Divan-e Hafez
The most revered poet of the Persian language. His Divan still sits in Iranian homes as an oracle, opened at random for guidance. Hafez's ghazals manage simultaneously to be wine songs, mystical allegories, and love poems without resolving the ambiguity; that irreducible multiplicity is their genius. Goethe said reading Hafez made him feel like a student.
Without Persian you are reading the residue. Rhyme, pun, and double meaning die in English, and the most popular versions in print are loose inventions barely tethered to what Hafez wrote. Read straight through, the conventions repeat: wine, rose, nightingale, cruel beloved, again and again. An oracle made for random consultation was never meant to be read cover to cover.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
