A Great Need

Contemporary American poet Daniel Ladinsky wrote “A Great Need” after allegedly receiving directions in a dream of 14th-century Persian poet Hafez. In his 1999 book The Gift, he says that “I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to his ‘artists and seekers’” (Ladinsky, Daniel. “Preface.” The Gift: Poems. Penguin, 1999. pp. 6-7).

The Gift, which includes “A Great Need,” was not Ladinsky’s first work involving Hafez. Ladinsky published I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz and The Subject Tonight Is Love: Sixty Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz in 1996. While Ladinsky states that he set out to translate Hafez’s work from its original Farsi/Persian, he found it difficult since he did not speak the language. Instead, he states that most of his “renderings” come from studying H. Wilberforce Clarke’s 1891 English translation and Hafez’s life:

My goal is to bring across, right into your lap, the wondrous spirit of Hafiz […] I believe the ultimate gauge of success is this: Does the text free the reader? Does it contribute to our physical and emotional health? Does it put ‘golden tools’ into our hands that can help excavate the Beloved whom we and society have buried so deep? (Ladinsky, Daniel.