Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

In 1995 The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz, Ms. Gray’s translations of Hafiz, was published by White Cloud Press. In the years since the translations have been favorably reviewed in both academic and literary circles. Working in collaboration with Iraj Anvar, a scholar and translator of Persian classical poetry, this 30^th Anniversary edition includes an additional thirty ghazals not included in the original edition, and offers the Persian text en face for each ghazal. It includes updated and revised introductory material and notes, as well as the full text of Daryush Shayegan’s essay “The Visionary Topography of Hafiz.”

Available December 2024.

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as translator Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, “remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms.”

In the foreword to her book-length poem Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.”