"People say that Bach sort of gathered together everything that had gone before him in music and brought it into a new kind of stage. Hafez did the same with the conventions of lyric poetry."
"One of the great things in Hafez's poetry is that it's extremely ambiguous often and that it can be read in different ways. His poetry can read in a secular way or in a religious ... that's the great problem with translating Hafez that you have this constant ambiguity and ambiguity is very difficult to transfer from one language to another."
"Different cultures put their energies into different arts at different times ... For example, you can think, painting in Italy or music in Germany, that kind of thing, but in the medieval period, the artistic energies of Iran went largely into poetry. And poetry has become part of the Persian cultural identity in a way that is true of very few other cultures."
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