A Year With Hafiz, Daily Contemplations, by Daniel Ladinsky
(New York: Penguin Books, 2010) Reviewed by Laurent Weichberger, December 18, 2011 I am sitting at my home in Boulder, Colorado having just spent a week with the Persian spiritual master, and great poet, Hafiz. I had just returned from spending a week with my family in Arizona, and found Hafiz waiting for me upon arrival at my new home in Boulder. The long awaited new book, A Year With Hafiz, Daily Contemplations, by Danny Ladinsky is structured as a one poem per day journey, so that you can open it to the day you are living through, or any date that’s meaningful (such as a birthday), and revel in the associated wisdom. I decided to read a poem a day for an entire week before writing about this new volume. Danny has come a long way from that first volume of translations, The Subject Tonight is Love, Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz back in the early 90s. When that book came out, I knew that Danny’s inspired work was to be the flute music, the breath of life, making Hafiz truly accessible for the Western reader. It was a fresh approach, and Danny stood on the shoulders of Barks, and other great adventurers in the epic struggle to translate what even Meher Baba and other great masters said was almost impossible to translate properly from the subtleties of Persian.
And this, “Anyone you have made love with, it is because you were really looking for God.” Ain’t that the truth we don’t like to hear, that every romantic affair is nothing but a desperate search for the divine? Then this, “We circle inside what we love, what we fear, what we hope. The mind is like a falcon ever ready with its sight on its choice prey – beauty. For nothing satisfies like Her taste. A holy infant, taken from God’s womb, is each creature.” Hafiz sees past the ragged surface of each one of us, like the Arch Mage he really is, to help us realize our own inherent divinity. I have traveled around the world, and been in many airports and coffee shops, talking to Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Sufis, and Hindus… as well as atheists and agnostics, and all of them seem to be reading Hafiz, and loving it. They are more inspired by Hafiz in English than their own scriptures these days. Would they have been so thrilled with Henry Wilberforce-Clarke’s 1891 renditions? Of course not. Chapeau, Danny, your work for Hafiz has arrived in all its glory, and when the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him and his family) said, “God has treasures beneath the Throne, the keys to which are the tongues of poets,” I am certain he counted you among them.
I remember reading his next Hafiz book, I Heard God Laughing, and I fell into a nap while reading it on a summer afternoon. I dreamed that I was explaining to someone about Hafiz, but I couldn’t quite find the words to express his greatness. To fully get my point across I pretended to BE Hafiz, and suddenly I started to become filled with infinite bliss! I woke up with the book on my chest, in a state of bliss. So, Danny has taken on the job of translating bliss into the most unromantic of languages, English, God bless him. Of course we will forgive him for using phrases that Hafiz would never have uttered, like “Love kicks the ass of time and space.” To give you a sample of my week with Hafiz, here is how my days started here: “There is an invisible sun we long to see. The closer you get to the present, the brighter and more real it will become, even at midnight.” Anyone who has played on the floor with a five year old child knows about that sun.
Cyprus and Laurent at home, Jan. 2012
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