Note Dick Davis' The Faces of Love: Hafiz and the Poets of Shiraz has now been published, and a review of that excellent book is currently in the works. 

Review of: The Gift: Poems from Hafiz the great Sufi Master
By Daniel Ladinsky

Every now and again, I get an email from a reader asking why I only review books and translations that are good, or at least passable. What would deserve a grade of F? And it is a fair question. The answer is that I don't see the point, most of the time. Badly done translations are usually recognized as such after a decade or so and eventually fade into obscurity. The test of time is a remarkably solid one, as far as literary translation is concerned (though hardly a perfect one, as Robert Bly's undeserved acclaim will attest.) Plus, for me to review a truly bad translation would require me to actually read it again, a pain I am utterly unwilling to endure for the sake of so utterly undeserving an artist. Moreover, for reasons of personal disposition, I'm more interested in pointing out things that people ought to read, rather than warding them away from things they shouldn't touch with a ten-foot blowtorch while wearing a HazMat suit.

But there are exceptions; unfortunate, unforgivable exceptions to this rule: works that are so bad, so absurdly passed off as good by critics who don't know any better, and so lamentably popular for all the wrong reasons that explaining to people why they shouldn't touch them is the literary equivalent of warning one's best friend not to date the suave, good-looking con-man. Such works which the critical apparatus should have long ago round-filed but have, due to some perversion of fate, some anomaly of chance, or some flatulence of God, managed to remain on various favorites lists, are just asking for an unmasking. So let the unmasking begin.

Dan Ladinsky's The Gift: Poems from Hafiz the great Sufi Master is perhaps the most inexcusably excruciating book bearing the name "translation" I have ever had the displeasure to read. For absurd reasons, it is still widely popular and seen as successful, despite a decade's worth of hindsight since its first printing in 1999. So let me do my part to call this book what it really is: an awfully-written, narcissistic, colossally unintelligent act of charlatanry which derives its success largely from exploiting (and grossly perpetuating) some of the most shameful traits of the American public: ignorance of Islam and Islamic languages, unbridled consumerism, poor literary sensibility, stereotypes of "The East" and reviewers' reticence to say anything negative. This is why, in case you were wondering, I have not dignified Ladinsky's textual excretions with the the customary link to the corresponding page on Amazon.com.

The rest of this review will indeed be about the book, but it will also be an act of revenge for what I went through while reading it.

***Translations? What translations?***

Normally, my reviews of translations take the translation in question and then compare parts of it to the original (I do not do reviews of translations whose original language I am not competent in.) However, in the case of Ladinsky's work, this is not possible because there really aren't any originals being translated! Ladinsky's passages do not correspond to anything Hafiz wrote in Persian. At all. As I perused the volume, I could reasonably have expected to at least recognize some of what Ladinsky was translating. I didn't.

And it's not that these translations are just so free that I didn't recognize which Persian text they corresponded to. For example, Coleman Barks' Rumi translations (to which Ladinsky's work is often unjustly compared) and Edward FitzGerald's versions of Omar Khayyam (which are often misguidedly underrated by modern critics and scholars) are both very free and sometimes take incredible liberties with the original Persian. But, although they often leave me wondering what original Persian lines they're supposed to be translating, EVEN THEY don't disfigure the text so consistently that I never once recognize a single line or stanza as corresponding to any specific counterpart in the original. The closest you get is the occasional Hafiz-like motif or image, usually so vague it could probably refer to any one of a few dozen original Persian lines.

What makes this even more appalling than it already is is the sheer hypocrisy and egotism that Ladinsky shows in his introduction, once one takes into account that these poems are really his and not Hafiz's. When he says that Hafiz's poetry contains a "music that comforts, empowers, enlightens," or that there is a particular line from it that he wants "to inscribe these words of Hafiz on every flag, church bell, temple, mosque and politician's brain", he's actually praising himself. The portions of the introduction where he cites some verse or other to make some insipid point or other aren't actually citing Hafiz. He's citing his own work and then saying essentially "wow, whoever wrote this stuff [A.K.A yours truly] was a frickin' Genius." As if that weren't gross enough, within this selfsame introduction, he characterizes this book as a selfless labor of love, trying to "impart his [Hafiz's] remarkable qualities." This guy has actually taken his own self-aggrandizement and pawned it off on the reader as devotion and dedication to another artist he admires! HOW SHAMELESS CAN YOU GET?

Ladinsky just might be deluded enough to believe his own statement (the only one that comes within vomiting-distance of the point I just raised) in the book's introduction that "once in a while I may seem to have taken the liberty to play a few of these lines through a late-night jazz sax instead of from a morning temple drum or lyre." I can tell you that it is, at best, a grotesque low-balling of what's really going on here. At worst, it's probably just a half-assed attempt at discrediting unfavorable reviews like this one. In the same paragraph, he further answers readers who object to what he calls "a few contemporary expressions" (read: outright fabrication) in the poems with the following crack-pottery:

To that I say- nothing doing. The word translation comes from the Latin for "to bring across." My goal is to bring across, right into your lap, the wondrous spirit of Hafiz that lifts the corners of the mouth. I view this goal as a primary, no-holds-barred task. And I apologize for any language that may stop the beguine and not let the reader remain in Hafiz's tender strong embrace.

First off (pedantry alert) actually, the word trānslātiō in late Latin didn't mean "bring across" at all. It meant "translation" in a sense more or less congruent with the modern English word (though in many contexts its meaning was a bit closer to "metaphor.") The classical word trānslātus on the other hand, from which the late Latin word derives, as the passive participle of transferō (whence English "transfer") did mean "carried across" as well as "translated." Which isn't that odd, really. Not all languages resemble the modern European ones in having a dedicated word that means "to translate." Many, like classical Latin, just use other verbs metaphorically to express the same concept. Anyway, all this goes to show that Ladinsky just typed "Translation" into Dictionary.com and used the result to feign erudition, and just revealed himself as an even bigger poseur in the process.

Moreover, the logic is completely blinkered. A word's etymology doesn't determine its present-day meaning AT ALL, and it certainly can't be used to argue semantics, otherwise "hussy" would mean "house-wife." Words do not have discreet ontological properties independent of speakers' perceptions. For example, when I call Ladinsky's book pathetic, it is obvious that I do not mean that it is "sensitive, moving" (even though that is the word's historical meaning in earlier English, as well as that of the Greek word from which it derives) so much as "laughable in its failure." Justifying an argument of semantics by resorting to etymology is one of the many ways the ignorant and inept try to masquerade as sagacious and skilled.

But, Dear Reader, it gets worse. Way worse. Behold:

I feel my relationship to Hafiz defies all reason and is really an attempt to do the impossible: to translate Light into words — to make the luminous resonance of God tangible to our finite senses. About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz an an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to ‘my artists and seekers’.

I don't even have a joke here. There's nothing I can say that would be more hilarious than Ladinsky's own statement. How? HOW did Penguin think that it was sane to publish the work of an ostensible translator who claims that the original poet literally gave him the "translations" from beyond the grave?¹. I don't care how stupid the editor was. NOBODY is that brainless. Even if you have no brain at all and just a spinal cord, you should still pause over this paragraph and say "hey, something's a little off here."

At any rate, if Ladinsky has, as he seems to imply at times, taken literal translations and just rephrased the message contained therein so as to make it accessible to a modern audience, then the Spice Girls' "If you wanna be my lover" is just a more accessible retelling of Shakespeare's sonnet 116 because, after all, they're both about love, kinda. That's not hyperbole. The difference in quality and subject really is about that vast.

***Just Plain Old Bad "Poetry"***

This brings us to the second part of why this book is so diesel-chuggingly bad. The poetry contained is at best mediocre, and at worst it is either outright plagiarism or sounds like a sixth grade choirboy writing something because his English teacher made him. Take a look here:

Where is the door to God?
In the sound of a barking dog,
In the ring of a hammer,
In a drop of rain,
In the face of
Everyone
I see.

Upon reading these lines, a friend of mine said: "I wrote better poetry in kindergarten, and I suck at poetry." Telling the reader you're about to say something profound and then listing a bunch of clichés (thereby leaving it up to the gullible reader to imbue the text with something that wasn't even there just to justify the its existence) is not poetry. It's something to be ashamed of. This "eastern" pseudo-mystical Sensei schtick is not at all Hafizian, Persian, Sufi or even Islamic. It is utterly contemporary, utterly American, and utterly ubiquitous among "spiritual" poets today who want to sound profound but don’t really want to put forth a true artistic effort: God is everywhere! Whoop-dee-doo, Mr. Ladinsky, your readers sure never heard that one every other day at Sunday-school.

Or take another little eructation:

Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a better
Job.

If this is Hafiz "revealing God with a billion IQ" as Ladinsky says in the introduction, then John Donne or George Herbert must have a God-IQ of a billion quadrillion each. What this is is bad allegory with even worse line-breaks, which the editor of any literary magazine (even in shoddy days like these) could only respond to with rejection and pity². Seriously, Dear Reader, let me know if you find anything in the above-mentioned lines that could be anything other than an enjambed fortune-cookie.

Granted, not all of the poems contained herein are quite that appalling. But, even if you discount the true howlers, this is still a generally bad book which would never have risen to prominence without the name "Hafiz" appended to it (but more on that fact later.) Ladinsky's poems (for they are not in any sense Hafiz's) usually insult the reader's intelligence by telling him/her what he/she already knows (or knows to be false,) passing off the obvious for the profound. Neither of these things would matter at all if the poems themselves were compelling in terms of language (which matters more than ideas anyway in a poem) but they just aren't. Take this excerpt, which is actually a more representative specimen of Ladinsky's work:

Love
Is the great work
Though every heart is first an
Apprentice

That slaves beneath the city of Light.

This wondrous trade,
This magnificent throne your soul
Is destined for-

You should not have to think
Much about it,

Is it not clear
An apprentice needs a teacher
Who himself

Has charmed the universe
To reveal its wonders inside his cup.

Happiness is the great work,
Though every heart must first become
A student

To one
Who really knows
About Love.

Okay, not as nauseating as the previous bits, but completely joyless nonetheless. And a bucketful of clichés: great work, wondrous trade, city of light, magnificent throne, your soul is destined, an apprentice needs a teacher, reveal its wonders. All yawners. Oh and yes, Ladinsky, we all know how amazing love is. As if that weren't bad enough, the rest is more Sensei-posturing about how you have to learn about Love from a real Lover. Only "charmed the universe" and "slaves beneath" are at all interesting as phrases or in context here. And Ladinsky doesn't build on them at all or use them to develop what ideas he has. He is the Bad Poet par excellence- too talentless to write consistently well, and too stupid to take what good ideas he does have and build on them. "Reveal its wonders inside his cup" is the only bit that sounds remotely within throwing distance of Hafiz' lines, and even then the connection is so vague that it could be any one of a dozen verses, and has a whopping cliché anyway. Yawn.

Of course, since Ladinsky thinks Hafiz was a "Sufi poet" (which he probably wasn't- but it doesn't really matter) this poem (like all the poems in this book containing the word "love") is really supposed to be about love for the divine. This is ostensibly the side of spirituality that Ladinsky wants to show us benighted Westerners (as if we're too stupid to just Google it.) Unfortunately this just makes Ladinsky come off even worse. As an idea, it is nothing new to Western readers, and anyone with more than a cursory awareness of western literary history or culture would know that (how else could "God is love" or "Bride of Christ" become such mammoth-clichés.) The notion of the Lover and Beloved as a metaphor for Believer and God (or Christ and the Church, or Soul and Heaven- pick your favorite poison) is actually one of the oldest. It appears in the Christian and Hebrew Bible several times. For example, for most Jewish and Christian schools of thought, it was the canonical (read: only acceptable) interpretation of the Song of Songs well into the 20th century, a fact which lead western mystical poets (such as St. John of the Cross, whose most famous such poem I have translated here, by the way) to construe their faith in amatory, quasi-conjugal terms. (In fact, the radical interpretation in vogue today is a reading of the Song of Songs as simply a description of carnal cravings.) There is NOTHING NEW for an educated Westerner about any of this. The fact that Ladinsky assumes otherwise is an insult not just to the Western reader's intelligence, but to his/her literary tradition as well.

However, for all my writing about how there isn't any Hafiz in these pages, I do recognize another Persian poet. It's actually Rumi. Or, more precisely, Coleman Barks' extremely free translations (but at least they can still be called translations) of Rumi. Now and then, Ladinsky reveals himself to be not just a charlatan and bad poet, but also a pretty brazen plagiarist to boot. Here's another snippet from this book:

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself

A Christian, A Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel
Or even pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known

Once more, the first few lines have same lazy trick of enjambed prose with a little capitalization thrown in for good measure. The rest of the poem is just uninspired tripe. But what I want to call your attention to, Dear Reader, is the following translation of Rumi³ by Coleman Barks:

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

It is hard for me to believe that Ladinsky hasn't plagiarized Coleman Barks' translated poem (which, though hardly a masterpiece, is infinitely superior to Ladinsky's own perfume-drenched dreck.) As usual with this book, Hafiz doesn't say anything in Persian like what Ladinsky would have us believe. But Coleman Barks' Rumi very much does, here anyway. Ladinsky, here, has not only plagiarized the work of a translator of a different poet than the one he purports to be translating, but, it seems, would have the reader believe that Hafiz, and not he, is the real plagiarist, or perhaps that any similarity is pure accident because Rumi and Hafiz are supposedly oh-so-similar⁴.


***And Bad Scholarship***

Anyway, as if all this weren't horrid enough, that isn't all the ways in which this book fails. It also fails because Ladinsky, like so very many others, fundamentally misapprehends the nature of medieval Persian poetry in general, and of Hafiz in particular. He is under the impression that Hafiz was primarily a Sufi poet (à la Rumi) because many of the poems can be read as a kind of mystical code. The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated than that. I know of no better summary than the one given below by the scholar Wheeler Thackston, originally printed in A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry (which, by the way, I heartily recommend to Persian students who want an introduction to classical literature):

One of the major difficulties Persian poetry poses to the novice reader lies in the pervasion of poetry by mysticism. Fairly early in the game the mystics found that they could "express the ineffable" in poetry much better than in prose. Usurping the whole of the poetic vocabulary that had been built up by that time, they imbued every word with mystical signification. What had begun as liquid wine with alcoholic content became the "wine of union with the godhead" on which the mystic is "eternally drunk." Beautiful young cupbearers with whom one might like to dally became shāhids, "bearers of witness to the dazzling beauty of that-which-truly-exists. After the mystics had wrought their influence on the tradition, every word of the poetic vocabulary had acquired such "clouds" of associated meaning from lyricism and mysticism that the two strains merged into one. Of course some poets wrote poetry that is overtly and unmistakably mystical and "Sufi." It is much more difficult to identify poetry that is not mystical. It is useless to ask, for instance, whether Hāfiz's poetry is "Sufi poetry" or not. The fact is that in the fourteenth century it was impossible to write a ghazal that did not reverberate with mystical overtones forced on it by the poetic vocabulary itself.

For this reason among others, to call Hafiz a "Sufi Master" as this book's title does makes little sense. It is about as ludicrous as assuming a Renaissance sculptor must have only kept the company of attractive people because his sculptures only depict their subjects as having ideal bodies (when, of course, in reality, that was simply the result of the artistic tradition, not of the artist's own tastes or experience.) This misunderstanding of Ladinsky's is compounded by the fact that he uses H. Wilberforce Clarke's literal translation of Hafiz as a jumping-off point for his own work. Although Ladinsky seems to be under the outlandish impression (in the introduction) that Clarke's version is "the most respected English translation of Hafiz," the truth is actually football fields away from that notion. Clarke's versions are regarded by modern scholarship as absurd if not irrelevant in terms of the "mystical" commentary supplied liberally on every page in the "vast footnotes" which Ladinsky admits to using as fodder for his project. In fact, the poet-scholar Dick Davis has referred to Clarke's work as "goofy-Sufi."

***How Could A Just And Loving God Let This Happen?***

That such a grotesque fraud/misprision could be perpetrated on American readership is made possible by a curious constellation of facts: Hafiz, although he has immense name-brand value, tends not to be read much by modern Westerners. We hear of him as the "great Persian genius" but few of us actively go and look for his work in translation and, to make matters worse, there hasn't really been a very successful English translation of Hafiz since Gertrude Bell's in the 19th century, which probably strikes modern readers as overly formal and poetick with its "thou" and "knoweth" etc.

Then there is the fact that, in America today, "the East" is still seen, at least somewhat and in certain circles, as the land of great seers and men of spiritual bounty. Unsurprisingly, none other than Dan Ladinsky himself fell prey to the mystique of The East as a follower of Meher Baba. (Does anyone seriously think that Meher Baba, had he been born in New York instead of India, wouldn't just be one of those lunatics on the metro?) This mysticization of The East and Islam is often especially encouraged in liberal circles as an antidote to the outright demonization engaged in by the political right. In fact, that's probably why Coleman Barks' versions of Rumi were so successful.

However, Hafiz was not a mystical sage, but a frickin' human being. True, he was and is a spiritual poet whose faith often transcended the narrow boundaries imposed by religious authorities. However, he was also a carnal lover, a drinker of very real (and very non-spiritual) wine and a man deeply attached to his hometown. I cannot overstate just how big of an Asshole/Microbrain Ladinsky is to claim that he's somehow doing Hafiz a service by portraying him as some New Age guru.

Either Ladinsky really is that much of an idiot (which wouldn't surprise me, actually) or he is simply capitalizing on the name "Hafiz" by appending it to his own work as a way to sell books. Indeed, I see no reason to think that this is not the case. In fact, his utter silence when critics mistook his work for his translations, his unwillingness to divulge the true nature of the texts contained in this volume, and his insistence (online and elsewhere) that the book's sales somehow justify his swindle -all suggest that he knows what he's doing, and it ain't pretty.

***Critics***

Now, because critical acclaim and scholarly silence played a significant role in getting this book disseminated so widely, the critics who praised this book (and most especially the ones who really should have known better) deserve to be discussed, their claims refuted, and their sins made known to all, because what's just as appalling as the book's quality is the fact that this and other Hafiz books by Ladinsky have gotten favorable, nay fawning, reviews from literally all but one critic⁵ who wrote about it. The favorable reviews are nothing more than the products of ignorance compounded by the usual circle-jerk of modern American literary criticism and the fact that most critics who could have seen through this book simply didn't review it, which is typical in an age when nobody wants to give a bad review to something that calls itself literature. But, as the Yiddish saying goes, a halbe eymes iz a gantse ligen "a half truth is a whole lie."

I repeat that not a single specialist in Persian literature reviewed the work when it first came out. Almost all of the reviews came from people whose claim to fame (and now shame) ties into spirituality or philosophy. Lets take a look at some of the typical critical commentary that the book has received:

First off, Brian Bruya, who is currently an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University (and is known mainly for his work on East Asia,) though my guess is that he only had an M.A. when he wrote this, gives us the following bit of embarrassing blurbery:

Hafiz, a secret Sufi, came to prominence in his day as a writer of love poems. That love transformed into an all-consuming passion for union with the divine. In The Gift, Daniel Ladinsky bestows on us the impassioned yet whimsical strains of Hafiz's ecstasy. Never forced or awkward, Ladinsky's Hafiz whispers in your ear and pounds in your chest, naming God in a hundred metaphors.

I once asked a bird,
"How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?"
She responded,
"Love lifts
Me."

Like Fitzgerald's version of Khayyam's Rubaiyat, the language of The Gift strikes a contemporary chord, resonating in the reader's mind and then in the heart. Ladinsky's language is plain, fresh, playful--dancing with an expert cadence that invites and surprises. If it is true, as Hafiz says, that a poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, reading Ladinsky's Hafiz is like gulping down the sun.

Bruya manages to not only tell a pack of absurdities that reveal his lack of taste, but make outright errors of fact that anyone who'd so much as read the Wikipedia article on Hafiz could tell you. Hafiz was not a "secret sufi" and, his poems don't give us any evidence one way or another. Since most of them were probably recited in public in his day, we can be certain that Hafiz wasn't telling any secrets in those. Other than the poems, all we know about Hafiz comes from legends of much later provenance (even the most cursory survey of the critical literature could tell you that.) As we have already discussed, poems with apparent mystical content are not necessarily mystical poems, and Hafiz in particular loved to play with the multiple resonances of the poetic vocabulary. Hafiz gives us no indication that his poetry, to the extent that it was religious, is evidence for an "All-consuming passion for union with the divine." It is true that there are certain poems which describe a speaker in throes of longing for the divinity/beloved, and in certain of those poems there's enough evidence to say that they're probably mainly religious in message. Such a poem, for example, is the one that begins with the following lines:

Muzhda-yi vasl-i to k'ū k'az sar-i jān barkhēzam
Tāyir-i qudsam o az dām-i jahān barkhēzam
(Where is the news of Union with you? For it would let me rise and give up the soul,
I am a holy bird and from the cage of the world I will arise.)

However, we've already established that it is foolish to assume that Hafiz is the speaker of the poems, and that this is not some poetic avatar. Moreover, even if we were to assume that this poem (and others like it) are autobiographical, Bruya's statement still falls flat on its face since modern scholarship has almost no access to the relative chronology of the poems. We don't know which ones were written early in life and which ones were written later. (All we have is certain clues from certain of the poems due to references made to events and places during the poet's lifetime.) We cannot say how "that love transformed" into anything, because his poems don't offer much of a timeline by which to gauge what is transforming, where, when, and into what.

So much for Bruya's historical claims. As for his discussions of the translation, the excerpt he chooses to cite is pretty trite and cliché-ridden with the one exception of the phrase "gravity of darkness". A bird lifted on the wings of love? Really? C'mon, my 10th grade P.E. teacher could do better than that. An "expert cadence that invites and surprises?" I don't need to insult your intelligence, Dear Reader, by foisting yet another excerpt on you to refute that claim. "Hafiz says, that a poet is someone who can pour light into a cup,".... No, Hafiz doesn't say that. Anywhere. Ever. That's Ladinsky's invention.

At this point it should be clear that Bruya doesn't even know the least thing about Hafiz scholarship, and hasn't even bothered to, say, ask one of his Persian-speaking colleagues if this sounds anything like the Persian poet. If one of his students turned in a paper with this many howlers, I doubt he'd give it a second thought before flunking the student.

Here's another little blurb by Patricia Monaghan:

Less well known in the U.S. than his Sufi predecessor, Rumi, Hafiz (Shams-ud-din Muhammad) is also worthy of attention, and Ladinsky's free translations should help see that he gets it. Hafiz is so beloved in Iran that he outsells the Koran. Many know his verses by heart and recite them with gusto. And gusto is appropriate to this passionate, earthy poet who melds mind, spirit, and body in each of his usually brief pensées. Ladinsky has deliberately chosen a loose and colloquial tone for this collection, which might grate on the nerves of purists but makes Hafiz come vividly alive for the average reader.

"You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare-
Don't mix them!"

he advises, and

"Bottom line:
Do not stop playing
These beautiful
Love Games."

Nothing is too human for Hafiz to celebrate, for in humanity he finds the prospect of God. In everything from housework to lovemaking, he celebrates the spiritual possibilities of life. A fine and stirring new presentation of one of the world's great poets.

Lets tackle these claims one by one, shall we?

The assertion that Hafiz outsells the Qur'ān is often tossed around. It probably isn't true, though. But I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on this one.

"Many [Iranians] know his verses by heart and recite him with gusto..."

Actually, you'd have a hard time finding an Iranian of whom this isn't true. She could have just as easily said "Almost all know..." and made an even stronger case. But the fact that she went for the weasel-wording suggests that, like Prof. Bruya, she's talking out of her ass.

"And gusto is appropriate to this passionate, earthy poet who melds mind, spirit, and body in each of his usually brief pensées."

This statement could literally apply to anyone/thing. And in any event, as is the case with Bruya, we find no indication that Monaghan knows/knew anything about Hafiz other than what the book's introductory material told her. She is eminently unqualified to comment on the quality of the translation as she does:

Ladinsky has deliberately chosen a loose and colloquial tone for this collection, which might grate on the nerves of purists but makes Hafiz come vividly alive for the average reader.

Actually, most of Hafiz' 20th century translators have gone for a somewhat colloquial tone in English. Peter Avery, Elizabeth T Gray (whose collection of Hafiz translations I have reviewed here) and most others have used a good deal of colloquial English. There is nothing new or exciting about this. (Actually, one could make a good case for not making Hafiz sound completely colloquial, but that's beside the point.) And what grates on the nerves of this purist isn't the colloquial tone, so much as the fact that THESE AREN'T TRANSLATIONS AT ALL. Both of the excerpts she cites are almost completely artless, and both contain whopping clichés. The rest of her review is more of the same sad drivel which shows that she hasn't so much as typed "Hafiz" into google.

There are other fellatious reviews like the ones mentioned above, including a ghastly blurb by Alexandra Marks of the Christian Science Monitor, a vapid specimen of ignorance by Andrew Harvey and, most preposterously, a strange pair of sentences from Coleman Barks which suggest that he hadn't read the damn thing to begin with.

Here I should mention that Parvin Loloi (one of the few scholars of Persian to actually try and describe what is really going on) in his Hâfiz, master of Persian poetry: a critical bibliography states that

Ladinsky has composed a great many texts which have clearly attracted (and perhaps even inspired) a particular audience. What is less certain is the relevance and propriety of attaching the name of Hāfiz quite so prominently to the whole exercise...while Ladinsky's "Hafiz" may have done much for Ladinsky's own standing, it is hard to see that it has done much for the memory of the persian poet

Whew. Good to know that someone at least looked at the proverbial banana peel on the floor before slipping like a doofus. Thank God for small flavors.

*******

And if, now, at the end of this long review, if you're left saying to yourself, "it's easier to tear down than to build," your point is well-taken and you're welcome to take a peek at my own Hafiz translations and see an attempt at actually communicating some of what the poems are like in Persian. Or, if you like, wait around a couple months for Dick Davis' The Faces of Love: Hafiz and the Poets of Shiraz which, if the pre-publication drafts I've seen are any indication, promises to be a refreshing moment for Hafiz in English. As a reward to you, Dear Reader, for haven gotten through this review of mine, have a look at one of Dick Davis' translations of Hafiz.

This one is a rendering of the one beginning Yārī andar kas namībīnam yārānrā che shod. While not perfect, it is (a) a solid poem, (b) solid in the same ways as the original is great and (c) actually a translation:

I see no love in anyone.
Where, then, have all the lovers gone?

And when did all our friendship end?
And what's become of every friend?

Life's water's muddied now and where
Is Khizr to guide us from despair?

The rose has lost its coloring.
What happened to the breeze of spring?

A hundred thousand flowers appear
But no birds sing for them to hear.

Thousands of nightingales are dumb.
Where are they now? Why don't they come?

For years no rubies have been found
in stony mineshafts underground.

When will the sun shine forth again?
Where are the clouds brimful of rain?

Who thinks of drinking now? No one.
Where have the roistering drinkers gone?

Now no one says "to love's to be
Enamored of life's mystery."

What's happened to our lovers who
know and delight in what is true?

This was a town of lovers once,
Of kindness and benevolence.

And when did kindness end? What brought
The sweetness of our town to naught?

The ball of generosity
Lies on the field for all to see.

No reader comes to strike it. Where
Is everyone who should be there?

Silence, Hafiz! Since no one knows
The secret ways that heaven goes,
Who is it that you're asking how
The heavens are evolving now?

Final grade: F-

Notes:

-¹- Also, I think that the same thing that happened to Ladinsky happened to me. Just as he had a dream where Hafiz spoke his lines to him in English, so I have had a dream wherein Hafiz spoke to ME in LATIN from beyond the grave. I don't know why it happened in Latin. Maybe it was because Ladinsky used the Latin etymology of "Translate" to justify his ventures. Maybe it was to jab at Ladinsky for his monolingualism, or maybe it was just for irreverence' sake. But it happened. And these were the 8 lines of ecclesiastical Latin which Hafiz, like unto a martyr, spake unto me from beyond:

Danielis fatum est in meschita mori
Proximis facticiis morientis ori
Tunc cantabant futile angelorum chori:
"Deus sit propitius huic proditori"

Istiusque codices cadent ad infernum
Unde surgent sanctius fumi ad supernam
Surgam ex sepulchro tunc, requirens tabernam,
Cantans improperio "Requiem aeternam"

Here's a literal translation:

It is Daniel's fate to perish in a mosque/ With his fetishes near to his dying mouth/ And a choir of angels shall sing in vain/ "May god have mercy on this traducer!"

Yea his very books shall fall to Gehenna's flame/ Whence their smoke, more godly, shall rise to the heavens/ Then from the grave I shall arise in search of a wine-tavern/ Singing "rest eternal" out of sheer scorn.

-²- Speaking of literary magazines, it would appear that Ladinsky hasn't published any of his "translations" in any periodical, online or in print. Most translators of collections of short lyrics "try out" isolated poems in literary journals before the book (usually, I suspect, before they had any idea for a book.) However, the only previous publication listed on the copyright page is in previous Hafiz books by Ladinsky. Wanna bet every journal rejected this joker's submissions outright?

-³- Actually, the poem which Barks is translating here (che tadbir ay musalmānān ke man khwad-rā namidānam) probably isn't authentically by Rumi as it doesn't appear in the earliest manuscripts. But that is beside the point.

-⁵- If you're curious, the only literary critic who saw this book for what it was is Murat Nemet-Nejat whose review can be found here.

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