Description
“These stunning translations of Master Rumi, at once gustatory and spiritual, cut the gloom of our existential doings. Imperative now, as ever, to know this beauty and love.”
– ANNE WALDMAN
“Water is immediate and timeless. These poems imprint on the heart. To read these verses is to enter mystery and paradox, to be burnished by the sacred fire and broken open by the holiest dance.”
– SULEIKA JAOUAD
“Gorgeous, fluent, and faithful translations. Gafori renders Rumi’s voice on the page with an original integrity that is as skilled as it is unforgettable.”
– PADRAIG O’TUAMA
Haleh Liza Gafori is a performance artist, translator, vocalist, poet, and musician born in NYC of Persian descent. Her acclaimed book of translations, GOLD, Poems by Rumi was published by New York Review Books in 2022, and her second volume WATER will be released on April 22, 2025, also by NYRB Classics. A bicultural woman with ears tuned to the music of American free verse as well as to the subtleties of the Persian text, Gafori aims to transmit the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poems into contemporary American poetry. Gafori is a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts grant supporting the development of her cross-media performance piece based on GOLD. Weaving translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English, she offers audiences glimpses of the astonishing rhythm and wordplay of Rumi’s original text, while uncovering how deeply and urgently the poetry dialogues with our times. Gafori’s translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Palewell Press, and elsewhere.
