Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

At last in English is a wide selection from the great Persian poet Hafez, so beloved in Iran that almost every family there keeps his Divan close at hand. When Robert Bly and Coleman Barks visited Iran, they heard schoolchildren singing Hafez poems at his graveside. For some fifteen years, the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn has worked with Robert Bly to produce this translation, which for the first time carries into English Hafez's nimbleness, his fierce humor directed at the mullahs, his astonishing range of thought, and the delight of his love poems. A master of the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry, Hafez may be considered as Rumi's wild younger brother, and is now translated into an English that helps us understand his true genius.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

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.

Excerpted from The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Doorby Robert Bly Copyright ©2008 by Robert Bly. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.