Little in the life of the great Persian mystic poet Hafez (or
Hafiz) is known for certain. Various dates for his birth and death
are cited, generally between 1310-1326 and 1388-1390 respectively,
and the many stories posing as biography are mostly unverified
traditional anecdote. For all his success as a court poet, he faced
(it seems) a number of political, professional and personal
upheavals, including war, self-imposed exile, unrequited love, and
the death of his wife and son. Nonetheless, he brought to Persia’s
already mature romantic lyrical tradition perhaps the most
consummate and inventive realisation of the ghazal. In Iran, his
Divan is to be found in the majority of homes. The poetry is
recited by heart and is used in bibliomancy. Translations and
imitations of his works flourish across the world, and his tomb in
the Musalla Gardens (in Shiraz, his birthplace) is a famous site of
pilgrimage.
The book's translator Mario Petrucci was born in 1958 to Italian
parents. His collection Shrapnel and Sheets (Headland, 1996) was a
Poetry Book Society Recommendation, while Heavy Water: a poem for
Chernobyl (Enitharmon, 2004) secured the Daily Telegraph/Arvon
Prize and was made into an internationally award-winning film. i
tulips (Enitharmon, 2010) takes its name from Petrucci’s
1111-strong Anglo-American modernist sequence, of which the waltz
in my blood (Waterloo, 2011), anima (Nine Arches, 2013) and crib
(Enitharmon, 2014) are also parts. His translations include Sappho
(2008), Catullus (2006) – both with Perdika Press – and Eugenio
Montale’s Xenia (Arc, 2016), winner of a PEN Translates award. His
immense 3D poetry soundscape, Tales from the Bridge, spanned the
Thames for the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad and was shortlisted
for the Ted Hughes Award. Petrucci has held major poetry
residencies at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. He is
also an ecologist, PhD physicist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
'The challenges of translating elaborate poems from medieval Persian to modern English are legion… But Mario Petrucci takes on the task with gusto here, and is to be applauded.' – Henry Shukman, poet, novelist, Zen teacher
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