I thought I’d share an Iranian’s view of this.

As a Persian-British person myself that comes from Shiraz (where you can find Hafez’s mausoleum and where I obtained an English translation – Hafez is notoriously difficult for even native speakers), I see it as a form of erasure that he claims to have translated Hafez, when he does not understand Farsi. The front cover of The Gift literally states this, even though he has himself said that his poetry was not the same as Hafez’s. I had heard that he used a different translation and then wrote based on that translation and his dream before as well actually. No matter the case though, it is still incredibly disrespectful to almost write over Hafez’s works.

Whilst I understand so many people enjoying his works, I do tend to get frustrated that someone taking up valuable space that is incredibly small for translations of ‘non-western’ literature is not even capable of doing so. There is very little room in the classics sections for these and for someone that is from ‘the West’ (its in quotation marks because that term has never made sense to me – the Earth is a sphere, after all) to take up that limited room is incredibly frustrating. He has also stolen the opportunity from many people to experience Hafez’s true poetry, as unlike yourself, not everyone will find out what has happened, and will continuously quote his works, exacerbating the effects of his overwriting.

My feelings on this become worse when I see quotes of his saying in an interview in 2013 ‘Is it Hafez or Danny? I don’t know. Does it really matter?’. This is also something that is repeated by others that enjoyed and leads to a dismissive attitude by others in relation to other cultures. The fact is that so many books hold historical context and for Hafez, there are themes of Islam, Divinity and love during his times. They tell everyone of the kinds of lives that were lived and hold some cheeky political commentary as well. These are not present in Ladinsky’s works (he instead uses mysticism that is more similar to Hinduism and adds mentions of Christ which Hafez would not). There is also no use of one major component of Hafez’s poetry which are his ghazals (sonnet-like poems with five to fifteen couplets). Therefore, whilst Ladinsky’s works are inspired by and in very loose terms, resemble Hafez, in many ways, they are not at all similar, and paint an incorrect picture of Persia at the time. He has used 14th century Persia and a major poet of Persia to basically sell his own poetry since the name is part of the allure. I understand that he had his dream, but that doesn’t justify his use of the name. I do wonder how his own poetry would’ve faired had he published it under his own name and merely mentioned Hafez as one of his inspirations in the preface. There are admittedly so many people that love Ladinsky’s works but his methods of spreading his works are terrible. In summary, they wipe both Hafez’s identity as well as his own.

Hafez himself is known to have influenced many authors and poets including Goethe, Yeats, Emerson and Tagore outside of Iran for example. Had any of these been ‘translated’ in the same manner as Ladinsky does (as a previous comment mentions), there would be greater outrage. As they also mentioned ‘arrogance’, I’d like to say that Ladinsky’s treatment of someone that is put on a similar pedestal in Iran to Shakespeare in anglophone nations is clearly arrogance on an individual level. I won’t comment on the idea of arrogance of ‘the West’ because that is a different question and would require looking at the treatment of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ literature within ‘Western’ countries, and the answer would certainly be much more complicated than a yes or no. (We’d also have to look at the opposite as well and factor in nationalism and society at the time as well as effects of imperialism of all kinds around the world – it would be fascinating but a much wider view would need to be taken and it would take ages).

Gosh, sorry! This is an incredibly long and scattered comment (I apologise if anything comes off the wrong way) but personally, I am outraged and frustrated. Not only has doing something like this undermined his own and Hafez’s works as well as the representation of Persian culture in the 14th century, to me, it makes me ask if I can trust any translation of any book.

Anyhoo, if you’d like to read actual translations of Hafez, I suggest looking at academics and scholars such as Professor Dick Davis, Peter Avery (awarded the Farabi Prize for his translation) or Gertrude Bell.

Zoe:
That’s a really good point about Chaucer and Shakespeare. A friend and I considered doing a feminist interpretations of Ladinsky channeling Hafiz. I think most assume the translations are language translations. Knowing that wasn’t exactly true very much changed my feeling about the translations. Cis