Customer Reviews

Book of the Winebringer

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The masnavi is the longer, freer cousin of the more constrained ghazal. It can be virtually unlimited in length and rhyms AABBCC. Hafez has only a handful masnavies compared to his nearly 500 ghazals. Two of them are well known to native speakers: "the wild deer" and "the winebringer," the first one even put to song by a popular pop singer.

Smith does an admirable job of catching the essence, as well as the music and lyricism, of these gems. Smith's Winebringer is as easy to the ears, and as fluid, as the original. He achieves this by clever usage of vocabulary while maintaining constant line-length and rhyming scheme so essential to the form. I highly recommend this delightful volume.

Winebringer, come. That liquid that all cares burns;
That if a lion drinks, into a burner of forests turns,

Give, so to the sky that captures the lion I can go;
So the care, this tired old world, I can overthrow.