A selection of original translations of the great Persian poet by an up-and-coming American
translator and musician. Up until the age of 40 the 13th century Persian sage Rumi was
chiefly known as a preacher and a man of serious and sober views. At that point however an
encounter with the poet Shams of Tabriz left him utterly transformed. Rumi became a poet
himself a poet in singleminded pursuit of ecstatic illumination and liberation whose poetry is
meant to induce a similar revelation in his audience bringing them to a condition of serenity
compassion and oneness with the divine. Rumi's poetry is a masterpiece of world literature to
which readers in many languages continue to return for inspiration and succour as well as
aesthetic delight. This new translation preserves the radical intelligence and the ecstatic
drama of poems that are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.
Marilyn Hacker one of America's finest contemporary poets praises Haleh Liza Gafori's new
translations of Rumi as "the work of someone who is at once an acute and enamored reader of the
original Farsi text a dedicated miner of context and backstory and best of all a marvelous
poet in English."
