{"id":83529,"date":"2020-04-04T20:15:48","date_gmt":"2020-04-05T01:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/persian-heritage.com\/wordpress\/?p=79916"},"modified":"2020-04-11T10:46:26","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T15:46:26","slug":"wine-prayer-and-hafiz-of-shiraz-%e2%80%ac%d8%b4%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a8-%e2%80%ac%d9%88-%e2%80%ac%d9%85%d9%86%d8%a7%d8%ac%d8%a7%d8%aa%e2%80%ac-a-new-edition-of-the-persian-masters-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2020\/04\/04\/wine-prayer-and-hafiz-of-shiraz-%e2%80%ac%d8%b4%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a8-%e2%80%ac%d9%88-%e2%80%ac%d9%85%d9%86%d8%a7%d8%ac%d8%a7%d8%aa%e2%80%ac-a-new-edition-of-the-persian-masters-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Wine & Prayer and Hafiz of Shiraz \u2014 A New Edition of the Persian Master\u2019s Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Translated by: Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. and Iraj Anvar Ashland, OR, October 2, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

While tensions between the United States and Iran continue to oscillate, a new book of translations of Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1389),\u00a0 released on September 23rd, displays the central and unwavering role that mystical poetry plays in the Persian psyche.<\/p>\n

Native Persian speakers – in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, other parts of Central Asia, and in these countries \u2018 diasporas – have a special bond with the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz. Poems from his diwan are not only memorized, recited and sung by individual s of every kind in every comer of the Eastern Islamic world, but even used for divination. Hafiz was the unrivaled master of the Persian ghazal, a lyric form roughly equivalent to the English sonnet in length, intensity, and complexity.<\/p>\n

Wine & Prayer is a new and expanded edition of The Green Sea of Heaven, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. \u2018s acclaimed 1995 translation s of Hafiz\u2019s ghazals. For this new book Gray, a poet, scholar, and corporate consultant, joined forces with Iraj Anvar of Brown University, a scholar and translator of Rumi, to completely rework the original fifty ghazals and to translate thirty new ones, including expanded notes to the poems and online access to the original Persian text. Suitable for literary enjoyment, spiritual practice, or the study of classical Persian, this edition bring s to the English reader Hafiz\u2019s genius with language, his passion for the Divine Beloved, and, in places, his scandalous – to clerics then and now-exaltation of music and wine as images of, and vehicles for, ecstasy and transcendence.<\/p>\n

Wine & Prayer presents the ghazals of Hafiz in English translations that capture the subtleties, paradoxes, and spiritual depth s of the poet hailed by Persian-speakers as the \u201cTongue of the Invisible\u201d and the \u201cInterpreter of Mysteries.\u201d In the book\u2019s Afterword, Persian scholar Daryush Shayegan notes how \u201cthere 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.\u201d This describes the vein of rich ambiguity that Hafiz mines throughout his work, and which Gray and Anvar capture in their translations.<\/p>\n

Recent translations of Hafiz have been controversial. Professor Omid Safi, an Islamic Studies scholar and translator of Sufi poetry, notes that \u201cthere are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering \u2018versions\u2019 that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth T Gray Jr. offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wine & Prayer is published by White Cloud Press as part of their acclaimed Islamic Encounters Series and their Sufi poetry translations, and is available nationwide with distribution by Publishers Group West.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translated by: Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. and Iraj Anvar Ashland, OR, October 2, 2019 While tensions between the United States and Iran continue to oscillate, a new book of translations of Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1389),\u00a0 released on September 23rd, displays the central and unwavering role that mystical poetry plays in the Persian psyche. Native […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":83577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phart"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}