Haleh Liza Gafori

A follow-up to her ground-breaking translations of Rumi in Gold, poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori translates a new selection of work by the great Persian mystic that will muster the soul and stir the spirit. Water expands on Gold, Haleh Liza Gafori's inspired and widely praised translation of the lyric poetry of the Persian mystic Rumi. As in Gold, Gafori renders with fluid grace and moving immediacy these indisputable masterworks of world literature, drawing on the deep well of Rumi's work to bring out the worldly wit and wisdom that accompany his otherworldly summons. Behold the divine within and without, he tells us. Question the gnawing hunger for material possessions, fame, and fortune, and the fear of emptiness that drives it. Muster the soul, and experience a more compassionate and liberated state of mind. An eco-poet before his time, Rumi celebrates the immensity and wonder of the natural world while warning us of the havoc that greed and the pursuit of power wreak upon us and our world. His flights of dazzling imagery open up heart-stopping glimpses of the divine, challenging readers to wake from oblivion, and above all, to surrender to the transformative power of Love. Gafori is an acclaimed vocalist and musician as well as a gifted linguist and poet, and in her translations Rumi's poetry sings and beckons as nowhere else. Hers is the work, as the poet Marilyn Hacker has said, "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."

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."