performance artist, poet, translator, musician, and educator
GOLD
POEMS BY RUMI, TRANSLATIONS BY HALEH LIZA GAFORI
New York Review Books - Classics / Penguin Random House
“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.” - New York Review Books
“Haleh Liza Gafori’s energetic translation highlights the timelessness of Rumi’s work, delivering unforgettable phrases. Rumi’s introspective nature…cosmic vision…and deeply contemplative yet accessible poems star in this worthy translation.” - Publishers Weekly
“Haleh Liza Gafori’s Gold is everything Rumi was himself—sacred, profane, laugh out loud funny, deeply earnest, demotic, and yes, Persian. There’s a rich fluency here not just in idiom but in gesture, in spirit. What a gift this is, what gold.”- Kaveh Akbar, Poetry Editor at The Nation
“Haleh Liza Gatori’s ecstatic and piercing translation has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into the quick of our present. Each poem is a divine invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.”
- V(formerly Eve Ensler)
“A dazzling selection of his poetry, including some never previously alive in English, appears in Gold, newly translated and inspirited by poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori…[the book] will go nourishing generations to come”- Maria Popova, The Marginalian
”Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi are exquisite. Gorgeous, fluent, faithful translations, rendering Rumi’s voice on the page with an original integrity that is as skilled as it is unforgettable. - Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound
“Haleh Liza Gafori’s new translations of Rumi are 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.”
- Marilyn Hacker, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets ‘08-’14
“In this eloquent, faithful translation of the popular 13th-century poet and mystic Rumi, Persian American poet and musician Gafori opens a fresh window on Rumi’s spiritual quest and his urgent invitation to readers to embrace a more enlightened existence. Ecstatic, spinning lines wind through mystical paradoxes—wordless speaker, footless runner, placeless place—toward a sense of wonder and oceanic love.” - Library Journal
“Gafori is Iranian [and American]… grew up with Rumi’s poetry and songs in her household, and has spent years studying his work on a mission to bring it into English. Unlike many who have had these capabilities and ambitions, she also has a gift for creating free verse lines in English that capture much of the beauty and paradox in Rumi’s original. And they have their sonic pleasures. Gold is a perfect introduction to the illuminations in Rumi’s work, or an important addition to your Rumi bookshelf.” - Elizabeth T Gray, Jr. , Hyperallergic
“Gold steers clear of gurudom for a poetics divine and earthly . . . here is a supple, intimate idiom still anchored to the sacred, a poetics of arousal that puts ‘mystery in the middle.’. . . In the serene grandeur of these poems . . . there are traces of the Central Asian melting pot he left behind: Buddhist renunciation, Zoroastrian fire. . . . Beneath the gorgeous imagery, there are hard questions about how to live in times of crisis. Far from new-age quietism, these poems urge the heart to be alert, amazed, to meet the ‘sour world’ awake. ‘You have a role at this feast. Rise up.’” - Yasmine Seale, 4 Columns
“The poems in Gold are spectacularly beautiful in some cases hilarious poems you can really chew on” - Tim Ferriss
“I have been longing for this gorgeous book, this specific translation of Rumi’s poems my whole life. As Rumi says in one of the book's poems, “Wherever the soul soared/Fire was there first.” Haleh Liza Gafori has taken Rumi’s original Farsi text and unleashed its fire. My soul soars reading each poem. She has given us a great and graceful gift.”
- Elizabeth Lesser
“These are the Rumi translations we’ve been waiting for! In Gold, translated by Persian-American poet/singer Haleh Liza Gafori, meanings and images hurtle us towards love and ecstasy, just as Rumi intended. You won’t read these words so much as dance with them. Hang on tight as they begin whirling. Unbuckle your seat belt as they take flight. Pure Gold!”
- Bob Holman
“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
"In clear, shimmering language, neither simplified nor obscurantist, Gafori renders the ecstatic core of Rumi's vision in an American idiom that both honors the Islamic background of the poems and insists that what we mean by "surrender" cannot be delimited by any psychology or religious tradition.
- Leonard Schwartz
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