Poems of Hafez

Super book good reading for everyone

The book was not delivered in a high quality.I wonder whether the way that the paper was cut was an artistic idea or not? Anyway, I could see a red spot looking at the book.A small damage had also occurred to one corner of the book.

Difficult to understand at times.

Two thumbs up!

A REALLY NICE BOOK . FAUX HAND CRAFTED PAGES .EXCELLENT EXPLANATIONS OF FORMATTING AND TRANSLATIONS AND POSSIBLE ALTERNATE MEANINGS .THANKS !

If I had to chose a book or a piece of work that is absolutely untranslatable, it would have to be the poems of Hafez. His poems, when you hear them in the original language Farsi, are so breath-takingly beautiful, you cannot believe that somebody can create such words and thoughts! So I was very nervous about this book, but I have to say the translations are really wonderful. They are really to the point and the author magically manages to retain the original meaning but also to write beautiful poetry at the same time. This is a very demanding task!! So I can highly recommend this book to anyone. You should buy this book and do a proper Hafez reading :) Which means you will ask yourself any question, and then flip through the pages and randomly open it. The first poem your eyes fall upon (either left or right page) should be used for interpretation or as an answer. Enjoy, and while you do so, please also read the poems of Rumi (Mowlana) !!

This new English translation of 202 of the ghazals (poems) of the fourteenth century Iranian poet Hafez is surely a significant step toward making Hafez' poetry accessible to the English-speaking peoples of the world. Hafez clearly ranks among world's greatest poets, whose works should be known to everyone. This is unlikely to happen, because it is extremely difficult to translate poetry into poetry, and the difficulty increases more than linearly with greater differences in language and culture between the poet and the intended audience.Dr. Ordoubadian includes an introduction which deals with some of the difficulties of translating Iranian poetry into English poetry. His examples, however, are all from Hafez, which is good for the serious student of Persian poetry, but much more difficult for the lay reader. I give below an example of the difficulty of translating poetry, which I hope will be easier for the rest of us to understand. It is from a poem written in a language MUCH more closely related to English, and involves no problems of cultural difference. The middle lines, labeled LITERAL, show how someone with a German-English dictionary and little actual knowledge of German might translate it, e.g., translating Das kommt as `The comes' instead of `It comes.' The translation labeled POETIC expresses, in good English, what Heinrich Heine expressed so beautifully in German, AND it scans properly in iambic trimeter, like Heine's.GERMAN: . Ein .Marchen . aus alten ZeitenLITERAL: . .One picture . .out of . old timesPOETIC: A . scene . . . from .olden timesGERMAN: .Das kommt . mir . .nicht . aus . . dem .SinnLITERAL: . The comes .to me . .not . out of . the . mindPOETIC: . . .Keeps running thru my mind.This is what Dr. Ordoubadian has attempted, with considerable success, to do with the poetry of Hafez. I expect that this translation, or maybe a later edition thereof, perhaps with more of the 486 ghazals of the Khanlari edition translated, will become the recognized standard of excellence for English renderings of Hafez, and will be a significant factor in bringing Hafez to the world-wide audience he [email protected]

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