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The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz, 30th Anniversary Edition

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Háfiz (d. 1389) was the greatest of all Persian poets, called the “Tongue of the Invisible” and the “Interpreter of Mysteries.” His command of the lyric ghazal’s traditional imagery and themes blends eroticism, mysticism, and panegyric into verse of unsurpassed beauty.

Originally published in 1995, this expanded bi-lingual edition includes the Persian originals and brilliant English translations of eighty of Hafiz’s most important ghazals. This authoritative edition also includes an Introduction and Afterword as well as extensive notes to the poems and a Selected Bibliography.

Praise for The Green Sea of Heaven:

“Achieves the almost impossible, rendering the virtually untranslatable Hafiz into beautiful and accurate poetry. There are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering ‘versions’ that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said. Elizabeth Gray offers us something different: poetic translations rooted in close readings of the original Persian, developed in consultation with a native speaker scholar.”

Omid Safi
Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University

Author of Memories of Muhammad and Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition

“This is a groundbreaking work, one that places the ghazal of Hafiz into a contemporary English poetic idiom. After too long a wait, we encounter Hafiz, come alive in an English style that is at once natural and intricate. This is a remarkable achievement.”

Michael Sells
 John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature in the Divinity School and in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago

Author of Mystical Languages of Unsaying and Approaching the Quran

“These are truly remarkable and moving translations: the first English versions of Hafiz to read as poetry while still capturing the unique qualities of concision, multivalent meaning and spiritual depth which have for centuries made his Persian ghazals the acknowledged masterpiece and exemplar of poetic art throughout the Eastern Islamic world.”

James W. Morris
 Professor of Islamic Studies in the Theology Department and Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College

Author of The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ‘Arabī’s "Meccan Illuminations” and From the Qur’an to the Islamic Humanities

“Translating the untranslatable Hafiz is a most daunting project, one that Gray and Anvar have accomplished with considerable literary sensibility, grounded in their solid scholarly reading of the original Persian. These approachable, skilful English renderings will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Hafiz in the context of his medieval Muslim world.”

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford

Author of Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth-century Iran

Interview from Sufism: An Inquiry (2024)

View full issue of Sufism: An Inquiry

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