The Gift | | Author: Hafiz
Creator: Daniel Ladinsky
Publisher: Penguin Compass
Category: Book
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Rating:  87 reviews
Sales Rank: 7573
Media: Paperback
Edition: Gift
Pages: 333
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0140195815
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.5511
EAN: 9780140195811
ASIN: 0140195815
Publication Date: August 1, 1999
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Amazon.com Review
Hafiz, a secret Sufi, came to prominence in his day as a writer of love poems. That love transformed into an all-consuming passion for union with the divine. In The Gift, Daniel Ladinsky bestows on us the impassioned yet whimsical strains of Hafiz's ecstasy. Never forced or awkward, Ladinsky's Hafiz whispers in your ear and pounds in your chest, naming God in a hundred metaphors. I once asked a bird,
"How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?"
She responded,
"Love lifts
Me." Like Fitzgerald's version of Khayyam's Rubaiyat, the language of The Gift strikes a contemporary chord, resonating in the reader's mind and then in the heart. Ladinsky's language is plain, fresh, playful--dancing with an expert cadence that invites and surprises. If it is true, as Hafiz says, that a poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, reading Ladinsky's Hafiz is like gulping down the sun. --Brian Bruya
Product Description
An extraordinary new translation of the world-renowned mystic poet Hafiz.
More than any other Persian poet--even Rumi--Hafiz expanded the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Because his poems were often ecstatic love songs from God to his beloved world, many have called Hafiz the "Invisible Tongue." Indeed, Daniel Ladinsky, the accomplished translator of this volume, has said that his work with Hafiz is an attempt to do the impossible: to translate Light into words--to make the Luminous Resonance of God tangible to our finite senses.
With this stunning collection of 250 of Hafiz's most intimate poems, Ladinsky has succeeded brilliantly in translating the essence of one of Islam's greatest poetic and religious voices. Each line of The Gift imparts the wonderful qualities of this master Sufi poet and spiritual teacher: encouragement, an audacious love that touches lives, profound knowledge, generosity, and a sweet, playful genius unparalleled in world literature.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 87
 Beyond Rumi June 11, 2010
WiseWoman (Oklahoma City)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Hafiz has a gift for finding the Cosmic in the beauties of nature and the most delicate of human emotions -- and also in very mundane, ordinary-life circumstances. Sometimes he presents it all in terms as esoteric as Rumi, and sometimes with rich, earthy humor all his own; but always with a grace that delights both eye and ear. This book is truly A Gift....(pun intended).
 Spiritual and Poetic Chicanery May 27, 2010
Andrew J. Sydlik (Pittsburgh, PA United States)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Review of Daniel Ladinsky's The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Sufi Master
Spiritual and Poetic Chicanery
The most important point is that this book is NOT a book of translations of Hafez. Instead, it is a book of original poetry by Daniel Ladinsky, "inspired by" Hafez. Other reviewers have pointed this out, but obviously, this book's high rating and continued commercial success show that this is not well enough known. I purchased this for a poetry book discussion group, and now I feel ripped off. No one else there knew of this when I told them at the meeting (I only found out the day before, unfortunately), and were quite shocked. And these are people who have devoted their whole lives to poetry, including one who has done translation herself, so they're no rank amateurs. The person who suggested the book does not have Internet access, so I guess she didn't have a chance to do the research.
Ladinsky has tried to justify pawning off his own work as that of Hafiz, including his own review here, in a pathetic attempt to use a loose definition of translation and that, if it gets to a lot of people and makes people happy, what's the problem? Well, heroin and cocaine can be loosely reinterpreted as medicine (in fact people used to think it had medicinal properties), and some could say that once they become available, they become widespread and make people happy. But that don't make shooting up and snorting good things.
Ladinsky, as well Penguin (who, as far as I know, has been silent on the matter), should take responsibility for their deceitful action. And for those who try to say that Ladinsky doesn't claim to actually translate, or that Penguin went against his wishes (as he himself half-heartedly indicates): let's be clear. It says right on the cover "Translated by Daniel Ladinsky," and he has done other books saying the same thing. If it happened once, it shouldn't have happened again. Also, though he hm-haws about wanting to originally call the poems "versions," he doesn't disavow the end result, express regret or vow to work with a publisher who will be more honest in the future. No, he tries to justify his deceit by saying it is for our own good. Just like a cult leader.
If you have any doubt about this, compare Ladinsky's work with other translations of Hafez into English. You will quickly see the difference. The translations vary quite a bit stylistically--eg, Gertrude Bell's biblical-sounding 18th-century translation, Elizabeth T. Gray's more formal translation, and Thomas Rain Crowe's more colloquial translation. But the most loose translation is still very different from this.
Hafez is most known for his mastery of the ghazal, a poetic form which consists of five or more couplets, with a word or phrase from the second line of the first stanza repeated in the second line of each successive stanza. While some translators have forgone the formal structure of this form in order to attempt a more organic rhythm (such as Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn), the vestiges remain, creating the sense of an unfolding pattern, of insights unraveled. Not so with Ladinsky's verse, whose formal arrangement is quite abysmal, making frequent use of one or two word lines (which feels arbitrary rather than powerful), and line breaks that seem to have little rhyme or reason. The language is also usually simplistic, the use of metaphor awkward and often not interesting, so that from an aesthetic point of view, these could not be considered very good poems.
If there is any value here, it would have to be from a spiritual point of view. People claim, even after knowing that Ladinsky didn't actually translate these poems, that they still find the poems uplifting. Although couched in New Age style ideas, which seem rather "precious" and saccharine at times, I can see this; there is something joyous in reading poem after poem that encourages love and happiness so forcefully, and some of the verses do have a rather surprising and playful sense of humor (eg, "A Hard Decree," in which God posts a warning that those who can't find joy in life will feel the jaws of the world bite their sweet a--). The value of all this becomes problematic, pretty much ruined actually, by the knowledge that Ladinsky pretty much used Hafiz as a selling point. If these had been sold under his own name, or if it was marketed as "Inspired by" rather than "Translations of" that would be different.
It's not as though I imagine Ladinsky is completely unfamiliar with Hafez--some of the imagery and techniques in the book imply otherwise. But it is only a vague similarity; the celebration of drunkenness, the use of erotic or earthly love as a longing for God, being self-referential--these all appear in Hafez, but not quite in the ways Ladinsky renders them. Ladinsky is a bit over-the-top in his irreverence to the point of his tone actually seeming like a parody of Hafez, rather than a respectful tribute. Others have noted that the spirituality in here bears more resemblance to Zen Buddhism than Sufism, which I think has some relevance--the use of absurdity (like in "Two Giant Fat People"), the celebration of silence, seeing God in everything ("Courteous to the Ant"). Ladinsky mentions Allah (once, I think), and Muhammad a few times, but even those don't really say anything particularly interesting about Islam or Sufism, and as far as I know there aren't any references to the Quran--very different from the playful allusion to the Quran and Islamic and Zoroastrian (not referred to at all by Ladinsky) culture in the actual Hafez. So if you are looking to gleam something of Sufism from the "Sufi Master," you won't find it here.
Ladinsky talks about spending time with Meher Baba. If you look up info about Meher Baba, you will perhaps get a better idea of Ladinsky's background and influences. Meher Baba had more of a Hindu-type spirituality. I'm sorry, but the guy claimed to be an incarnation of God, and that makes me very suspicious. I only know a little of Sufism, but it seems to me even the most radical Sufi, if coming from a proper tradition, would find that to be utter blasphemy.
In conclusion, Ladinsky and Penguin should be ashamed of themselves for using the name of a greatly respected poet to sell books fraudulently. If Ladinsky were to take responsibility and try to work for a more honest output in the future, maybe he could be respected by some as a spiritual writer. But as it is, he does a disservice to himself as well as Hafez. And I am sad to think that people will not look for actual translations of Hafez, relying solely on Ladinsky's inventions, which are more accessible but not the same at all. Hafez' work deserves attention, and even the worst translation is better than no access at all--or worse yet, a fraud.
ah, to be able to read Farsi! April 18, 2010
doc peterson (Portland, Oregon USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a fan of Middle Eastern poetry in general, and Rumi specifically, Hafiz was a natural next choice to read. Like Rumi, Hafiz was a Sufi, and like Rumi he wrote in Farsi. The similarities continue in a commonality in theme and tone: both celebrate and find the divine in the everyday and mundane details so often overlooked by those of us who tend to get caught up in the (ultimately) trivial matters of daily life.
Hafiz, though, seems more overtly "religious" in his poety - the references in this collection are more explicit and clear in their religious grounding. Whether this is a function of the translator or the intent of the poet, I am unable to tell. Depending on one's temperment and attitude, this may be either a good thing or a bad thing - take from it what you will. The poems that I enjoyed the most were those that were more open-ended: perhaps there is a religious implication (almost certainly there is), but there is also an element of the romantic and deeply personal in it as well. For example, in "Needing a Mirror", Hafiz (through Ladinsky) writes,
Your / Eye / Is so wise
It keeps turning, turning/ Needing to touch / Beauty
It keeps turning/ Needing to find a mirror
That / Will caress you / As I.
There is a playfulness to the collection, and a creativity and uniqueness of metaphor that I just don't find in Western poetry. Regardless of wether this is the art of the poet or the skill of the translator, I enjoyed the collection. Four stars for it not being in the original. (A star deducted on general principle of translation.)
How shameless can you get? November 2, 2009
A. Z. F. (Chicago, Il)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Several Amazon folk have asked me to jump into the Ladinsky debate and comment on what Ladinsky is doing and whether his work is worth reading. So let me come right out and say that Dan Ladinsky's book is perhaps the most inexcusably excruciating book bearing the name "translation" I have ever had the displeasure to read. This review will indeed be about the book, but it will also be an act of revenge for what I went through while reading it. It is a culturally narcissistic, colossally unintelligent act of literary charlatanry which derives its success largely from exploiting (and grossly perpetuating) some of the most shameful traits of the American public: ignorance of Islam and Islamic languages, unbridled consumerism, poor literary sensibility, New Age tripe and shallow thinking.
Normally, my online reviews of translations take the translation in question and then compare parts of it to the original (I do not do reviews of translations whose original language I am not competent in.) However, in the case of Ladinsky's work, this is just not possible because there really *aren't any* originals being translated! Ladinsky's passages do not correspond to anything Hafiz wrote in Persian. At all. I'm not a Hafiz scholar, but by now I have read probably a couple thousand lines of Hafiz' poetry in Persian, and know a good bit of it by heart. I'm not saying this just to brag. My point is that, given this, as I perused the volume, I could reasonably have expected to at least recognize *some* of what Ladinsky was translating. I didn't.
And it's not that these translations are just so free that I didn't recognize which Persian text they corresponded to. For example, Coleman Barks' Rumi translations (to which Ladinsky's work is often unjustly compared) and Edward FitzGerald's versions of Omar Khayyam (which are often misguidedly underrated by modern critics and scholars) are both very free and sometimes take incredible liberties with the original Persian. But, although they often leave me wondering what original Persian lines they're supposed to be translating, EVEN THEY don't disfigure the text so consistently that I never once recognize a single line, poem or stanza as corresponding to any specific counterpart in the original. The closest you get with Ladinsky is the occasional Hafiz-like motif or image, usually so vague it could probably refer to any one of a few dozen original Persian lines. If Ladinsky has, as he implies, taken literal translations and just rephrased the message contained therein so as to make it accessible to a modern audience, then the Spice Girls' "If you wanna be my lover" is just a more accessible retelling of Shakespeare's sonnet 116 because, after all, they're both about love, kinda. That's not hyperbole. The difference in quality and subject really is about that vast.
This brings me to the second part of why this book is so diesel-chuggingly bad. The poetry contained is at best slightly-above-mediocre, and at worst it sounds like a sixth grade choirboy writing something because his English teacher made him. Take a look here:
Where is the door to God?
In the sound of a barking dog,
In the ring of a hammer,
In a drop of rain,
In the face of
Everyone
I see.
Upon reading these lines, a friend of mine said: "I wrote better poetry in kindergarten, and I suck at poetry." Telling the reader you're about to say something profound and then listing a bunch of clichés (thereby leaving it up to the gullible reader to imbue the text with something that wasn't even there just to justify the its existence) is not poetry. It's something to be ashamed of. This "eastern" pseudo-mystical Sensei schtick is not at all Hafizian, Persian, Sufi or even Islamic. It is utterly contemporary, utterly American, and utterly ubiquitous among "spiritual" poets today who want to sound profound but don't really want to put forth a true artistic effort, and so have to play the sage: "God is everywhere!" this poem says tritely. Whoop-dee-doo, Mr. Ladinsky, your readers never heard *that* one every other day at Sunday-school!
Or take another sample:
Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a better
Job.
If this is Hafiz "revealing God with a billion IQ" as Ladinsky says in the introduction, then John Donne or George Herbert must have a God-IQ of a billion quadrillion each. What this is is bad allegory with even worse line-breaks, which the editor of any literary magazine (even in shoddy days like these) could only respond to with rejection and pity1. Seriously, readers of this review, please let me know if you find anything in the above-mentioned lines that could be anything other than an enjambed fortune-cookie.
Speaking of literary magazines, it would appear that Ladinsky hasn't published any of his "translations" in any periodical, online or in print. Most translators of collections of short lyrics "try out" isolated poems in literary journals before the book (usually, I suspect, before they had any idea for a book.) However, the only previous publication listed on the copyright page is in previous Hafiz books by Ladinsky. Wanna bet every journal rejected this joker's submissions outright?
Anyway, as if all this weren't horrid enough, that isn't all the ways in which this book fails. It also fails because Ladinsky, like so very many others, fundamentally misapprehends the nature of medieval Persian poetry in general, and of Hafiz in particular. He is under the impression that Hafiz was primarily a Sufi poet (à la Rumi) because many of the poems can be read as a kind of mystical code. The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated than that. Mysticism was, for a variety of reasons, seen as ipso facto poetic during Hafiz' time, so much so that the lyrical and mystical traditions had essentially fused into one. A Persian lyric poet of Hafiz's era *could not but* write poetry with a flavor of Sufism to it anymore than a Renaissance sculptor could show anything other than an idealized version of his subject.
For this reason among others, to call Hafiz a "Sufi Master" as this book's title does makes little sense. It is about as ludicrous as assuming a Renaissance sculptor must have only kept the company of attractive people because his sculptures only depict their subjects as having ideal bodies (when, of course, in reality, that was simply the result of the artistic tradition, not of the artist's own tastes or experience.) This misunderstanding of Ladinsky's is compounded by the fact that he uses H. Wilberforce Clarke's literal translation of Hafiz as a jumping-off point for his own work. Although Ladinsky seems to be under the outlandish impression (in the introduction) that Clarke's version is "the most respected English translation of Hafiz," the truth is actually football fields away from that notion. Clarke's versions are regarded by modern scholarship as absurd if not irrelevant in terms of the "mystical" commentary supplied liberally on every page in the "vast footnotes" which Ladinsky admits to using as fodder for his project. In fact, the poet-scholar Dick Davis has referred to Clarke's work as "goofy-Sufi."
In short: do not buy this book if you do not want to contribute to the cause of a swindler and bad poet.
Hafiz October 1, 2009
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Such a lovely book, i had to buy it because of a class, and i find myself reading the poems everyday, not just during my class. The book was in good conditions, and it was interesting when i got it because there was an Ace of Diamonds card inside the book. Just awsome.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 87
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