Thirty Poems of Hafiz of Shiraz by Peter Avery
Very little is known about the life of Hafiz, except that he was born in Shiraz and died there in 1389, making him almost an exact contemporary of Chaucer. As well as being a court poet he lectured in Qur'anic exegesis. His pen-name 'Hafiz' means 'one who can recite the Qur'an by heart'. Hafiz lived in the 'time of troubles' of the Iranian civilisation that was then subject to much internal strife between marauding princes and under constant threat from the nomads of Central Asia under Timur. He was said to have received the gift of poetry miraculously from Khidr, literally 'the green one', a mysterious figure associated with the esoteric. The poems of Hafiz have many levels of significance but have come to be interpreted above all in terms of Sufi mystical theology. His reputation to this day makes him the Shakespeare of Persian literature. This volume, first published in 1952, makes accessible in English, thirty poems by the greatest of Persian writers, beautifully and faithfully rendered into English as a result of the close collaboration of a scholar and a poet.
Classification: general
Size: 234 x 156 mm
Pages:224
Binding: cloth/paper
ISBN: 1-870196-15-5 cloth 1-870196-14-7 paper
Price:£19.95 cloth, £9.95 paper
Publication date: Dec 2002 (3rd edition, revised, expanded)
Peter Avery, OBE (1923-2008) was born in Derby, England, and devoted his life to Persian literature and history. As a child he was introduced to Fitzgerald's paraphrase of Omar Khayyam's quatrains which lead to a lifelong interest in Persian poetry. He began to learn Persian during the Second World War when he was stationed in India because he wanted to be able to read Hafiz in the original. Having taken a degree at the London School of Oriental and African studies, after living in Iran and the Middle East until 1957, he became Lecturer in Persian Studies in the University of Cambridge, where he continued to teach, even after retirement, until the end of his life.
John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs OBE (9 July 1918 - 26 December 2006) was an English poet and translator, known for his verse influenced by classical myths, and the long Arthurian poem Artorius (1972).
Review:
"Among the more recent translations, those of Avery and Heath-Stubbs are probably the best of the free verse translations. They present each bayt in an unrhymed couplet of loose six-stress lines, which preserve something of the essentially symmetrical form of the original." Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol.XI
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