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    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez

    By Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    One of our most acclaimed poets brings the work of the great Persian mystic and poet, Hafez, to a new audience.

    There is no poet in our tradition who carries the amount of admiration and devotion that the Persians have for Hafez. Children learn to sing Hafez poems in the third grade, and almost every family has a copy of the collected Hafez on the dining room table. Robert Bly and the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn have worked for 15 years on this book of Hafez, the first that carries into English his nimbleness, his outrageous humor, his defenses of the private life in the face of the fundamentalists, and the joy of his love poems. He writes in the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry. This is Rumi’s wild younger brother, now brought into an English that makes his genius visible.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061971099
    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
    Author

    Robert Bly

    ROBERT W. BLY is the Director of the Center for Technical Communication, a consulting firm that specializes in business communication and marketing. He has been a copywriter and consultant for more than twenty years, and is the author of more than forty-five books.

    Read more from Robert Bly

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    • 4/5
      Oh, to be a "rind" - the inspired libertine, genius by nature, wise through study, beloved by God, and lover of creation and pursuer of beauty! I don't know why Islamic mysticist poems about love and wine and nature strike a chord in my heart, but presumably it is the combination of an appreciation for a lack of formality, immense erudition, and a love of this world (because of God!). Even in English translation (and what a translation - 30 ghazals worked over 15 years!) they work, and I wonder not why Hafez is to be found in nearly every Iranian household.

    Book preview

    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door - Robert Bly

    The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door

    Thirty Poems of Hafez

    Translated by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn

    Contents

    Some Thoughts on Hafez—Robert Bly

    PART I

    How Blame Has Been Helpful

    My Cloak Stained with Wine

    The Night Visit

    The World Is Not All That Great

    A Thousand Doorkeepers

    Do Not Sink into Sadness

    The Pearl on the Ocean Floor

    The Lost Daughter

    Say Good-bye. It Will Soon Be Over.

    The Man Who Accepts Blame

    PART II

    The Wine Made Before Adam

    Conversation with the Teacher

    Gabriel’s News

    One Rose Is Enough

    Reaping Wheat

    The Green Heaven

    What Do We Really Need?

    The Angels at the Tavern Door

    Deciding Not to Go to India

    The Wind in Solomon’s Hands

    PART III

    Reciting the Opening Chapter

    Become a Lover

    The Dust of the Doorway

    Gobbling the Sugar of Dawn Sleep

    About Destitute Lovers

    The One Who Remains Disgraced

    The Guesthouse with Two Doors

    Some Advice

    A Glass of Wine

    On the Way to the Garden

    Hafez and His Genius—Leonard Lewisohn

    Notes on Hafez and His Genius

    Abbreviations to Reference Works on Hafez’s Poetry

    Notes to the Ghazals

    About the Translators

    Other Books by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Some Thoughts on Hafez

    BY ROBERT BLY

    MOST OF THE THINKING poems we admire by Wordsworth or Wallace Stevens proceed in a gentlemanly way down the page, and we all love that. But Hafez’s poems move in a jagged manner. Encouraged by the ghazal form, which asks for a poem to begin again with each stanza, Hafez constantly interrupts his own flow of thought in a way unusual to us. A stanza on the glory of the countryside in spring will be followed by an aggressive attack on fundamentalists in the next stanza, and that followed by a stanza hoping for the door of mercy to be opened.

    One has to be light on one’s feet to read a Hafez poem all the way through. A poem of his might begin in some pre-historical time, before the creation of human beings, and that would lead directly to a description of Muhammad as a fisherman with a net or to a complaint that Hafez is wasting his life.

    Hafez gives out a hundred blessings each time he lays out a poem. He tells secrets of the inner life, praises wine, and describes the gorgeous complications of certain poems written long before his.

    Something in the opulence of his language reminds us of Andrew Marvell; something in his swiftness reminds us of the young Shakespeare. Beyond these, we sense some ability to leap that many of us have never experienced before. He says:

    No one has ever seen your face, and yet a thousand

    Doorkeepers have arrived. You are a rose still closed,

    And yet a hundred nightingales have arrived.

    Hafez often teaches the poets to write about the world before this one. He praises the taverns inside Shiraz, the fields outside, the upper lips of beautiful women, the charm of wine and conversation, and the beauty of young men or young women. But always he wants us to remember

    The pearl that was never inside the shell of space and time.

    And we as a people are so used to being inside space and time, inside boring sermons and bad streets, that when we ask others about the pearl, we tend to inquire from people lost at the ocean’s edge, in other words, from people like us.

    But he says there is someone called the tavern master, who knows a lot. He is hinting here at the old Zoroastrian religion, which was the religion in Iran before the Muslims came. He asks:

    Last night at the tavern,

    When I was drunk and ruined, what glad news

    Did Gabriel bring from the invisible world?

    Since our natural home is Paradise, he turns to the reader and asks:

    Your perch is on the lote tree in Paradise,

    Oh wide-seeing hawk, what are you doing

    Crouching in this mop closet of calamity?

    He is not going to be overly cheerful with us:

    Let the nightingale

    Lover cry. Cry on. This is a place of wailing.

    The English that we use in poetry now has unfortunately lost much of the moxie, fierceness, and complicated beauty that was in English at the time of Shakespeare, and so, in order to be fair to Hafez, we ought to reach for some romantic, complicated, or unusual words. But we usually fail.

    We have to be clear that much has been lost in these translations. We can mourn over that, but translating them ten more times probably wouldn’t do any good.

    Don’t allow your inward being to be hurt by what

    You have or have not. Be glad, because every

    Perfect thing is on its way to nonexistence.

    Part I

    Part I

    356

    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

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