Shop for Music
About the Composer
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander (Seafarer Press)
A Love Like That (medium voice)
A tender ballad of unconditional love.
-
A Love Like That
-
A Love Like That
-
A Love Like That: Songs of Unconditional Love
Medium voice, piano
Daniel Ladinsky’s elegant modern renderings of the works of Hafiz have introduced countless readers to this ancient Sufi poet’s powerful philosophy of gratitude, openness and joy. This generosity of spirit is captured in this warm and expansive setting.
Composer’s Notes
The scholarly side of me always scrutinizes the texts I set to music to ensure they are authentic, accurate and properly attributed. But I have another side – the artist side – which like a bright-eyed magpie leans toward shiny things: beauty, delight, patterns, color, sounds, and ideas which open the heart.
Thus it was with some trepidation that I approached the work of poet Daniel Ladinsky. Neither a purist nor an academic, Ladinsky’s engaging Hafiz-inspired renderings have led to passionate debate among poetry lovers, Sufi scholars, and Farsi speakers alike. To what extent are Ladinsky’s poems translations as opposed to original poems? And how much does that matter?
In the end, my inner debate was decided by a burst of spontaneous gratitude. I enthusiastically and unapologetically set “The Sun Never Says” to music in honor of my extraordinary parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.
-Elizabeth Alexander
Text
The Sun Never Says
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look what happens with a love like that:
It lights the Whole Sky.
-Hafiz
Translation and rendering by Daniel Ladinsky
© 1999 by Daniel Ladinsky, from the Penguin Publication The Gift: Poems by Hafiz. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky.
$7.00 per licensed PDF
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.