A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking translations by an American poet of Persian descent.

Up until the age of forty, the thirteenth-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 single-minded 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 succor 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."

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 03/08/2022
ISBN: 9781681375335
Pages: 112

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 12/20/2021 pg. 68