Why adore the dead but battle the living?

You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave.
Look, I’m lying here still as a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!

—from Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi

“A preacher before he was a poet, [Rumi] hungered to feel what he called for in sermons: liberation from the cramped shell of self [and] union with a shoreless Love,” writes celebrated translator Haleh Liza Gafori.

Once Rumi met the vagabond, mystic, and rebel Shams of Tabriz, he began to walk his talk and talk in rhyme, spouting poetry that has endured for eight centuries. His dazzling imagery opens us to heart-stopping glimpses of the divine while calling upon us to consider the way we live now—the way we manage the challenging act of being both matter and spirit in an often tumultuous world. He invites us to question and perhaps even break through, to cultivate compassion, to live a more expansive, soulful existence.

In this three-part seminar, Gafori, the first Iranian American female poet to translate Rumi’s ghazals into English, discussed a selection of his poems, exploring recurring themes, such as divine love, the death of the ego, heartache, ecstasy, and liberation. Offering cultural context and backstories, she unpacked words and phrases that have no one-to-one equivalent in English, but are central to Rumi’s poetry and Sufi philosophy. She also recited short excerpts of the original text offering participants glimpses of the astonishing rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay of the Persian text, revealing some of the challenges, pleasures, conundrums, and surprises that riddle the translation process.

Class met from 2:30–3:45 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, August 6, 13 and 20.

Gafori referenced her translations of GOLD: Poems by Rumi (New York Review Books, 2022), which registrants are encouraged to buy.

On-demand opportunity! Tuition, which is being offered at a discount, includes access to presentations, recordings, syllabus and transcripts for a limited only.