The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez

The nice Persian poet Hafez is so cherished in Iran that nearly each relations there retains his Divan shut handy. For a few fifteen years, esteemed American poet and writer Robert Bly has labored with the nice Islamic student Leonard Lewisohn to provide this translation, which for the 1st time captures Hafez's nimbleness, his fierce humor, his outstanding diversity of notion, and his have fun with love—enabling English audio system to totally get pleasure from the real genius of this grasp of the ghazal shape, one of many maximum innovations within the background of poetry.

Show description

Preview of The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez PDF

Best Poetry books

The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition

This revised and accelerated version of the fundamental Rumi features a new creation via Coleman Barks and greater than eighty never-before-published poems. via his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this beautiful literature to a remarkably wide selection of readers, making the ecstatic, religious poetry of thirteenth-century Sufi Mystic Rumi extra well known than ever.

Don Juan (Penguin Classics)

A few of the earliest books, really these relationship again to the 1900s and prior to, at the moment are tremendous scarce and more and more pricey. we're republishing those vintage works in cheap, top of the range, sleek variations, utilizing the unique textual content and art.

The Penguin Book of English Verse

Spanning seven centuries, this bold and revelatory assortment turns the normal chronology of anthologies on its head, directory poems in response to their first person visual appeal within the language instead of through poet. For greater than seventy years, Penguin has been the best writer of vintage literature within the English-speaking global.

Additional info for The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez

Show sample text content

The grasping soul doesn’t are looking to connect itself to the divine, so it's going to connect itself to a “pretty face” or another picture that pulls it. So regardless of the mystic’s center hangs upon, no matter if this be a stupendous shape (surat), a tune (awaz), a verse, an idea, or a second of meditation, is his shahid (FAH, p. 361). Yeats, in his poem “Memory,” hence writes: One had a stunning face, And or 3 had allure, yet allure and face have been in useless as the mountain grass can't yet preserve the shape the place the mountain hare has lain. “GOBBLING THE SUGAR OF sunrise SLEEP” Stanza 1: In Khanlari’s version of the Divan, rather than “the life of affection” (hasti-yi ‘ishq), the word “drunkenness of affection” (masti-yi ‘ishq) is given. the previous analyzing that we've got selected here's extra genuine (it is featured in six of Khanlari’s variation MSS. ); moreover, “the lifestyles of affection” can also be the popular analyzing of either Haravi and Khurramshahi, and Khanlari’s arguments for “drunkenness” (Divan, II, pp. 1225–26) are convincingly refuted by way of Haravi. This couplet is generally thought of by means of so much commentators to be a paraphrase of the verse: “I didn't create the jinn and humans with the exception of the sake of worship of Me” (Qur’an, LI: 56). guy has been created in order that he/she may perhaps turn into a lover. the variation among guy and the angel lies within the incontrovertible fact that angels don't have any love, while males can't dwell with out love (SGH, III, p. 1827). Stanza five: for the reason that all of the commentators agree that this can be a Sufi mystical ghazal, they rightly clarify the “kingdom” spoken of the following as being the “kingdom of religious poverty. ” Stanza 6: during this couplet, just like the prior one, the poet makes use of moral and metaphysical arguments as strategies of seduction to extra his erotic advances. He entreats his liked to desire him with a look out of the “corner” of her eye to prevent turning into topic to any untoward calamity (the look from the nook of the eyes is juxtaposed, either via poetic machine and alliteration, to “recluses” who take a seat in corners). The time period bala, translated the following as “disaster,” refers back to the adversities, problems, or failures that afflict mankind, which, based on conventional Islamic (and Christian) piety, might be prevented through honest prayer, as Blake’s stanzas (from “The gray Monk”) point out: yet useless the Sword & useless the Bow. they could by no means paintings War’s overthrow. The hermit’s prayer and widow’s tear by myself can keep the area from worry. For a Tear is an highbrow factor, And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King, And the sour groan of the Martyr’s woe Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow. “ABOUT DESTITUTE fanatics” Stanza 2: Khurramshahi (HN, II, p. 1166–87) has an extended dialogue of the forms of love in Hafez’s Divan, the place he notes that there are a few thirty-eight varied features of affection, mentioning a few fourteen diversified couplets during which love and cause are against one another, certainly one of that is this verse (HN, II, pp. 1182–83), He additionally devotes an extended dialogue to the love/reason dichotomy in his remark on different ghazals (HN, I, pp.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.69 of 5 – based on 23 votes