listens to Hafiz’s poetry feels a direct connection with him and understands exactly what he means. Khorramshahi, in the introduction to his famous Háfiznámeh, says, “The díwán of Hafiz is not a mere literary collection, it is beyond literature. It is a book of life.”
While an historical figure surrounded by legends, we know almost nothing about him. We know that he lived most of his life in Shiraz, a city of gardens and vineyards in what is now south central Iran, and made a living by his verse at royal courts. No mean trick considering how deadly court politics could be during decades of foreign invasions and intra-dynastic strife.
How did you first encounter him and his work?
EG:
In 1972, I dropped out of college for a year and followed the hippie road (as one did, then) from London to Kathmandu and down to Sri Lanka. In eastern Anatolia I began to hear about Persian poets who wrote love poems to a Beloved who might be human or might be God. As a poet, on my own mystical quest of sorts, this was just what I’d been looking for. Hafiz was supposed to be the best of the lot so when I got to Tehran I bought an armful of English translations—and was appalled. To me they all sounded like warmed-over forgettable Victorian homilies about drinking and women, done by some lieutenant stationed somewhere with time on his hands. I left them behind and headed off for Isfahan, Shiraz, Bam and then Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Despite my disappointment, I decided to visit the tombs of Hafiz and his fellow-Shirazi poet Sa’adi before I left Shiraz. I will never forget the late afternoon I arrived at Hafiz’s tomb. The golden light fell aslant on the carved alabaster ghazals on his tomb and the surrounding structures. Nor forget the sound of streams running through the garden among the roses. Nor the circles of disciples surrounding various shaikhs. The poems were visually gorgeous, and indecipherable. I concluded on the spot that these pilgrims hadn’t come here based on the translations I’d read in Tehran, and vowed I’d learn to read them when I got home. I wanted to make the book I’d wished I’d had in hand that afternoon.
When I returned to college I began my study of classical Persian. At the end of my first year I announced that I was ready to translate Hafiz. I remain deeply grateful to Wheeler Thackston and Hossein Ziai, once they stopped laughing they agreed to help me work my way through a tiny handful of poems. The poems were more luminous and polyvalent than I could ever have imagined.
IA:
Honestly, I don’t know because I don’t remember when it occurred. What I know is that I began to hear his lines in songs and quoted by those around me even before I could talk. My understanding of Hafiz has come in stages across my life. My first direct and conscious contact with him was in the elementary school where I could read a ghazal and also see his name as the composer and then memorize it. Later, in my twenties, when I lived in Rome, I felt the true impact of his work. I began to understand him at a different level, and to appreciate his poetry from a new perspective. I can say that it was a journey of rediscovery of the man and his work.
Thereafter, reading his ghazals became part of my life. When Jim Morris introduced me to Liz and I began to work with her on her translations, I was struck by Hafiz and his work in a whole new way. When you translate any work, you get to go deep and discover things that you never would as just a reader. After this experience, Hafiz occupied a much larger part of my heart and life. In fact, working on Hafiz translation gave me the courage to start translating Rumi, a project I had been thinking about for years. Compared to Hafiz, Rumi’s work seems to be simple and more straightforward to translate. Rumi’s poetry is not multilayered as is Hafiz’s poetry. Now, again, after this new effort with Liz I feel even a deeper connection with Hafiz. Now I enjoy more than ever reading Hafiz and contemplating his lines.
What is it about this 14th century poet that makes him of interest to readers today?
EG:
At least during my lifetime, there has been an increasing hunger for experience, art, and literature that speaks to the spirit, to the soul. While it takes many forms in many individuals in many cultures, the spiritual quest is always with us, and it is in love that we find its purest expression. A topic we are unlikely to exhaust any time soon. While Islamic literature, and medieval Iran, are unfamiliar to many readers, Hafiz’s poems “speak to every heart” and his commentary on our world—and its institutions and delusions—seems deeply relevant, highly contemporary, and often hilarious. He misses nothing, and sees to the center of everything.
IA:
To me Hafiz is and will always be readable because he transcends time. The truths in his work were as valid then as they are now, and will never be outdated. He talks about life, and the essence of its basic components that do not change. In terms of these essentials we are the same humans now as we were in the 14th century. Technology has not changed our spirit. His poetry has a pulse and his words are like veins with blood circulating in them.
Rumi is most popular Persian poet in the United States today. How do he and his work relate to Hafiz?
IA: Rumi is the most popular in this country because he is more straight forward and easier to understand, and therefore easier to translate. In fact, he expands mostly on one topic, love. He is deeply spiritual and deals with the core of Islam which is basically about love. We also owe his fame in this country to Coleman Barks (I will expand on Barks’s work later in this discussion). Hafiz speaks of a wider array of earthly concerns, but it doesn’t mean that he neglects the main topic of Rumi’s work. In fact, one can see the core of Rumi’s thought interspersed throughout Hafiz’s work. As someone who has read both poets deeply, and translated both, it’s clear to me that some of Hafiz’s ghazals are directly connected to Rumi’s, and that he was inspired by him. In my mind, I cannot choose between the two. They complement each other.
What challenges did you face in translating these poems from classical Persian into contemporary English?
EG:
Well, first, Iraj and I are told at least once a week that Hafiz is untranslatable. We agree. While some ghazals are slightly easier to bring into English than others, basically there is no way to capture the brilliance of his thoughts, language, rhythms, formal choices, puns, and turns of phrase. We agree, he’s untranslatable. So, does that mean you don’t try? That you simply tell people, “There’s this great poet and he’s changed my life and what you should do is go study classical Persian for years and then you can read him”? We don’t think so. We think you try and bring to an English reader as much of Hafiz as you can. (And, of course, we get the pleasure of spending hours exploring Hafiz’s verse.)
Second, there is always the fundamental question of how “literal,” how “close to the bone” do you make the English version? I’m pretty sure that translators of literary work have argued about this for millennia. My first versions, done in 1973, were very free. I imagined I was producing something like Pound’s Cathay. Given that various scribes had moved lines around over the centuries, I figured I could too. It was Elizabeth Bishop who turned to me, after reading some early drafts, and said: “This poet stands at the pinnacle of Persian poetry. Is that correct? Do you really think you know what he was trying to say better that he did? That you can improve on his work?” It was a moment of devastating illumination.
I remain committed to trying to bring as much of an Hafiz ghazal as I can to a reader, as a free-standing moving, beautiful poem in contemporary English. I also want, as a reader and a translator, to have as much— unobtrusive—commentary available as possible, to have a sense for the context, imagery, wordplay. But let me be clear: if choosing a beautiful phrase (or rhyme) means losing something that feels important to the poem, I increasingly choose to err on the side of the more literal rendering. There is no “improving” on Hafiz.
Then there are the specific issues of bringing Persian into English. For instance, Persian pronouns don’t indicate gender. How amazing is that? The Beloved (whom I love, or seek, or have lost) can be a woman, a man, a young boy, a king, a patron, or God. The Persian poet can utilize the entire range of such nuance in a single word or phrase, but the English translator has to work around or choose. And then there are the multivalent thematic associations with roses, nightingales, wine, tavern-masters, dusty thresholds, thrones, and jasmine. For the Persian listener/reader such images carry into the poem a long literary and cultural tradition.
Our Translators’ Introduction takes a shot at discussing formal and lexical challenges, and explains some of the prevalent imagery. Daryush Shayegan’s Afterword speaks to the spiritual and religious context of the work in the context of the Persian tradition. The annotations at the back of the book offer a more highly-granular explanation, poem by poem.
IA:
I don’t think I can add much to what Liz says about this issue. I basically agree with most of the things she says. However, “traduttore, traditore”, “translator, traitor” is an Italian word play which originates in pre-Renaissance Italian literary circles. Apparently, it was used for the first time in relation to the translation of Dante into French. Well, what can I say? A translator being a traitor seems to me, to some degree, to be a correct assessment, but without this betrayal every literary work on earth would have to remain imprisoned in its own cultural domain and could only be read only in the original language. Therefore, to accept the idea of abstaining from translating great works into other languages means closing windows to other cultures. So, I choose to be a “traitor” in this regard because, by translating a work, even if I can only convey thirty percent of the original, I know that I have rendered a service. According to a great number of orthodox Muslims, translating the Qur’an is a sin and it must only be read in Arabic.
How did you two come to work together on this new and expanded edition of Hafiz’s ghazals?
EG:
In fact, James Morris, now at Boston College, introduced us in 1994. I was revising the manuscript of translations that, had the Revolution not intervened, was to have been published by the Imperial Academy in Tehran. Steve Scholl, at White Cloud, suggested I work with Iraj on a final review of The Green Sea of Heaven before it went to press. It was an amazing experience, and over the next twenty years we went on to read and perform Hafiz (and Rumi) with an array of performers and musicians. We spent months discussing his translations of Rumi, and mine of Farrokhzad, and continued to learn from one another. In 2018, when Steve asked if we’d like to do a new and expanded edition of Hafiz, we leapt at the chance to do it together, starting from the ground up.
IA:
In 1994 I received a call from Liz who said she was referred to me by our mutual friend Jim Morris. Steve Scholl had asked her to review her translations with a native scholar before White Cloud published them. To make a long story short, over the next several months we went over her translations, word by word. After Green Sea’s publication, we had many delightful events reading the ghazals in both languages for all kinds of audiences around the country and collaborated in other translations of modern Iranian poets, as she mentioned above. Last winter – when Green Sea of Heaven went out of print – Liz called and asked if I wanted to work on a new expanded edition together, which was a great blessing for me. This time we spent hours and hours on Skype working on the new translations and revising the old ones. For me it was a joy doing this work and I savored every moment of it.
Some recent English translations of Rumi and Hafiz have been plagued by controversy. What is all that about?
EG:
See my answer to the question of the translator’s stance and choices, above. Any translator is essentially, I think, a disciple of the writer he or she is translating, at least for the duration of the project. Translating a poet is the most intense reading and exploration of that poet’s work that can be done. I bless every translator and their choices, but, please, if you are going to call it a translation, it is my firm belief that you really, actually, like, you know, really need to understand what the poet said.
IA:
There has been a lot of talk about this issue in recent years. I don’t think I need to be polite about this and just hint about certain “translations” without naming names. Words have specific meanings and they are there for us to communicate and to point at things. We all know the meaning of translation. Translation does not mean to rewrite, edit, interpret and add new ideas to someone else’s translation of an original work in a more “poetic” fashion – and then call it your “translation” without speaking a word of the mother language. There are other words in this rich English language that can convey the meaning of doing this.
Let me talk first about the work of Coleman Barks. In addition to enjoying his work, I have a lot of respect for him and feel deeply indebted to him, as an Iranian-American scholar, a fellow paesano of Rumi, for putting Rumi on the map in the United States. But I love his work by itself, without considering that they are called “translations” of Rumi’s poetry. The only objection I have is to the characterization of his books. The word “translation” in the title is in some important ways misleading. Mr. Barks knows English and the value of the words in this language, which is why his work is loved. But readers are entitled to know, before embarking on a book, what they’re actually reading. Mr. Barks has improved his versions of Rumi over the years by engaging in a deep study of Rumi and the Persian poetry tradition. He has been personally involved in a Sufi order and he tries to bring to his English readers the heart of Rumi’s message but at the same time not emphasizing Islamic teachings.
For some time now, Mr. Barks has been co-translating with John Moyne, a native Persian speaker and scholar of Sufism, and these more recent Rumi books do seem closer to the Persian texts. A good example of this is the popular Rumi quote that is widely shared, including as a tattoo on Brad Pitt’s bicep:
Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there
In the original text, Rumi uses the Arabic words iman (faithfulness) and kufr (infidelity) for rightdoing and wrongdoing respectively: iman and kufr being terms that are Quranic and related to the Islamic shariah (law). Barks, writing for non-Muslim audiences, makes a creative choice that does downplay the Islamic roots of Rumi’s poetry, but is still firmly tied to the real, Muslim figure of Rumi. In short, reading Rumi via Barks one must understand that you might not always be getting the full Islamic context of the Master’s original poetry.
And then there is Daniel Ladinsky’s so-called “translations” of Hafiz, and here I have to be really harsh and call it completely fraudulent and dishonest. I have heard that he is really a nice man and has his followers. In his defense, he genuinely feels that he has captured the spirit of Hafiz in his work. He is an American disciple of Meher Baba, who loved Hafiz and listened to recitations of his poetry every night. But it seems highly doubtful that our great poet Hafiz has authorized Ladinsky to write his own new age-ish “poetry” and claim it is a genuine translation. I do not accuse Mr. Ladinsky of being dishonest but I can’t help to think that perhaps he is delusional. I have looked at his work and been unable to find a single phrase that belongs to Hafiz.