Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses

Chapter 2: NOTE

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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sonnets and short poems ranging from intimate meditations to more formal exercises. Many pieces probe impermanence, longing, and the pursuit of beauty, alternating quiet elegies on loss and weariness with assertions of resilience, desire, and contemplative rest. The final sequence adapts and reimagines Persian odes, evoking Hafez’s spirit rather than literal translation. Poetic forms shift between sonnet-like structures and freer lyrics, unified by musical diction, images of nature and wandering, and a tone that balances elegiac restraint with vivid sensory detail.

NOTE

The last fifteen pieces in this book, which are founded on odes of Hafez, are not translations. Their aim is rather to convey if possible something of the original spirit than to give a faithful rendering of either thought or form; & I have not scrupled to omit, insert, alter or even deliberately to pervert the idea as fancy or feeling dictated. Some of the poems follow the Persian fairly closely (especially nos. 30, 31, 34, & 35); others are merely founded on or suggested by one or two couplets.

No. 4 was suggested by a Persian dialect quatrain by Baba Tahir.

The remainder are original.

E. B.

Chilswell,

Sept. 1920.

A. A. D.