About Roger Sedarat
Roger Sedarat is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and scholar. His translations of classical and contemporary Persian verse have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Brooklyn Rail, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Ghazal Games, which features original English poems in the Persian form, and Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque, winner of The Word Works Tenth Gate Prize. His recent academic publication, Emerson in Iran: the American Appropriation of Persian Poetry (SUNY Press), is the first full-length study of the seminal writer’s engagement with Persian verse and its consequent influence on the American literary tradition in the 19th century. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize for Verse Translation, he teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.
Praise for These Garden Nights, Ghazals by Hafez
Hafez’s poems are deceptively simple, plainspoken and direct. They are meant for everyone, not just the scholar or the elite. They speak of abandoning worldly temptations, of spirituality, of love and of wine: “Don’t offer mystics grape juice and sweet talk. / With pure wine they have sacred work to do.” Roger Sedarat captures in his translations the many dimensions of Hafez’s poems. Sedarat’s sensibility is clearly at one with Hafez. Both Hafez and Sedarat admonish themselves not to take themselves too seriously; yet each is “deadly” serious in his desire for enlightenment. How to live a wise and worthy life? Sedarat shares how embarking on this mystic and poetic path to wisdom can be fun. In this endeavor, it is our good fortune to have Roger Sedarat as our trusty guide.—Barbara Goldberg, Series Editor, from the Foreword
Sedarat’s translations of Hafez are like fine wine. Sip and savor them line by line. —Sholeh Wolpé, Translator of Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad and Attar’s Conference of the Birds
