AN EVENING WITH HAFIZ OF SHIRAZ
with Elizabeth Gray, Iraj Anvar, & Afshin Goodarzi
Friday, April 4, 2025 / 8:00 pm
Admission: $45
Early-bird tickets ($35) available till March 31st
The ghazals of Khwája Muhammad Shams ud-Din Háfiz-i Shírází (d. 1389), the pre-eminent lyric poet of Persian literature, speak of love, human and divine. So finely do they hover on this interface with the divine that he is known as “The Interpreter of Mysteries” and “The Tongue of the Invisible.” His poems speak to each individual heart, and they continue to be recited and sung by people throughout the Eastern Islamic world: scholars and bus drivers, writers and performers, school children and Sufis.
On this special evening we will be celebrating the publication of the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwán of Háfiz. Hafiz’s ghazals will be sung and recited in English and Persian, accompanied by classical Persian and Western musicians, in an intimate evening gathering at the Dergah al-Farah. The evening will feature English translations of Hafiz by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. and Iraj Anvar, and classical Persian music performed by Afshin Goodarzi.
PERFORMERS
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. Her translated selection of poems by Iran’s iconic woman poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions) was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her books of poetry include After the Operation (Four Way Books), the long poem, Salient (New Directions), and the sequence of poems, Series | India (Four Way Books). Her work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Hyperallergic, Little Star, Talisman, The Harvard Review, The New England Review, Antaeus, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She has served as guest poetry editor of Epiphany and The New Haven Review. Gray is also the founding CEO and managing partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC. She serves on the boards of World Poetry, Flood Editions, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. From 2009-2015 served as chair of the board of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in New Haven, CT. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in New York City. www.etgrayjr.com
Iraj Anvar is an actor, singer, stage and film director, writer, translator, and educator. He completed his first diploma in Genoa, Italy at the Swiss School, then gained a degree in acting and directing at Alessandro Fersen’s Studio di Arti Sceniche in Rome, Italy. On returning to his native Tehran, he co-founded the Tehran Theater Workshop. He directed and performed in many stage and television productions, and translated plays and film dialogue into Persian, including plays he directed for the stage. He also taught acting and diction at Tehran University. A few months before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Anvar moved to New York City, where he received his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU, where he taught Persian language and literature for several years. He directed From Kaf Mountain to Vernon (2002), a documentary film about an Abkazanian community in Vernon, British Columbia, and published his translations of works by Genet, Pirandello, Adamov, and others in Iran. In addition to his collaborations with Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., he created the English subtitles for the Oscar-nominated film, Children of Heaven (1998). He has taught Persian literature and language at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the University of Wisconsin. In 2008, he established a Persian program at Brown University, where he also taught a course on Iranian cinema. He has had a lifelong involvement in the poetry of Rumi, Háfiz, and Ferdowsi. In New York, he has read and sung Rumi, Háfiz, and other classical poets in Persian and in his own translations at the Asia Society, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Bartholomew’s Church, the Long House Preserve Garden, the Bowery Poetry Club, Stony Brook and New York Universities, and several other institutions. His translations of Rumi ghazals include Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz, Forty-Eight Ghazals, (Semar) and Rumi: Say Nothing (Morning Light Press). A third set of Rumi’s poetry in English translation, Birds of Wonder, is forthcoming.
Afshin Goodarzi has been an avid student of Iranian classical music for over 25 years. He started his studies of the Iranian Setar with Reza Derakhshani and has continued to study the Radif and its performance over the past 20 years. Afshin Goodarzi has performed and lectured at numerous venues throughout the northeast.