With so many dubious ‘translations’ of Sufi poet, Hafiz — hailed by Persians as “the tongue of the Invisible” and the “interpreter of mysteries” — I’m grateful for this beautiful edition.
Thank you, to Omid Safi for recommending it, Elizabeth T Gray Jr for translating it & Steven Scholl / WHITE CLOUD PRESS for publishing it 🙏🏼
Here’s a peek between the covers:
Stain your prayer mat with wine if the Magus tells you to,
for such a traveller knows the road, and the customs of its stations...
The dark night, the fear of waves, the terrifying whirlpool,
how can they know of our state, those who go lightly along the shore?
Around thirty years earlier, as an impressionable teenager, I was struck by another book of mystical musings. The name of that book was *The Madman by Khalil Gibran (modeled after Nietzsche's infamous parable of 'the madman').
I remember finding this quote below very liberating as a young man, as it gave me permission not to conform to others' expectations of me...
I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of aloneness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
Having a Lebanese father, Lebanese philosopher-poet-painter Khalil Gibran, was a formative and inescapable influence. Reading Gibran, as a very young man, I knew next to nothing at that tender age about spirituality or mysticism, but was deeply drawn to his prayer-like poetry and art of longing.
Later, in my late teens, I would come to know that Gibran’s major influences were Blake and Nietzsche, both ecstatic visionaries in their own right, who seemed to commune with a mysterious and unseen realm, while proclaiming a form of prophecy in their work.
I would continue to grope in the dark after such wisdom literature and ineffable art– preoccupied as it was with morality, life of the spirit and, ultimately, transformation– through my twenties and thirties when I was finding my own voice as an artist and evolving as a person.
Strange to say, I don’t think I might not have written my new book, Learning to Pray without having being exposed Gibran thirty years ago…
So, what books marked you as a young reader & what are you reading, now?