The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door - by Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

The great Persian poet Hafez is so beloved in Iran that almost every family there keeps his Divan close at hand. For some fifteen years, esteemed American poet and author Robert Bly has worked with the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn to produce this translation, which for the first time captures Hafez's nimbleness, his fierce humor, his astonishing range of thought, and his delight in love--enabling English speakers to fully appreciate the true genius of this master of the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry.

Review Quotes

"Bly, like other giants of poetic activism . . . has not been content to merely live his times. He has actively challenged them, and his muse, far from abandoning him, has stood steadfastly . . . at his side." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

"For more than fifty years Robert Bly has been exploring the poetry of other languages, cultures, ages, in order to reach past the inherited conventions of poetry in English which he grew up with in mid-century." - African Sun Times

"This is an amazingly meaningful translation of Hafiz's poetry that I deeply appreciate. . . . Having understood the original text in both its technical and non-technical senses, they have presented us with a translation shorn of jargon." - --Baha al-Din Khurramshahi, author of Hafiznama, a two-volume Persian commentary on Hafez's poetry, Tehran, Iran

"The medieval Persian mystical poet Hafez used sinuous lines and ringing metaphors to write about wisdom, the dangers of repression and the paradoxes of his faith. His blend of simplicity and challenge makes him the most popular poet in Iran today. Bly and Lewisohn (a world-class Sufism expert) present clear and memorable versions of Hafez's renowned lyric meditations. . . . Though Hafez does not (yet) have the immense Western popularity of that other Sufi mystic, Rumi, his verse has all the ingredients to make a similar splash." - Publishers Weekly