Divan-e Hafez
The most revered poet of the Persian language. His Divan still sits in Iranian homes as an oracle, opened at random for guidance. Hafez's ghazals manage simultaneously to be wine songs, mystical allegories, and love poems without resolving the ambiguity; that irreducible multiplicity is their genius. Goethe said reading Hafez made him feel like a student.
Hafez may be close to untranslatable, and reviewers say as much: one calls him “even more untranslatable than your average old, foreign-language poet,” warning that forcing the ghazal's strict rhyme into English often “comes across as goofy and childish.” A two-star review of the Dick Davis translation goes further, accusing him of overselecting for “vulgarity and pederasty” and pushing a secularizing agenda that undercuts Hafez's religious standing. Because that same volume anthologizes Hafez alongside two other Shiraz poets, some readers feel the Hafez portion gets crowded rather than given room on its own. One reader working from a poem-only edition without Persian says plainly that any translation stays a compromise, since “it doesn't feel like really understanding.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
