Your Lover's Beloved Author:Hafez, Mahmood Karimi-Hakak and Bill Wollak, Translators A bilingual (Persian-English) classical poetry edition. The poetry of Hafez is pleasing, magical wine that allows you to become exactly as drunk as you desire every time you taste it. Whether the transport you seek is the frenzy of wild intoxication or merely the slightest unleashing of inhibitions, Hafez is the master of magnaminity, tamer of t... more »ensions, initiator of intimacy, and mentor of the unconventional. But always, Hafez is the poet who investigates the confusing contingencies of human relationships. He understands how desire urges us along an uncertain path. Hafez lives on the lips of illliterates, in the singing of professional entertainers, as well as in the tomes of specialists. His poems are emergencies. They startle, confound, yet resonate. Reading Hafez is like suddenly hearing an ambulance siren over your shoulder in a crowded street or the whispered advice of your best friend in your ear alone. The translation abounds with beautifully wrought and complexly conceived images. And this, to my mind, highlights the unique achievement of this particular set of translations. Not only is the language exquisitely wrought, but the profundity of Hafez's mystical insights are equally well-wrought. This is not an easy feat when translating from Persian to English. --Phillip Cioffari The colloquial and accessibile voice Hakak and Wolak tease out of these ghazals reveals the poet to be passionate, rebellious, and unerringly drunk with the kind of desire only found in Shakespeare's sonnets, or the best of Shelley or Keats. . . . The emphasis in these translations, however, has been on the quality of language as it makes the transition to English, and on the essential Hafezian voice. Hafez, the lover and seeker of the sublime, comes out in lines which speak personally and immediately. --Naton Leslie Karimi-Hakak and Wolak combine the 'correctness' of literal translation from the original language and the effective rendering of the sensibility of the poet as he confronts the universal realities of experience: love, heartbreak, death, injustice, momentary joys. Hafez has something to say about all of these and more, and his work juxtaposes a philosophical focus with a heightened sensuality in a manner which readers today can readily enjoy. --Maria Bennett« less