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The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez - Paperback | Diverse Reads

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

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One of our most acclaimed poets brings the work of the great Persian mystic and poet, Hafez, to a new audience.

There is no poet in our tradition who carries the amount of admiration and devotion that the Persians have for Hafez. Children learn to sing Hafez poems in the third grade, and almost every family has a copy of the collected Hafez on the dining room table. Robert Bly and the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn have worked for 15 years on this book of Hafez, the first that carries into English his nimbleness, his outrageous humor, his defenses of the private life in the face of the fundamentalists, and the joy of his love poems. He writes in the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry. This is Rumi’s wild younger brother, now brought into an English that makes his genius visible.

ISBN-13: 9780061138843

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication Date: 03-24-2009

Pages: 128

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

Robert Bly's books of poetry include The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. His awards include the National Book Award for poetry and two Guggenheims. He lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dr. Leonard Lewisohn is Lecturer in Persian and the Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow in Classical Persian and Sufi Literature at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in England.

Read an Excerpt

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
Thirty Poems of Hafez

How Blame Has Been Helpful

We are drunken ecstatics who have let our hearts
Go to the wild. We are musty scholars
Of love, and old friends of the wine cup.

People have aimed the arrow of guilt a hundred times
In our direction. With the help of our Darling's eyebrow,
Blame has been a blessing, and has opened all our work.

Oh, dark-spotted flower, you endured pain all night,
Waiting for the wine of dawn; I am that poppy
That was born with the burning spot of suffering.

If our Zoroastrian master has become disgusted
With our way of repentance, tell him, Go ahead,
Strain the wine. We are standing here with our heads down.

It is through you that our work goes on at all;
Oh, teacher of the way, please throw us a glance.
Let's be clear about it; we have fallen off the path.

Don't imagine us to be like the tulip, who is preoccupied
With its goblet shape; rather look at the dark
Spot of grief we have set on our scorched hearts.

"Hafez," you say, "what about all your intriguing colors
And ingenious fantasies?" Don't take our language seriously.
We are a clean slate on which nothing has been written.

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
Thirty Poems of Hafez. Copyright © by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

What People are Saying About This

Coleman Barks

“Robert understands the wild assertions of Hafez and his transparency. Robert’s translations have the nimbleness and daring of the lover. This is the book we have been waiting for.”

Baha al-Din Khurramshahi

This is an amazingly meaningful translation of Hafiz’s poetry that I deeply appreciate. . . . Having understood the original text in both its technical and non-technical senses, they have presented us with a translation shorn of jargon.