The thirteenth-century Persian sage Rumi was chiefly known as a preacher of serious and sober views until the age of thirty-eight when he encountered the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz. Utterly transformed by their friendship, Rumi became a poet in single-minded pursuit of ecstatic illumination and liberation. His work was meant to induce a similar revelation in his audience, bringing its members to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. His poetry is a masterpiece of world literature to which readers in many languages continually return for inspiration and succor as well as aesthetic delight. This new translation preserves the radical intelligence and the ecstatic drama of the poems that are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.

Marilyn Hacker, one of America's finest contemporary poets, praises Haleh Liza Gafori's new translations of Rumi as "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."