The Green Sea of Heaven

Auteur

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet and translator whose selection of poems by Iran’s iconic female poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022) was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her own books of poetry include Salient (New Directions, 2020). She serves on the boards of The Beloit Poetry Journal, Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, and from 2009-2015 served as chair of the board of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in New York City. www.etgrayjr.com.

Iraj Anvar is an actor, singer, stage and film director, writer, translator, and educator. He completed his first diploma in Genoa, Italy at the Swiss School, then gained a degree in acting and directing at Alessandro Fersen's Studio di Arti Sceniche in Rome, Italy. On returning to his native Tehran, he co-founded the Tehran Theater Workshop where he directed and performed in many stage and television productions and translated plays and film dialogue into Persian, including European plays he directed for the stage. He also taught acting and diction at Tehran University. A few months before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he moved to New York City, where he received his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU where he taught Persian language and literature for several years. In New York, he has read and sung Rumi, Hafiz, and other classical poets in Persian and in his own translations at the Asia Society, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Bartholomew's Church, the Long House Preserve Garden, the Bowery Poetry Club, Stony Brook, and several other institutions.

Texte du rabat

"The authoritative Hafiz, including original Persian and brilliant English translations. Recent translations of Hafiz have been controversial. Omid Safi notes "there are so many fake translations of Hafiz, offering 'versions' that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth Gray offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar." A ghazal was once understood to mean only lyric poetry of love. But what was courtly love concerned with wine and physical beauty became, in the hands of Sufis like Farid ud-Dâin 'Attar and Jalal ud-Dâin Rumi, a way to describe a mystic's relationship with God. Ghazals also then became ways to veil from theological and political conservatives Sufi teachings regarding the possibility of intuitive, personal union with the Divine. Hâafiz became the greatest Sufi poet, called both "Tongue of the Invisible" and "Interpreter of Mysteries." His command of traditional imagery and themes blends eroticism, mysticism, and panegyric into verse of unsurpassed beauty. Eighty of his ghazals are presented here, with Persian originals on facing pages to brilliant English translations. In the afterword, Persian scholar Daryush Shayegan notes how "there is no antagonism between the earthly wine and the divine wine, just as there is none between profane love and the love of God, since one is the necessary initiation to the other.""--