I recently finished another beautiful book that I can’t recommend enough. It served as a form of therapy, meditation, and spiritual care, all in one. While brief, Water, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, is a powerful experience that helps you recover hope.
- Format: 144 pages, Paperback.
- Published: June 10, 2025, by OR Books.
- Genres and Tags: Love poetry, Nonfiction, Poetry, Spiritual.
- 5/5 stars.
A follow-up to her ground-breaking translations of Rumi in Gold, poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori translates a new selection of work by the great Persian mystic that will muster the soul and stir the spirit.
Water expands on Gold, Haleh Liza Gafori’s inspired and widely praised translation of the lyric poetry of the Persian mystic Rumi. As in Gold, Gafori renders with fluid grace and moving immediacy these indisputable masterworks of world literature, drawing on the deep well of Rumi’s work to bring out the worldly wit and wisdom that accompany his otherworldly summons. Behold the divine within and without, he tells us. Question the gnawing hunger for material possessions, fame, and fortune, and the fear of emptiness that drives it. Muster the soul, and experience a more compassionate and liberated state of mind. An eco-poet before his time, Rumi celebrates the immensity and wonder of the natural world while warning us of the havoc that greed and the pursuit of power wreak upon us and our world. His flights of dazzling imagery open up heart-stopping glimpses of the divine, challenging readers to wake from oblivion, and above all, to surrender to the transformative power of Love.
Gafori is an acclaimed vocalist and musician as well as a gifted linguist and poet, and in her translations Rumi’s poetry sings and beckons as nowhere else. Hers is the work, as the poet Marilyn Hacker has said, “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.”
After reading several of Rumi‘s translated works, you would assume it would be a lighter experience. However, the strength in his words is still very much present in Water, which does tend to make the reading heavy at times. The good side is that it does keep the meditative style of many of the poems, if not all. The end result is a reading meditation itself from the first page.
At first, the idea of a whole book theme-based on water seemed strange to me, but knowing it was Rumi, why not? The result was a book that shows you the divine in the most simple things. Especially, it shows you how marvelous the simplest thing is, the one we take for granted the most often, with poems that lead you into a spiritual experience.
This is not to say that the language is complicated. Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations keep the simplicity of Rumi’s words while preserving the beauty in how he uses language. Water honors the poet by sticking to a style that flows in your tongue and soul as a calming river. In today’s world, where peace seems to be a luxury, books like this are a must for spiritual self-care.
All in all, this is a book that is easy to read and is not at the same time. Underneath a tricky simplicity, there is a beauty that transcends words and style, a peaceful balm for the senses. Haleh Liza Gafori did a great at keeping Rumi’s voice in Water, and I will be excitedly waiting for the next translation. In the meantime, I want to catch up with the previous book she worked on, Gold.
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