How Do you translate Hafiz?

Many have tried. An impossible task. The hardest to read or listen to may be the most competent and “worthy”, simply because all Hafiz’ poems address The Beloved in a similar way. The ecstasies of joy, couched within the metaphors of drinking and love, can become “samey”. This does the poems a great injustice because they need to be sung, or sonorously intoned: an example of poetry which DEMANDS performance. The worst translations are probably the old ones, couched in archaic, “poetical” English. These are, frankly,, alienating.

So where do you go? This translation is done in rhyming couplets, and exhibits the worst traits of this style by dragging in bad rhymes rather too often in the most execrable doggerel. And yet this apparent naivety works, very often. Why? Because it is interesting to the ear and never flat nor monotonous. In fact it has a mesmeric quality which can put you “under the influence”, quite in accord with Hafiz’ bar rooms and taverns. It is ordinary, down-to-earth, a quality exhibited by all the greatest visionaries and mystics: reality is here and now. Hafiz brings the ineffable into the most worldly locations, thus blending the two in the one truth.

In the end, after initial impatience, I let myself be carried along by the flow of this translation, turning off my rational, critical mind. Maybe that’s the point: just experience, don’t think.

The reading itself is adequate: the reader has a good voice, but “swallows” the ends of some lines which are inaudible - not good professional technique.

I suggest: listen to this reading, followed by a more conventional one: then decide!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!