A selection of original translations of the great Persian poet by Haleh Liza Gafori, an up-and-coming American translator and musician.

The thirteenth-century Persian sage Rumi was chiefly known as a preacher and a man of serious and sober views. But at the age of forty, his 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 work is meant to induce a similar revelation in his audience, bringing its members to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. His 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—almost all of which is of Rumi's Divan-e-Shams-e Tabrizi written near the end of his life—preserves the radical intelligence and the ecstatic drama of poems that are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.

Rumi's gold is not the precious metal but a feeling-state arrived at through the alchemical process of burning through layers of self, greed, pettiness, calculation, doctrine—all of it. In sum, the payer of Sufism is "teach me to love more deeply." Gold is the deepest love.

Your naked freedom
is your shield.
*
Silence!
I'm in a hurry. Leave the paper. Break the pen.
The cupbearer is here, jug in hand.

Meet us in the land of insight,
camped under ecstasy's flag.

“I have been longing for these translations of Rumi’s poems my whole life. Haleh Liza Gafori has taken Rumi’s original Farsi text and unleashed its fire. My soul soars reading each one. Sublime, clean, crisp, deep, luxurious, funny, soft, and kind, these translations are a great and graceful gift.” —Elizabeth Lesser, author of Cassandra Speaks

“Rumi’s beautiful melding of wildness, insight and untrammeled joy has found a true, unerring voice in Haleh Liza Gafori, whose own fine abilities as a poet bring these hallowed Persian, poetic gifts anew into 21st century English.” —David Whyte, author of Consolations