The Origins of the Text
The Translator's Account of Her Encounter with Háfiz
by Elizabeth T. Gray
Reprinted from The Harvard Review

Voices. Some draw us to them with affection or mystery, or claim us by birth. Others lie in wait, to ambush and slowly inhabit us. Often the destination is what we hurried through on the way.

In the fall of 1972 I abandoned college to see the Himalayas, to spin prayer wheels, to be--like any self-respecting revolutionary discarding Nixon's America for anything that resembled its opposite--in touch with traditions ancient and mystical. A Journey to the East. The standard hippie pilgrimage: six months to Kathmandu by truck, rail, bus, foot, and occasional lifts in the Land Rovers of the Generous.

In eastern Turkey I heard that there were Muslim poets who wrote exquisite lyrics: love poems in which it was never clear whether they wrote to their beloved or their God. Some, apparently, had lived in Iran. Crossing into the Shah's country below Mt. Arafat, I found some English translations: Victorian and wooden to my modernist ear, maudlin to raunchy rhymes filled with repetitious images of wine and roses and ladies. Not likely to be useful to an adept making her way along The Path.

Before crossing the southeastern desert in Baluchistan, headed for Quetta and Kandahar, I paused in Shiraz. White-brown hills, walled garden compounds along the river. With a few days to kill, it made sense to visit the poets' tombs. There were tour buses and knots of tourists. Rectilinear paths between columns of cypress, rose beds fed by well-orchestrated channels of water moving toward the river. It was a quiet sanctuary of watered green nestled between hot hills, with a shaded pavilion above the poet's tomb. I moved on.

Ten months later, at home, amid the littered recollections of the Khyber, the hashish bazaars, the Ganges, and innumerable Tibetan temples, there remained, embedded like a coal in ash, an image: the pilgrims and supplicants seeking succor and answers at the silent tomb, the intent disciples clustered around the slender turbaned shaikh, and, in the blistering white sunlight, the ravishingly beautiful sweep of indecipherable verse in alabaster.

"No one has unveiled the face of thought as well as Háfiz
since men began to comb, with a pen, the curly hair of speech."

Review of The Green Sea of Heaven

The Harvard Review, Vol. 8, (Spring 1995) pp. 81-85

Western scholars of classical Persian poetry have frequently felt humbled before the grand ocean of allusions and historical references, stock phrases and metaphors, ever-recurring images and figures, tantalizing integration of rhythm and rhyme and world-play and meaning, from all of which leaps forth the ghazal--ghazal, the hard-as rock genre of Persian poetry, of which Háfiz of Shiraz is the unparalleled master. To be sure, the very form of this genre is unique to its own milieu: ghazal is a single poem containing within itself a whole multiplicity of vibrating small poems: for each verse of the ghazal, the bayt, is an integral whole, related to other bayts only--at least apparently--by a meter that is fixed and by a rhyme that reappears.

Given all this, translating a Persian ghazal is no easy matter. Steeped in tradition, it requires long curtains of explanatory footnotes hanging from the rod of each translated verse; but how clumsy such an exercise will look! And then, the translator must at once be highly learned in the Persian literary tradition and profoundly skilled in poetic craft. These are the twin requirements for those daring ones who undertake the daunting task. Here is an English translation of fifty ghazals of the great Háfiz: a translation with a rich flow that is surprising, with a vigilant faithfulness to the original that is commendable, and with a tender and learned poetic care that is both a scholarly and an artistic joy. Elizabeth Gray presents us with a bouquet of Shirazi flowers, blazing in their colors and so fresh. She is to be admired both for her erudition and her verbal skills. And more, we must admire her also for her cultural courage.

The plan of this work is very sensible. First, Gray provides a very useful introduction; here she presents the historical setting in which the 14th century poet Háfiz was composing his ghazals; she explicates the nature of this genre itself, including its formal and technical requirements; she speaks of the challenges faced by a translator; and she utters an authoritative word of caution to the reader: "brandish lightly . . . the templates of Western literary criticism" [!] (p. xxi). Yes, we must heed her advice.

Then, she juxtaposes the original Persian text and her translation; and her there exist no footnotes, no heavy curtains, no clumsiness. To be sure, notes do exist--but far removed from the translations, at the end of the book. This was an intelligent structural decision. These notes are minimal, not too extensive, not too pedantic. And they are highly beneficial. In some cases, they constitute packed short essays on some of the most abstruse stylistic, conceptual, and historical elements of the Persian poetic tradition. It seems, then, that the work has wide scope: its magnetism would pull scholars, students, and the enthusiasts alike.

Scholars praise for The Green Sea of Heaven

"This is a groundbreaking work, one that places the ghazal of Háfiz into a contemporary English poetic idiom. Ms. Gray captures the rhythms, the paradoxes, the ironies, the sudden changes in tone and voice, the ambiguities, the spark and the bite of the original. After too long a wait, we encounter Háfiz, come alive in an English style that is at once natural and intricate. This is a remarkable achievement."

Michael Sells, professor of Islamic literature and author of Mystical Languages of the Unsaying

"These are truly remarkable and moving translations: the first English versions of Háfiz to read as poetry while still capturing the unique qualities of concision, multivalent meaning and spiritual depth which have for centuries made his Persian ghazals the acknowledged masterpiece and exemplar of poetic art throughout the Eastern Islamic world."

James Morris, professor of Islamic thought and literature, Oberlin College.