Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry

Within the pantheon of world literature, the Persian poet Hafiz (born in around 1320 in the city of Shiraz) occupies an exalted position, and his poems have long been translated and studied in the West. However, the degree of the English language's interaction with the work of Hafiz has often been underestimated. Parvin Loloi's contribution has been to collect and analyse the entire body of translations of Hafiz in English and to identify the specific problems which his writing presents to translators, together with varying strategies adopted by translators to surmount these difficulties. Her book includes a comprehensive first-line index of English translations of individual poems of Hafiz: a rich resource for students of comparative literature or translation studies, which demonstrates widespread and long-established interest in one of the major poets of Persia. It points to cultural encounters which the debate on Orientalism has largely ignored and highlights a significant influence on English poets of the 19th century, including Byron and Tennyson.