{"id":217906,"date":"2022-09-12T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2022-09-12T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=217906"},"modified":"2022-08-15T11:45:05","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T10:45:05","slug":"the-art-of-choosing-love-over-not-love-rumis-antidote-to-our-human-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/09\/the-art-of-choosing-love-over-not-love-rumis-antidote-to-our-human-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Choosing Love over Not-Love: Rumi\u2019s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cYou\u2019ll long for me when I\u2019m gone\u2026 You\u2019ll kiss the headstone of my grave\u2026 Kiss my face instead!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,\u201d Lisel Mueller wrote in her short, stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To become precious \u2014 that is the work of love, the task of love, the great reward of love. The recompense of death. The human miracle that makes the transience of life not only bearable but beautiful.<\/p>\n

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love<\/a>, until we lose life itself \u2014 for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise<\/a>. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss \u2014 that deepest awareness of our own mortality \u2014 by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late. We write poems and pop songs about our self-made tragedy \u2014 \u201cThe art of losing isn\u2019t hard to master<\/em><\/a>\u201c; \u201cDon\u2019t it always seem to go that you don\u2019t know what you\u2019ve got till it\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/em><\/a> \u2014 and we go on living it.<\/p>\n

Eight centuries before Mueller lived and died, an impassioned invitation to transcend our self-made tragedy took shape in another short, stunning poem by another poet of uncommon contact with the deepest strata of life-truth: Rumi<\/strong> (September 30, 1207\u2013December 17, 1273), who believed that you must \u201cgamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.\u201d Rumi, ancient and eternal. Magnetic in his eloquent devotion and his soulful intelligence. Majestic in his whirling silk robe and his defiant disdain for his culture\u2019s worship of status. Volcanic with poetry.<\/p>\n

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Rumi (detail from a 16th-century Persian illuminated manuscript, Morgan Library & Museum<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his sixty-six years, Rumi composed nearly sixty-six thousand verses, animated by an ecstatic devotion to living more fully and loving more deeply. Having mastered the mathematical musicality of the quatrain, he became a virtuoso of the ghazal with its series of couplets, each invoking a different poetic image, each crowned with the same refrain \u2014 a kind of kinetic sculpture of surprise, rapturous with rhythm.<\/p>\n

A dazzling selection of his poetry, including some never previously alive in English, appears in Gold<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), newly translated and inspirited by poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the creative challenge of invoking the poetic truth of one epoch and culture into another, she writes:<\/p>\n

The languages of Farsi and English possess quite different poetic resources and habits. In English, it is impossible to reproduce the rich interplay of sound and rhyme (internal as well as terminal) and the wordplay that characterize and even drive Rumi\u2019s poems. Meanwhile, the tropes, abstractions, and hyperbole that are so abundant in Persian poetry contrast with the spareness and concreteness characteristic of poetry in English, especially in the modern tradition. I have sought to honor the demands of contemporary American poetry and conjure its music while, I hope, carrying over the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi\u2019s poetry\u2026 I have chosen poems that seem to me beautiful, meaningful, and central to Rumi\u2019s vision, poems that I felt I could successfully translate and that speak to our times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Haleh Liza Gafori<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What emerges is a testament to the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wis\u0142awa Szymborska\u2019s lovely notion of \u201cthat rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes\u2026 a second original.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is Haleh Liza Gafori reading for us her translation of Rumi\u2019s lens-clearing invitation to step beyond our self-made tragedy and into the deepest, perhaps the only, truth of life:<\/p>\n