Prelude : The Backstory
CONSTRUCTING A manuscript is a journey of discovery & wonder – beginning long before writing the initial capital letter of the first word – & hardly over in marking the last period at the end of the final sentence. Indeed, now that it’s out ~ & I’m outside of it, so to speak ~ the discovery & wonderment continues.
I’ve taken my vows, commencing a course of lifelong study of the book’s influences & meanings in my life. If I never publish another book, I know in my heart I have tasted the sweetest of fruits ripened within the fragrant flowers at the uppermost branches of the tallest of trees with my own two lips.
You are now reading the initial page for the book, which has now become its antechamber. When you’re ready, please proceed to what’s now the book’s primary web site, with extracts, interviews, reviews, a sampler of the range of what Hafez sounds like, from spoken to sung, media talking points, etc.
If you wish to linger here a moment longer, here’s my recollection as to where this all began … & how it coalesced …
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So, there I was — pounding the pavement (in my sandals), knocking on doors of publishers, with a query letter and proposal for The Book of Absence, a translation collaboration between Erfan Mojib and me. Publishing veteran Greg Brandenburgh had once tapped me to endorse a book of his, so he was on my list. He said, “No thank you – but … ” … and asked if we might be interested in translating Hafez.* At Hampton Roads he’d recently brought forth 3 excellent editions of Rumi**, translated by Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin in their new Little Book of … series [ Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Sufi stories, Kahlil Gibran, Meister Eckhart (translated as poetry), and so on ].
I was honored yet also aware of the legendary untranslatability of Hafèz. And yet, as poet Robert Kelly once put it, every language is a second language. I relayed the invitation to collaborator in iiterary translation Erfan Mojib. A couple of days later, he showed me some pages from a Persian edition of Hafiz by renowned filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. There, he’d isolate a single line, as if a close-up, then edited the line into several lines of a poem unto itself. Kiarostami also likened these to text messages. We tried a couple & Hampton Roads agreed they looked good. So it began.
From this seed, it took shape through further collaboration on a few levels. Erfan & I shared 1) a GoogleDoc which we’d visit together with 2_ GoogleDuo (now GoogleMeet). The combination of the two turned out to be like lightning in a bottle. When we had a manuscript, we then showed it to Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. and Iraj Anvar, for vetting the Persian, a second realm of collaboration. A third collaboration occurred when it came time to transform manuscript into print. Zoom became medium of choice as typographer-poet-painter-dancer Kathryn Sky-Peck fine-tuned the typography with us page-by-page. Last but not least, Ari Honarvar graced the book with the great honor of her words of introduction, may the merit of her kind blessings return upon her in myriad ways.
To draw you further inside the creative process, earlier on, we faced a challenging problem to solve during the selling of the manuscript. When our publisher approved of our initial samples, they stipulated we couldn’t turn in a manuscript with only one poem per page, as Abbas Kiarostami had done. So we agreed on two organizational principles :
- to group the poetry within five categories ( we called them Gardens, after Rumi’s Little Book of Life, also from Hampton Roads )
- to let the poems dictate their placement on the page.
The five gardens ~ of the world, wine, love, wisdom, and ecstasy ~ unfold as a spiritual journey, particular to Sufism.
The matter of placement of multiple poems per page sparked in two further creative vectors :
- development within and across the garden sequences drew upon on musical forms ~ in this case, aspects of rhythmic and harmonic development heard in classical Persian music. This links in to how Hafez’s lyric poetry are literally lyrics ~ to be sung. [ Samples of both are found in the book’s primary website. ]
- Abbas Kiarostami prefaced his edition with a quote from poet Arthur Rimbaud [ 1854–1891 ] : ” One must be absolutely modern.” In keeping with that spirit of Modernism, we drew from the revolution of 1897 by poet Stephane Mallarmé [ 1842–1898 ], transforming the book as a reading device [ & poetry as phallic columns ] into book as a spiritual instrument [ & poetry as dynamic shapes ]. The springboard for doing so was the abolition of the book’s physical gutter as marking a division ~ instead making verso & recto ( left-hand & right-hand pages ) a single unit.***
What it now is – is – up to you.
Please, enjoy !
