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Rating: 
Summary: Go Gray
Review: Elizabeth T. Gray is one of the very few translators who can come close to doing justice to Hafiz. Forget Ladinsky; if you want to get an idea what Hafiz really said, get Gray. To correct a misconception, the convention in Sufi poetry is to invoke Allah as a woman, lover of the male human Sufi. That's why so many Sufi poems are about love for women named Layla or Salma. The Sufi vision of God tends to be female. This is more explicit in Arabic Sufi poetry, because Arabic uses gender unlike Persian. Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi said in Arabic we can call Allah either huwa 'He' or hiya 'She', the latter because the ultimate Divine Essence (al-Dhat) is Feminine. The genderless Persian pronoun leaves an interesting ambiguity that you can't duplicate in English, but by calling God "She," Elizabeth T. Gray is well within the authenticity of the Sufi poetic tradition. I have heard her speak about how she discovered these poems, and read Hafiz aloud; she told of her deep spiritual connection with these poems and the divine love they inspired in her, and of her visit to Hafiz's tomb in Shiraz. The poet himself must be smiling from Heaven upon seeing her presenting his poems to us moderns with such love and care.
Rating: 
Summary: A generally accurate translation
Review: My researches into translations of Hafez have now left me with six different books. They are: 1. The Avery translation, recently re-issued.
2. The Arberry book, "50 Poems of Hafez"
3. This book, by Elizabeth Grey
4. The complete translation of the Diwan, by Saberi
5. Ditto, plus the Persian, by Wilberforce Clark
6. The translations by Gertrude Bell (Daniel Ladinsky is not in my library!! :-0 ) Which of these is "best?" Well, if you want the literal meaning, go with Wilberforce Clark or Elizabeth Grey. The downside is that neither rendering makes any attempt at being English poetry: there is no visible rhyme-scheme, and there is no visible metrical scheme. Grey's prose is more elegant than Wilberforce Clark's, but, on the negative side, she was clearly trying to get a religious "meaning" out of Hafez -- while Hafez was a poet, primarily. The translations of Reza Saberi are marred by many factors, the most important being his errors in English. (!) But they encourage a wide reading in the Divan. Saberi and Wilberforce Clarke are the only complete translations of the Divan which I have. Gertrude Bell is highly "poetic." She adds a lot of invented stuff to make her translation "poetic." I suspect she was trying to do with Hafez what FitzGerald did with Khayyam. She did not succeed because Hafez is a much more important and difficult writer. This leaves us with Avery (generally good translations in modern verse) and Arberry, who provides translations from multiple authors, plus some very good ones done by himself. I would recommend this book (by Grey) for those who really want the literal, word-for-word meaning of Hafez.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent in every way, a great introduction to Hafiz
Review: This is the book I was trying to find when I ordered "The Gift," which is an absurd series of forgeries. This book, clearly a labor of love by Elizabeth Gray, presents the Persian and the English on facing pages. Gray does tend to translate "the Beloved" with a female pronoun, BUT in her very useful introduction she points out that this is probably wrong, since the typical "Beloved" in Hafiz is male. There's much much more. There is a very useful discussion of the history and form of the ghazal, the meter is annotated, the individual words and similes are extensively discussed, and we are able to understand how Hafiz is the most spiritual of poets through the separate introduction by Daryush Shayegan. Until I saw this book, Persian poetry in general and Hafiz in particular were totally opaque to me, although I have some knowledge of Farsi and used to speak it fairly well. Now that I have seen this book, the veil is lifted, and I can begin to see. Thank you Elizabeth Gray and White Cloud Press for this labor of love!
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