Essential Rumi
by Jalal al-Din Rumi
from HarperOne
No translator could do greater justice to the gorgeous simplicity of Rumi's poetry than Coleman Barks has done here. These exquisite renderings of the 13th-century Persian mystic's words into American free verse capture all the "inner searching, the delicacy, and simple groundedness" that characterize Rumi's poetry while remaining faithful to the images, tone, and spiritual message of the originals. Barks's introductions to each of the 27 sections (described as "playful palimpsests spread over Rumi's imagination," and "meant to confuse scholars who would divide Rumi's poetry into the accepted categories") are themselves wonderful achievements of a poetic imagination; searching explanations of unfamiliar concepts and funny stories provide colorful background and frame the selections as no dry historical exegesis could.
While Barks's stamp on this collection is clear, it in no way interferes with the poems themselves; Rumi's voice leaps off these pages with an ecstatic energy that leaves readers breathless. There are poems of love, rage, sadness, pleading, and longing; passionate outbursts about the torture of longing for his beloved and the sweet pleasure that comes from their union; amusing stories of sexual exploits or human weakness; and quiet truths about the beauty and variety of human emotion. More than anything, Rumi makes plain the unbridled joy that comes from living life fully, urging us always to put aside our fears and take the risk to do so. As he says: "The way of love is not / a subtle argument. / The door there is devastation. / Birds make great sky-circles / of their freedom. / How do they learn it? / They fall, and falling, / they're given wings." --Uma Kukathas
A comprehensive collection of ecstatic poetry that delights with its energy and passion, The Essential Rumi brings the vibrant, living words of famed thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelalludin Rumi to contemporary readers.
The Gift
by Hafiz
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Hafiz, a secret Sufi, came to prominence in his day as a writer of love poems. That love transformed into an all-consuming passion for union with the divine. In The Gift, Daniel Ladinsky bestows on us the impassioned yet whimsical strains of Hafiz's ecstasy. Never forced or awkward, Ladinsky's Hafiz whispers in your ear and pounds in your chest, naming God in a hundred metaphors.
I once asked a bird,Like Fitzgerald's version of Khayyam's Rubaiyat, the language of The Gift strikes a contemporary chord, resonating in the reader's mind and then in the heart. Ladinsky's language is plain, fresh, playful--dancing with an expert cadence that invites and surprises. If it is true, as Hafiz says, that a poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, reading Ladinsky's Hafiz is like gulping down the sun. --Brian Bruya
"How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?"
She responded,
"Love lifts
Me."
An extraordinary new translation of the world-renowned mystic poet Hafiz.
More than any other Persian poet--even Rumi--Hafiz expanded the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Because his poems were often ecstatic love songs from God to his beloved world, many have called Hafiz the "Invisible Tongue." Indeed, Daniel Ladinsky, the accomplished translator of this volume, has said that his work with Hafiz is an attempt to do the impossible: to translate Light into words--to make the Luminous Resonance of God tangible to our finite senses.
With this stunning collection of 250 of Hafiz's most intimate poems, Ladinsky has succeeded brilliantly in translating the essence of one of Islam's greatest poetic and religious voices. Each line of The Gift imparts the wonderful qualities of this master Sufi poet and spiritual teacher: encouragement, an audacious love that touches lives, profound knowledge, generosity, and a sweet, playful genius unparalleled in world literature.
The Subject Tonight Is Love: Sixty Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz
by Hafiz
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
To Persians, the fourteenth-century poems of Hafiz are not classical literature from a remote past, but cherished love, wisdom, and humor from a dear and intimate friend. Perhaps, more than any other Persian poet, it is Hafiz who most fully accesses the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Daniel Ladinsky has made it his life's work to create modern, inspired translations of the world's most profound spiritual poetry. Through Ladinsky's translations, Hafiz's voice comes alive across the centuries singing his message of love.
The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Rumi on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication
from Inner Traditions
The first collection of poems translated into English from the forbidden volume of the Divan of Rumi
• Presents Rumi’s most heretical and free-form poems
• Includes introductions and commentary that provide both 13th-century context and modern interpretation
After his overwhelming and life-altering encounters with Shams of Tabriz, Rumi, the great thirteenth-century mystic, poet, and originator of the whirling dervishes, let go of many of the precepts of formal religion, insisting that only a complete personal dissolving into the larger energies of God could provide the satisfaction that the heart so desperately seeks. He began to speak spontaneously in the language of poetry, and his followers compiled his 44,000 verses into 23 volumes, collectively called the Divan.
When Nevit Ergin decided to translate the Divan of Rumi into English, he enlisted the help of the Turkish government, which was happy to participate. The first 22 volumes were published without difficulty, but the government withdrew its support and refused to participate in the publication of the final volume due to its openly heretical nature. Now, in The Forbidden Rumi, Will Johnson and Nevit Ergin present for the first time in English Rumi’s poems from this forbidden volume. The collection is grouped into three sections: songs to Shams and God, songs of heresy, and songs of advice and admonition. In them Rumi explains that in order to transform our consciousness, we must let go of ingrained habits and embrace new ones. In short, we must become heretics.
The Conference of Birds (Penguin Classics)
by Farid al-Din Attar
from Penguin Classics
Like Rumi and Hafiz, the name Attar conjures up images of passionate attraction to the divine. Attar was a Persian Sufi of the 12th century and his masterpiece is The Conference of the Birds, an epic allegory of the seeker's journey to God. When all the birds of the world convene and determine that they lack a king, one bird steps forward and offers to lead them to a great and mighty monarch. Initially excited, each bird falters in turn, whereupon the leader admonishes them with well-targeted parables. These pithy tales are the delight of this 4,500-line poem, translated deftly into rhymed couplets. What is your excuse for not seeking God? Your life is fine already? You prefer material pleasure? You are holy enough? You have pride, lack courage, or are burdened with responsibility? Attar has an answer to encourage you on the path to the promised land. And when you get there, the king may not be what you'd expect, but you must make the journey to see. --Brian Bruya
The Conference of Birds is the most widely known and influential work of Farid Ud-Din Attar, a twelfth-century Persian poet and mystic of the school of Islamic mysticism known as Sufism. The poem starts with the Hoopoe addressing a gathering of birds, urging them to journey to visit his king, Simorgh. Simorgh, he claims, is the ultimate king and ruler of them all.
The subsequent journey is an allegory of the soul's search for unity with the divine. In Sufism the relationship between the seeker and God is similar to that between a lover and the beloved. In this consuming and transcendent love, the distinctions between self and the divine fall away. The stories in The Conference of Birds have captivated generations of readers, inspiring them to take their own spiritual journeys.
The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
by Coleman Barks
from HarperOne
When Rumi was born in Afghanistan in 1207, it was a time of tremendous political turmoil in the Near East. Paradoxically, it was also a time of "brilliant mystical awareness," writes translator Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi. This brilliance shines through in every passage, as Barks celebrates the ecstatic nature of Rumi's poetry. Barks (The Essential Rumi) has been given much credit for leading modern Westerners to this astounding poet. His sensitivity to the reader is evidenced in how he organizes the poetry according to themes. Since Rumi is often quoted at public gatherings, such as weddings and memorial services, this makes referencing especially easy. In the section entitled "When Friend Meets Friend," readers find the poem "The Soul's Friend":
The most living moment comes when those who love each other meet each other's eyes and in what flows between them then. To see your face in a crowd of others, or alone on a frightening street, I weep for thatÂ….Barks offers a gracefully rendered introduction to each section, providing personal and historical background of the poetry. Elegantly designed and printed on cream-colored, heavy-stock paper, this is a delight for Rumi fans. --Gail Hudson
The Soul of Rumi is renowned poet Coleman Barks' first major assemblage of newly translated Rumi poems since his bestselling < The Essential Rumi.
Coleman Barks presents entirely new translations of Rumi's poems, published for the first time in The Soul of Rumi. The poems range over the breadth of Rumi's themes: silence, emptiness, play, God, peace, grief, sexuality, music, to name just a few. But the focus is on the ecstatic experience of human and divine love and their inseparability, conveyed with Rumi's signature passion, daring, and insights into the human heart and the heart's longings.
The Masnavi, Book One (Oxford World's Classics)
by Jalal al-Din Rumi
from Oxford University Press, USA
Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognized as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called "the Koran in Persian." The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed his work for the benefit of his disciples in the Sufi order named after him, better known as the whirling dervishes. In order to convey his message of divine love and unity he threaded together entertaining stories and penetrating homilies. Drawing from folk tales as well as sacred history, Rumi's poem is often funny as well as spiritually profound.
Jawid Mojaddedi's sparkling new verse translation of Book One is consistent with the aims of the original work in presenting Rumi's most mature mystical teachings in simple and attractive rhyming couplets.
Hafiz: The Scent of Light
by Hafiz
from Sounds True
In modern day Persia, the 14th-century poet Hafiz remains the most treasured voice of his homeland -- a place where his work outsells Rumi, and even the Koran. Yet only recently have Westerners come to know this wild Sufi mystic's astonishing verses on love and spiritual longing. Now, with HAFIZ: THE SCENT OF LIGHT, you will join Daniel Ladinsky -- the acclaimed translator of THE GIFT -- to revel in more than 30 of Hafiz' most stirring works. Offered here in the manner that Hafiz composed them, spoken or sung spontaneously amid companions and inspired music, each of these exquisite love songs (ghazals) shimmers with a nuance, depth, and passion rarely captured in previous translations.
Hafiz once said: "A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched holy mouth." From his vision of an all-embracing Beloved who sees beyond our religious beliefs to his revelations on the oneness of worldly ecstasy and spiritual awakening, Hafiz continues to pour the light of his poetry forth today.
Music composed and performed by Stevin McNamara (sitar and nylon string guitar), with special guest artists/composers Steve Gorn (bansuri flute), Jeffrey Rodgers (tabla, santoor, ethnic drums, percussion), Annette Cantor (vocals), Pandit S.N. Sopori (drupad/khyal/tarana singing), Bhushan Sopori (tabla), and Aurelia Roze (violin). Read by Nataraja Kallio.
Rumi: Voice of Longing
by Jalal Al-Din Rumi
from Sounds True
In the seven centuries since the death of Jelaluddin Rumi in 1273, the world has come to know and thrill to his sacred poetry. In concert with the tabla and sitar, his writing is part of a religious tradition that is believed to excite "spiritual heroism," embracing the holiness of love, lamentation, battle, and the longing for God. RUMI: VOICE OF LONGING collects nearly one hundred of Rumi's most memorable quatrains, presented here on two superbly remastered CD recordings for the first time ever.
Translated and performed by the Rumi scholar Coleman Barks, these works echo with a spiritual complexity that defies their outward simplicity. As Sufism acknowledges the truth of other religions, so does Rumi's poetry reflect universal themes: the search for the highest truth, the mystery of surrender, the longing to overcome ego imprisonment. RUMI: VOICE OF LONGING captures the silence, the love, and the playfulness that make each experience with this work one of sacred wonder.
With musical accompaniment by Marcus Wise on tablas and David Whetstone on sitar. Special appearance by Robert Bly.
Rumi: Bridge to the Soul: Journeys into the Music and Silence of the Heart
by Coleman Barks
from HarperOne
2007 is the "Year of Rumi," and who better than Coleman Barks, Rumi's unlikely, supremely passionate ambassador, to mark the milestone of this great poet's 800th birthday? Barks, who was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in Persian language and literature by the University of Tehran for his thirty years of translating Rumi, has collected and translated ninety new poems, most of them never published before in any form. The result is this beautiful edition titled Rumi: Bridge to the Soul. The "bridge" in the title is a reference to the Khajou Bridge in Isphahan, Iran, which Barks visited with Robert Bly in May of 2006—a trip that in many ways prompted this book. The "soul bridge" also suggests Rumi himself, who crosses cultures and religions and brings us all together to listen to his words, regardless of origin or creed. Open this book and let Rumi's poetry carry you into the interior silence and joy of the spirit, the place that unites conscious knowing with a deeper, more soulful understanding.
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