Applause for Haleh Liza Gafori's new Rumi translation - "Water"

Kindling and air for the embers of the four chambers of a heart.

Looking upon a field, well bloomed and warmed into spring with ten fifties of tints of the one we call "green" arrayed in clovers and mullein and rye and fescue and new bud and runner and fallen daffodil with their waningwithered shock of colored crown - I think it is too easy to pronounce a singular "meaning" of the field. Though many do proclaim just that. For some the glebe is the promise of hope or new growth. Others see the field as an obligatory sign of optimism or the unrelenting quality of change or of cycles or promise. Each of these, all of these, all belong...along with a raft of other possibilities. Many have been struck to song and poetry proclaiming such things of fields and spring.

The field is bigger than those. And smaller and more intimate.

And yet, I think none of them are as faithful (though not lesser) as the simple and full beauty of being there and intermittently oscillating between the close focus on particulars and the wider of view of the whole of the field that you can see (which isn't the whole field either!) The effect of being there in the "field in spring" is a massive part of the "the meaning." And if you can't get to said field in that spring yourself then someone who was there, who has in their capacity to faithfully report what they saw without trying to insist that you have a particular point of view or even a specific outcome then you have a companion worth breaking bread with.

In the new book "Water," which is the second set of selected poems by the famed Sufi poet and mystic that have been ably translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, you have such a companion for a little while. Run and don't walk to these pages. While you are at it get “Gold” as well. You know where to get books.

Any potential reader of this labor of devotion of "Water" should know that this capable and strong translator in Gafori not only has a life long relationship with Rumi through his words (read the introduction!), but also is a native speaker of his Farsi tongue and also in English. She is conversant in the references Rumi makes, so little details about Rumi's world appear all throughout without drawing focus - log, ant, bezel, grapes, turban, parrot, drum and mud. She is well positioned and skilled to the miraculous carrying bridge-work of translating language, time, culture and poetic sensibility. Her accomplishment as a poet in her own right shows in this aching joy of a book.

Gafori, the faithful reporter, with an urgent and eloquent love seeks to simply share her long conversation with the bursting spring field of Rumi. She crackles with excitement for the reader to join in the conversation with her and respond anew to the propositions that Rumi makes with questions of their own without trying to muscle the reader towards a preset emotional, spiritual or intellectual destination. There are proclamations in "Water" and there are queries and tricks and good-hearted sneers pointed towards the subject the poetic missive was first aimed towards. The mandatory brocade of Gafori and Rumi invites developing the skill of perception and seeing differently rather than conception. You might start to learn to cultivate the habit of looking through a Rumi shaped lens once in a while.

Any book of poetry that invites more speech by speaking to -you- rather than simply -about something- and to join in the long and still being told story of the consequence of loving...Drink deep by reading out loud "Water."