Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Haleh Liza Gafori

0:00Hi friends, Podrigo Tumah here. Thanks very much for listening to Poetry on Bound. In between Poetry on Bound seasons, and we have Season 11 that will start later in 2026, we have a whole host of interviews that I've done with poets over the last two years. Poetry on Bound in conversation, we call them. I've loved the opportunity to talk to poets about their craft, how they see the world through the lens of poetry, and what this art form does for them. These Poetry on Bound in conversation episodes deepen to my curiosity about language and art. I trust they will for you too. For today's Poetry on Bound in conversation, you'll be hearing from Halle Liza Gaffori, a translator, poet, and musician among many other things. She reads from her two volumes of translations of the 13th century Mystic Poet Roomie. They're titled Gold and Water, both published by New York Review Books. This conversation was part of the Greenbelt Festival,

1:04an annual festival for arts, activism, and belief in England. Greenbelt has an online component too. For this conversation, Halle joined us from Vermont while I called in from New York City. A special thanks to Paul Northup, Jane Cooke's and Joanna Booth, Stream 7, Christian Aid, and all the volunteers and staff and audience members at the Greenbelt Festival. Thanks to Halle Liza Gaffori and her publishers, New York Review of Books. Welcome to Poetry on Bound in conversation. My name is Paul Ziegotumma, and here I am with Halle Liza Gaffori. Hello, friends. God, it's so nice to see you all. This is my 22nd Greenbelt. I think a 23rd to be involved with. I'm very sad not to be there in person, but I'm very glad to be involved from afar. And I'm thrilled to be in conversation today with one of the foremost

2:07scholars and translators and reciters and imbodiers of Roomie. Halle Liza Gaffori is a poet, and she's a performer and she's a scholar and translator of Roomie, who was a 13th century Muslim mystic and poet. Halle is of Persian descent born in New York City. That's where I am right now. And she is sung and translated the poetry of various Persian poets for well over a decade. She's the translator of Water. I've got this here and gold. These New York Review of Books magnificent renditions of Roomie's poetry done by her. And she's taught classes at many universities. So Halle, you are very, very welcome to Greenbelt. Thank you. Thank you so much, Padregg. I know you're up in also in the states at the moment in the country of Vermont, and you're going to be doing a recital later on tonight, also in a field. Yes, yes. In another Greenfield. I wonder if you'd be able to say a little bit about Roomie,

3:10just to give an introduction. My guess is that lots of people might know the name or heard a few quotes or heard somebody saying them or seen a quote from him put up somewhere in a retreat center, but I'd love it if you could just tell us a little bit about him. Sure, yeah. Well, as you said, he's a 13th century Persian poet. We call him Persian, a Persian poet because he was writing largely in Persian. At that time, there weren't really nation states. So he was born in present day. Afghanistan or present day Tajikistan. There's a little bit of a disagreement about that. He traveled across Central Asia, landed in Turkey eventually, present day Turkey eventually. So he was moving across this whole land, you know, and he was writing largely in Persian, I think about 98% of his writing is in Persian. So that's why we call him a Persian poet. And he was a mystic. He was a sage. He was an ecstatic lover. He was a confessional poet too.

4:14He was speaking of his own struggles, of his own journey on this path of expanding into deeper and wider sensations of love and, you know, his practice of love, his practice of deep listening, his practice of whirling, all the whirling dance that the dervishes do. All of this comes into his poetry. He was the son of an Islamic theologian. So he was born into the tradition of even fasting. He was even fasting as a child. He was chanting the 99 names of God. And he was also absorbing your Persian folklore, probably some Hindu and Buddhist thought as well, because we see that, in, for instance, in the Mass Nevi. There's a little bit of that. We will talk about how most of the references are coming out of the Quran. But there's a lot of other stuff as well swirling around

5:14in his work. And I would say he's a good pal. Yeah, a good pal. You're absolutely. And a good pal to humanity. I mean, he's rooting for us. You know, he's rooting for our liberation. He's rooting for us to, you know, untie the knots in our psyches or to break through the mind for manacles. The shackles talks about these a lot, you know, of our own conditioning, of dogma of of our own ego. I mean, he's rooting for us, you know, in our liberation. And so I really do feel he's a friend to humanity. And while I'm keen to hear how it is that you came across him, but there I just want to check in about his name as well. So Rumi is, what does Rumi mean? Is that his full name? What, you know, what's his, what is his full name? Or is he known by other things too? Yes, he is known by the, I mean, across the Middle East, he's known as Molana or Mevlana, which is the same word essentially Molana, the Persians, like my parents call him Molana. They don't call

6:19him Rumi. That means our sage, our master. And that's what he's known as and in Turkey, they call Mevlana same meaning. His name was Jalaluddin Muhammad Ebna Hussein Balkhi. So Balkhi means from Balkh and Balkh his present day Afghanistan. But then eventually he was called Rumi because he was living in Anatolia for much of his life from around the age of 20 until he died. He was living in present day Turkey, which is part of Anatolia, which is Rumi. So unruum, right, which is considered Western in the realm of Central Asia, the realm of the Middle East, that's considered pretty West, right? So sometimes it's considered of Anatolia, of Rome, of the West, you know. But his actual last name was Balkhi. Okay. And you've mentioned that your parents also have a reverence for him. Tell us a little bit about how it is that you came to be in such kind of a

7:19deep relationship with Rumi because it's a very interesting story. Yeah, well, you know, my father was the first person I ever heard recite Rumi and he would, you know, he'd be walking around the house. Sometimes he'd be whistling Beethoven's, you know, ninth ode to joy. He loved that symphony. Sometimes he'd be reciting Rumi. Sometimes he'd be quoting Fitzgerald or even Flanery O'Connor. You know, he liked to recite from world literature, but Rumi was a central or Molana was a central figure in that in our house, you know, and I would hear him as a child. And I didn't really understand what he was reciting as a child. I could hear the rhythm and rhyme. And as I've said, you know, I felt like the poem's kind of galloped through the living room because they have this very muscular, repulsive rhythm. And I would stand in the golden dust they left in their wake, you know.

8:20And this was in New York City? Yeah, well, no, actually, it was portly New Jersey. So from an eighth floor balcony in Fort Lee, New Jersey, I'd look out at New York City at the Westside Highway and the Hudson River. And I would hear these lines. And yeah, I didn't understand them at the time, but I remember that they were special and they had some kind of weight and room would change. They were resided. And then later I read translations. And then later I started singing, you know, and I make this motion because it was like he was spiraling through my life like a good nervous. And then I was singing singing in Persian. And then eventually in 2016. So nine years ago, I started translating. And both your parents came from Iran to the United States just shortly before you were born or yes, they came before I was born. So I was born in New York City. They they met in University of Tehran Medical School. They both graduated from there. And their

9:22intention was to come to America and continue their medical education. But then the Islamic revolution happened and they didn't go back. So they stayed. And I was born in New York City. And at the hospital that my mother was working at at Al-Burhain St. Hospital in the Bronx. And as I've said, you know, in the intro to to water, they came to America with one, two cases of clothing and two two cases of books. One of those books was the Mass Nevi that my grandfather gave my mom. Yeah, so. I'm going to have lots of opportunities to hear you recite various things in response to different parts. But I'd be curious to hear from the first. Are there any parts that you can recite that are in the original, that are on translated? So we can get a feel for the contours of the sound of Rumi as he wrote himself. Sure. Maybe I'll do an excerpt. I'll do one that I often do because the rhythm and rhyme is so tremendous. And then I'll do a little piece of another one. So I'm always doing that one. But here's one.

10:52I got Camtene di Rahid Alam, Camzene di Rah Shoditon Nabudi in Hamigofdor, Mara. So that's a piece of one. And there was a lot of, there's a lot of internal rhyme in that one. Yeah. You hear maybe the gazelle form where Mara, Mara, Mara, he kept ending. So here's another recital. I'll just recite a bit of it. Now on Shira Mkibad Oshman Barayam, Mara in Bas, Kemen Boman Barayam, Chokhao Kepaia Ishram, Toya Rindon, Kazingel, Congolosusan Barayam. Barayam, I can hear that as the... Yes. Yes. With the gazelle, it's in couplets and the last word of every couplet is the same in a repeated form. That's right. Or it's a rhyme. Yes. A rhyme. Yeah, either it's the same exact word or phrase or it's a rhyming word.

11:55And for that, what is he talking about? How do you render and what it is you just translated for us? Sure. Sure. Maybe I'll do the second one first. This is from Gold. I'm not that lion battling an enemy. Confronting myself keeps me busy enough. I am the soil, love seeds, roses and lilies bloom from this mud. I ached from separation. I cloaked myself in night, emerged a shining moon. Consumed in love's fire, I slipped through any opening. I rise like smoke. I am a child and love is my teacher waking me from ignorance. Like love, I will live on radiant and eternal when eating and sleeping are done. Till then, like Vubak to the master musician, I quiet my mind and listen.

12:57In silence, your body becomes spirit. Beautiful. There's an absolute ecstasy every time I hear him, every time I hear him through you. Do you feel the same after so much scholarship and translation of him? He's alive with being alive, it seems. Yeah. I love trans. I love reciting and I love singing him. I mean, I don't tire of it. There's such beauty and honesty and sincerity. There's such an ecstatic love and there's also such a sincerity. I mean, he loves humanity. He's frustrated with humanity. He loves the earth. He's frustrated with how we carry on. And he's not afraid to say it and he's not afraid to save his own speak of his own issues with this challenging experiment of being human, being manner and spirit. He will speak about it all. And he will go into the ecstatic and he will promise us

14:03that we are at the root of the root of the root of our beings. Love that the primordial force is love. He says, all mass, bald, mass, calk, mass, gnar, mass, water is drunk. When air is drunk, earth is drunk, fire is drunk. The metal is drunk. The buds and thorns are all drunk. Imagination is drunk. Intellect is drunk. And the mysteries of existence and the mysteries of eternity, sorry, the mysteries of eternity, they're the drunkest of all. And liberate yourself. Liberate yourself from the tyranny of self. Be humble as soil and you will see every particle of soil is drunk on love by the creator's design. So it's like not that we always feel these things. We don't walk around typically feeling drunk on love. But he's telling us, you know what? That is actually at the root of the root of all this. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.

15:04You know, there is a love that pulses through us. You know, how else does dreams sprout from the earth's dark body? He asks, but that there's some force that wants to live. And that can call this divine love, you know, that wants to bring the disparate particles into one being. So anyway, that's always there. Hmm, beautiful. I mean, I've seen Rumi being quoted in retreat centers in many places around the world. And he crops up in many places. And his openness to the world, I think, has lent him a sense of friendship around the world. But to emphasize the fact that he was and always remained Muslim and that he was believing and praying and imagining within that tradition is a vital component of giving him his own integrity really. And giving integrity to today. Could you talk a bit about that with him? Yes. And he was born into the Islamic tradition. His father, as I said, was at the allogen. And so he grew up hearing, you know, the lines from the Quran and hearing the Hadith and being very influenced by it.

16:09So in his poetry, you know, he will quote lines. And so someone might read the line and think, oh, that's a line of poetry. But it might be a direct quote from the Quran. For instance, when he says, when love says, I'm closer to you than the your jugular vein, right? I'm closer to you than the vein in your neck. One might think, oh, that's an interesting thing to say. That is actually directly pulled from the Quran or when he says light upon light, he says, we are light upon light and the glass light passes through. Why muddy ourselves with the grudge? Right? So the light upon light is directly from the Quran, for instance. He uses, you know, we'll reference the 99 names of God at times, which are these beautiful words that carry so much meaning. And one might just pass over the word. Sometimes translators have done that. You know, and I think it's the job of the translator actually to grasp that word and unpack it.

17:10The word God, you mean? Well, the word one of the 99 names, for instance, like one of the 99 names is y'all, you know, they say Latif. And let her fat. Latif is the adjective. So it's really a description of God. So in this case, Latif means gentle, silky, kind, permeable, translucent. It means all these things. It means like silk. There are these moments where he's bringing this idea of this sort of silky feeling that the divine has and reminding us of that. But in some translations, this word has been passed over. But actually, this is a very important, for instance, moment in one of the poems where he says, my armor thinned to a silken scrim. He's saying, I became hair thin, like in this letha fat, in this silkeness, in this I became this silkeness, right?

18:11And so, and this thinness, right? So what's thinning down? It's always the ego, the armor of the ego, the defensiveness of the ego. When he says, for instance, they say there's a door between one heart and another. How can there be a door where no wall remains? So that place where no wall remains is Latif, is that thinned down wall that then dissolves. And so anyway, this is a very important moment in his poetry. And this is knowing that word and what that means and the cultural context of that word is very important in the translation of it. You know, then also there's characters like Mansour Al-Halaj, who's in Islamic tradition, who was a kind of a Christ figure. He was crucified. And he was crucified for saying, I am truth, capital T truth, which was another word for God too.

19:11So God lives in me, essentially, is what he said. And the Caleb was like, that's blasphemous, you know, hang him, send him to the gallows, you know, but he was this person then who they say, you know, in the poem, he unchained and in chains, he danced his way there because he felt he was meeting God and he wasn't even worried about death, right? And that's another thing that recurs in the poetry. Fearlessly done. And how well-known was Rumi during his life? I'm curious because clearly, all these centuries later, where we're still talking about him, was he a person of renown during his life? Could you talk a bit about that? And was that, was he popular or was he a controversial figure? Yeah, yeah, he was very loved in his time, very known. I mean, apparently his son who rode about him and his son was a writer. His son said thousands, like even close to 10,000 people would come to hear him speak, you know, like about the number of people at Greenbelt.

20:14So yeah, he was very loved. He was a preacher, right, before he was a poet. So, you know, at around the age of 38, he was a sort of apex of his career as a preacher in the present-day Konia, in present-day Turkey. And people would gather to hear him, they loved him. He was very charming, he was very magnetic, and he was, yeah, very loved. And that's why we know so much about him. For instance, Dante was living at the same time, but we know very little about Dante's actual life, personal life. But we know about Mollana Rumi partly because he was famous and people rode about him, you know. Interesting, huh? Yeah. And I know, in fact, you brought me into two segues of two different questions. I'll name them both, and then you can tell me which one you want to go, and then I'll ask the other subsequently. I was curious about what else is happening during Rumi's life? What else in the world is happening? What are the tectonic plates of things that are occurring during which he's writing this, and kind of whether any of those global events so

21:15occur in his poetry? And then the other one is to talk a little bit about what happens when he's 38, because I know there's this conversion almost. Oh, yeah. So take whichever one of those you want to have to start, and then I'll lead us on to the other afterwards. Sure, yeah, so we'll, I'll start with the first one, you know. So Mollana Rumi, the child around the age of 10, they his family left, uh, Balf, which is present day, Afghanistan, partly because his father wanted to preach in a bigger mosque. This mosque is frustrating me. So he wanted to move so it was partly a voluntary migration, but then also that eventually they were fleeing ahead of the Mongol invasion. So at the time that Rumi was living the 13th century, the Mongols were marching across Central Asia and wreaking havoc. They were burning down villages. There were stories that they would pile, you know, the skulls and pyramids,

22:16and it was, it was terrible. That was the Mongol invasion led by gangus Klan. So that was happening, and Mollana Rumi was exposed to it in that he heard about it. He heard stories about what was happening, you know, and as I speak of in the introduction that while he was moving across Central Asia with this caravan, you know, where there were people telling stories and people playing music and the sky imagined 800 years ago, brimming with stars and the fragrance of the orchards and gardens were so incredibly intoxicating. So at the same time that he was exposed to this beauty, there were also the stories of this brutality that gangus Han was spearheading. And so he had these two extremes in his experience from a very young age. And he had to grapple with that all his life in a way. And what is the inner jihad of the war or let's say the battle between good and evil,

23:19right, that's happening within it, or, you know, and I don't really like to say good and evil, and he didn't really like to say that. Let's let's talk more about, you know, the self obsessively self-interested aspect of the human versus a more generous compassionate aspect of human. And all of this is divine. All of this is within the umbrella of the divine. So there's no shame, but there's a dedication in the Sufi path to looking inward, self-reflection and looking outward and seeing how the very stifled aspect of self, the ego, the very, very self-centered aspect is wreaking havoc in inter-inter personal relations or on a global level. But anyway, he was aware of this not only because of looking out at the world, but also within the scripture, within the Quran, they're talking about maps, the self, and saying, where, what aspect of self are you at? And are you moving towards the

24:23compassionate quote unquote purified? I don't even like to use the word purified either. But this is the, you know, this is what the talking about. Interpolishing the heart is what they talk about, just getting the rust off the heart, you know, spinning down the walls of the ego. But he could see it playing out through Ginghis Khan, and he could see it playing out around him too. Because that was the human life, and we're all grappling with that. But that was one of the central commitments in his poetry to look into that, you know. Some of the crusades was that the fourth crusade, the Sacking of Constantinople had happened just around the time that he was born. Those things also affect where it is that the family went and the, you know, the politics of the time influencing their destination or their safety. Right. I think, well, I think mostly they were considered to be, you know, fleeing ahead of Mongol invasions. But yes, the crusades were happening at that time. So then like at 38, he is in Anatolia. He is a renowned preacher. Many green belts of people are

25:27coming to hear him preach. And something happens, which seems to be like a vault, a turning point in his life. I'd love for you to talk to us about that. And maybe bring us into some of the poetry about that too. Yeah. Let's start with the poem, a very short poem. Okay. You shattered my cup. You shattered my cage, light, feast, triumphant blessing, friend, trickster, haven for my drunken heart. You brought my spirit to a boil, turned my grapes to wine. You lit a fire to the fragrant wood and body of song in me. Watch the smoke rise. So this is what happened. His cage was shattered at the age of around 38 by you and who is you, shams of tabrily's, his friend, right? The friend, trickster, the haven for his drunken heart, the triumphant blessing, all of the things he said in

26:31that poem. And he speaks to shams over and over and over again in his poems. And shams was a mystic 20, 22 years older than Rumi. They met around the time that Rumi was 38, 40, and shams was around 64, 66. And basically shams was a minimalist sleeping on a rush mat, walking his talk, you know, saying on the fringes of Sufi gatherings, he kind of could penetrate, you know, the hierarchy and the facades. He didn't have any bandwidth for BS. Shams wanted to get to the heart of the matter. And he wasn't interested in hierarchies. He was very suspect of how we were talking about dissolution of self. And yet, you know, we're trying to make our turbines bigger, stuffing our turbines with rags because the bigger the turbine, the more important, or trying to sit in the VIP section when the famous speaker comes to town. You know, shams was very suspicious of this. He was like, what do you

27:35tell? How was this the walking the talk? So some people didn't like him. Some people loved him. And they would chase him down and say, be my teacher. And he would say, no, I don't want to be teacher. And he would flay, he would leave whenever he wanted from, you know, they called him patendet, which means bird. He'd be somewhere and then he'd lie away. So he was kind of a somewhat of a loner in a way. And then at around the age of 66, as the story goes, he was lonely and wanted, actually, he wanted a companion. And he said, you know, I want to bestow this knowledge I have on somebody, but I don't want any student. I don't want any disciple. He said, you know, he wanted a basically he wanted a master. He wanted someone who had climbed the mountain and all they needed and already had their wings, right? And all they needed was push. And he could watch them soar. He delighted in the mystical soaring. And wanted to see it manifest, you know. And then he heard

28:46about Molana Rumi and they probably actually met in Damascus 20 years ago. I do believe that part of the story that they did meet long before. And Molana Rumi knew about Shams and said to him, be my teacher purifier purifier, be my teacher. And Shams like, no. And so they, but then when Rumi was around 3840, Shams was ready for a companion and Rumi wanted Molana wanted a teacher because he was at the apex of his career. And he was like, is this all there is? I mean, you know, I'm surrounded by this kind of hierarchically thinking scholarly religious milieu. And I don't know there's got to be something more than this. So they met in the marketplace and boom, they recognized each other, you know, and they went into conversation. And then Rumi came down from his, well, it was a donkey, it was a horse, whatever. You could think of it metaphorically as coming off down from his

29:46high horse because he was on there with his entourage surrounding him and his silk robes and his big turban. And he got down and he went with the with the mystic vagabond, you know, scruffy vagabond. And they talked, they talked and talked and talked for months and months and months and the way they say, you know, God is in the room when two people are in the room engaged in unmasked conversation. You know, so there he was. And Molana Rumi felt like Shams was his portal to a deeper sense of the divine. Yeah. The way within which Rumi writes two and about Shams is an unashamed, unabashed love. It's extraordinary. He sees him almost sometimes. Do you say that he sees him like the cave, almost like where Muhammad met God that that Shams is the cave where Shams is the cave where where Rumi kind of reaches a further apex of his own mysticism. That's exactly right. I mean, when he says Yard, Madok, all mad, a friend cave. That's what we call him. And you know, there is a poem. I could read

30:52part of a poem that is to Shams, which Shalai read it. Yeah, please. Yeah. Okay. It's called you found me. Let me just get it. It's in gold here. Uh-huh. Here it is. And so this poem, you can see how, you know, Patrick, you had that wonderful class at the Union Theological Seminary. Yeah. Uh-huh. The you, you, you, right? So this poem, you hear the you move from Shams and eventually, it's to the divine in the last couplet. So he says, you found me once again. This is to Shams. You found me once again. You thief of hearts. In drunken ecstasy, you searched the bizarre and found me. Even through sleepy, littered, love drunk eyes, you spotted me. I ran to the tavern. You found me. Why do I run when no one can escape you? Why hide when you found me a hundred times? I thought I could lose you in a crowd of people, but you find me even in crowds of secrets,

31:59even behind my own masks. What a blessing to be sought and found by your eyes. What luck to be caught in your twists and turns, loving, sneer, persistent seer, towering cypress of countless gardens. I was pulling a thorn from my foot when you found me. You showered me with flowers from your fertile beds, dear night and gale, your melodies opened my ears, let a ladle wanting its fill of light, I plunged into the moon's halo at the bottom of that bottomless pit. You found me. Like a deer fleeing a lion, I ran through the desert deep in the mountains. You found me. Wounded, I shed my blood on every path. You followed the drops and found me. I was a hooked fish writhing in the sea waves. At the end of the line, you found me. You roamed the skies and catch galloping deer with all that skill and patience. You found me.

33:07The moment you found me, you gave me a cup brimming with love's wine. Heavy enough to match the weight on my soul. Every sip lightened it. Every sip, a bomb I drank till empty. My soul took flight. I have no mind, no ear, no tongue today. The source of thought and word found me. I just say that the direct dress, the lyrical dress of the you moves from the you of the friend into the you of the source of prayer. I've heard some people who read some homoeroticism into the relationship between Rumi and Shams. Could you talk about how it is that you respond to that or think or interpret those ideas? Yeah. Well, there's two things I want to say. One thing I want to say is that in Greek, we have agape and arrows and philia. There's one more I can't remember the

34:08name of it and it was a good one. Somebody was shouted out. I should know it too. I don't know why. Just when we finish. One thing that's not named is the love that we have for a guide, for a teacher, for the one that that pushes us and helps us fly. That is a love. The love in the Indian classical music, that's very, very, you know, the guru. You have your guru who's teaches you Indian classical music and you spend 40 years with your guru as they're called. You in the musical realm, I'm not talking about like the spiritual teacher right now, specifically about the music teacher. But this kind of love for a teacher and this dedication to a teacher is not something necessarily that we experience so much in our culture. We don't name it really. And so I think that was there. Also, do I think that there was erotic love between them? I think it's

35:10totally possible. I mean, I can't confirm it, but certainly many of the poems have an erotic flavor to them. And, you know, I think sometimes people really resist that in among like some Iranian scholars. And frankly, I find that a bit homophobic. I mean, why in the world would that not be possible that they loved each other in that way too? Of course, it's possible. And so many of our great poets through history and across cultures have had homo erotic experience, homo erotic love. So yes, I think it's very possible. I mean, there are poems that seem to point to that, you know. So yes. And also, there's this overwhelming love for the guide, for the beloved friend, for the one that you really, you know, did the friendship between the two of them last for the rest of Shams' life were they always hang alone together or do they have periods of absence or presence with each other? Well, sadly, they had two about two and a half years together only. Shams was driven from town,

36:17his roomy disciples were jealous, and they drove him from town. And then it's the rumor has it that he was actually killed. So it was devastating. And it was actually upon Shams' first disappearance that roomy started writing poetry. So he was not really writing poetry until Shams was in his life. So it was sermons up until that point, and then the sermons turned into joke, took flight, as you said. Would you be able to say a little bit about what Sufi means? Because I think again, you know, probably lots of people might have enough information about Sufi to make lots of mistakes. I think that's how I categorize myself. I feel like I've read some of what you've written and what are the people have written. So I've got smattering of information, but I think all I do would be to get it wrong at every juncture. Well, no, I doubt you get it wrong at every juncture. But, you know, a lot of people have different ways of talking about Sufism. So that's one thing. People have different

37:21even opinions about what it is. I mean, some people just say it's the mystical branch of Islam. And I think that's true. And also, you know, it is, well, first let's say Suf means wool, right? And it's a reference to the kind of minimalist. So since some people say it's a rejection of the central, I don't agree with that at all. Sufism is a very sensual mystical tradition. In a way, I think it also has aspects of animism in that in the Sufi tradition or in Sufism as express through Rumi's poetry, we have this recognition that as I said, the water is drunk. The water is alive. You know, the the cypress tree is a messenger. The nightingales are singing to us and giving us messages. Only we will listen and silence our own mind. So the whole world is alive. You know, the particle, each particle of soil is, he said, is drunk on love. So there's that sense of this kind

38:25of ecstatic as being the truth of all this whole shebang, right? The whole shebang is pulsing with God's love. And so yes, there's the wool road that you wear that some people say that's a rejection of the body, but it's not a rejection of the body. Sufism is alive with earth and body too. And also with the transcendent state and with the dissolution of the ego, I think the main thrust of the path is uncovering the divine love within us. The central ideas that God lives within us. And all we need to do is polish these egoic things that are sort of going on and grapple with them. And we never, it's the journey continues. You know, it's not this ultra like, let's be perfect and purified. Whatever that means. It's not that. It's not it's not self punishing either. You know, it's a very loving philosophy and about being in touch with the heart and feeling loved

39:27inside the heart. And it is in some ways universalist. I mean, there are aspects of it that do ring you do here, buddhas, you do here, hindu. Now is that just coincidence because it's universal human knowledge, Christian, Christian mysticism, you know, all of these traditions sort of do have a root of the root of the root in common. And so, you know, Rumi in the Mass Navi speaks of a tale that was in the Rigveda, an old Hindu text. You know, so that comes into Rumi's poetry. Now, Hazrat Inayat Khan, who is one of the great Sufis of live around 1910, you know, his belief is that music is our portal or one of his beliefs. Music is our portal to the divine and that Sufism embraces all religions, right? Hazrat Inayat Khan would speak of it that way. Some others would say, no, Sufism is totally Islamic tradition and it has nothing to do with the other traditions. You know,

40:29in some are like, well, it's very universalist and yes, it's very rooted in Islam at the same time. But to think what is at the root of the root of the root of all of these traditions, human wisdom, you know, and the heart infuse, wisdom, heart infused intellect. Yeah. Did Rumi, in tone, his poetry to the chant, was their music in the recitation? Yeah. Because I'm bringing us on to talk to you about you as a musician as well. But I was curious, what it is that we know about Rumi and music? Yeah. Well, it's certainly absolutely. I mean, one of the things that Sham's brought Rumi into was the practice of Samma. And Samma means deep listening and it also means whirling dance. So these were gatherings where musicians would play and people would quiet the mind and listen deeply and sometimes they would get up and do the whirling dance. And Sham's really encouraged Rumi

41:30to get into this practice. And it was there that he composed a lot of his poetry to the beat of a drum. So the whirling dance. Yeah. The whirling dance. Could you tell us about it? Yes, I've got a story about you that I'm going to bring off. I'm not sure. I didn't tell you that I was going to bring this up, but I wonder what it is. Okay. Charlottes, tell you about the dance first. Tell us about the dance first. Okay. So the whirling dance, it's possible that Rumi learned when he was child of women in the Haram actually, some say taught him, but also Sham's then later taught him. And some thought it was a blasphemous practice, a conservative thought it was and then others who were embracing music and dance as a portal to the divine thought. It was absolutely wonderful and encouraged it. So this is a dance where you raise your hand to the heavens and one hand to the earth. And you become a conduit for this divine energy as you whirl towards your heart.

42:30And this idea of whirling, coming back, coming back, coming back to the same point. In a way, sort of a metaphor for a lot of things, but one thing for the divine remembrance, we forget and we remember, we stray and we come back, we stray and we come back. We get, you know, frustrated with existence, which is all part of it. And it's totally okay and understandable. And then we sort of find this love that kind of helps us through that frustration. We come back. You know, we, and it's this kind of dance that we're doing. And hopefully we're sort of, you know, ascending that also we're reaching out in the centrifugal and centripetal force that's both outward and inward, you know, and that this rhythmic dance of one that requires a lot of motor coordination, but also at the end of the day requires total surrender. Because then when you really surrender in this dance, you could do it for hours.

43:33Yeah, it's an extraordinary deep stillness in the midst of motion. Exactly. The axis stays still and you're sort of whirling around your own axis and you're whirling around this divine axis that is grounded from earth through you to the heavens and you're whirling around it. And the story about you, Hale is that I was talking with somebody a couple of years ago and they said, I was at this poetry event and somebody got up and I missed her name and she began reciting Rumi and halfway through the recitation, she stood back from the microphone, raised one hand to heaven, had the other hand down to earth and began to turn. And then shortly after that picked up the electric guitar and continued to recite Rumi. And I was like, I know exactly who this person is. There's only one person who it could be. And so I feel sometimes like I'm meeting a friend of Rumi in the experience of the music as it's coming through you. You recite

44:37it in the original and then you translate yourself as you go as well. How is it that like this is you're an academic, you're a renowned translator highly regarded in the field of literary translation and you also approach this as a lover of these texts. And as somebody in whom this music lives and exists, could you talk to us a little bit about the energies of the intellect and of the heart as Rumi lives in and through you in his words? Yeah, well I have to say I really do love these texts so much. It almost brings weirdly brings me to tears in this moment, but I do approach this as a lover. I mean, it was all curiosity initially and then like just absolute falling in love with the process of sort of eating these poems and letting them work through me and letting them help me. You know, they helped me tremendously come to a place of deeper calm and you know, they've helped me evolve as a human being. And as I said, you know,

45:43there he says eat my poems like Egyptian bread. You know, he knows they're nourishing. I can attest to that and say yes, they're very nourishing. And yeah, and it's just like it's a pleasure to be inside of the poetry. I mean, gold I was working on partly during COVID, you know, and it was so lucky. I felt so lucky to be able to swim in that sea of his. I do feel like it's an enemersive experience and you know, to sit also with my mother and hear her recite it and then to recite it and then to sing it. And I think one is called to sing his poems, some of his poems, because they were written often, not all of them, but many of them to music. So they have an embedded rhythm. They have an embedded music. And so there are many Iranian vocalists, classically Iranian vocalists, you know, who sing his lyrics. That's a common thing. And we all get called to that and do it in our own ways and write our own melodies to it. Well, you know, or sing others melodies. And

46:49I've enjoyed that process of just sort of walking around a forest and seeing what melody comes for a particular couplet, you know. Beautiful. When it comes to the theories of translation, how is it that you bring yourself to that? You know, there's some theories of translation that say you try to communicate the energy and so you can perhaps use a different metaphor than what's in the original. And others would say, you know, you should try as far as possible to give as close to the original meaning as you're able in a translated language. How do you bring yourself to the project of translation? Yeah, I mean, I think that typically I'll read a poem and I'll walk around with it for a while. I think about it and feel into it. Maybe I'll think about one line and some lines. You can almost do a perfectly literal translation with a little juggling of syntax maybe. And it's it's it's the right it's good. It works, you know, but some lines are very elusive. Some lines are pointing to, you know, as I said, other other lines in other works of literature

47:57or in scripture. And, you know, sometimes there are these images that, oh, I love it when the images startle, you know, that's really fun. So I like to get the juicy, the poems with juicy images and leaps, you know, the gazelle is a form that has inherent leaps inside of it. So anyway, what I try to do is, you know, pick a poem that somehow delights me, challenges me, startles me, also poems that speak to our times. I'm interested in those that I feel speak to our times. Grabbing onto those, walking around with them, thinking about them, feeling them, eating them, trying to like, sort of really be with the lines. And then, you know, sign, then simultaneously translation comes through and then there's an editing that half and I edit, you know, it's not like I do things once I'm done. No way. I definitely spend a lot of time with it. And by the time I'm done with the poem, I typically know it by heart

48:58because it worked on it enough. As we can see. Yeah. So anyway, so that's part of the process. I'm not trying to mimic the rhythm of the original language because Persian has its own music and English has its own music and contemporary American poetry has its own music. You know, so I'm not trying to mimic the music. I think that would make me have to compromise meaning. I'm not trying to mimic the rhyme scheme or anything like that. I would have to compromise the image and the meaning to do that. So I do prioritize the message and the image that he's the metaphor that he's bringing and try to get as close to it as I can. Also, unpack when there's words that don't have one to one equivalent in English, try to unpack that within the poem instead of doing a footnote or try to bake it into the poem. These are things that I like to do with it. Yeah.

49:59What are some ways where you feel like some of Rumi's poetry feels contemporary to today? Are there particular poems where you think this is speaking to something that's very live at the moment? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the first poems in water, you know, when he says, my heart breaks when I look out on the old turning wheel of the world, the trickery, the snares, the deception, my heart breaks when I see pain planted in the soil. What will it yield? But more pain. You know, certainly speaks to our times. And you know, when he says, you know, whatever the ways of the world, what fruits do you bring? And he says, you know, in knowing that and then in that poem, he sets up all these crisis, situational, apocalyptic situations and asks us who will be, who will we be in the face of this or that or this? You know, for instance, he says, say, myzer's rule, generosity fades from memory. Still, your eyes see, your heart is full.

50:59What wage will you pay? What clothes will you offer the stripped and bare? You know, and he says, say, sun and moon, go down in hell's flames. What fire will you light? What light will you shine before we can't see? Before we can't hear? You know, so he's asking us. And then he says, you know, all these things goes on and on and on. I'm just doing a bit from the poem. But then he says, come, let's leave this all aside. We are drunk on a lofty ale. Because he knows when he's inviting us into radical generosity and radical compassion that it is a lofty ale. Right? But that's okay. Let's drink the lofty ale every now and then. Let's bring our let's rise to the occasion. He says, and he says, come, let's leave this all aside. We are drunk on a lofty ale and it's getting late. Where, my friend, is your tavern? Take us there. He, I mean, it's hard. As you recite the tenancy, the images of Gaza going through our minds to see what's on the news and the powerlessness as well as the calls to

52:04solidarity that are so important at Greenbelt and that I've heard you be so clear about as well in some of your recitations. Why did you choose the term water for the second translation? This is the last question I have for you. Yeah, water. Well, there's a lot of references to water and a lot of the poems and water, Abba Hayat, the water of life is a phrase that recurs in his poetry. And this water of life is one of the ways that he speaks of love. You know, that we can, because you know, love is a word, ash, we say in Persian, it's sort of abstract, right? And, you know, he says in one poem, you know, the grace, warmth and civility, their countless ways, right? That's love he defines at once. What is, you know, he says, if you don't know what love is, ask the desolate night, ask unkissed lips and a salaface what they miss. And then he goes on and he says, schoolbooks can't teach us what love teaches us, the grace, warmth, civility, their

53:08countless ways. You know, so that's one way he, for a moment, defines love. In other poems, he's talking about love as this water of life, Abba Hayat. So it, as I like to say often and I often say this, it waters the ground within us and between us, ensuring gardens rather than battlefields emerge, right? So this idea that love also is also Abba Hayat, it comes from the depths, it was found in the land of darkness in the space, in the void, right? The eastern void that we speak of, you know, this, this place of utter and complete, perhaps silence too of the mind, perhaps the void that we meet in meditation, perhaps it's also the dark night of the soul, where what is finally can we find there? But that fountain of love, of life force that wants to live, if we can find that little ah thing that wants to live in the dark night of the soul, then maybe that kind of emerges as a

54:12fountain and this is what then waters us as we move through this life, you know. I feel like when you talk about Rumi, you bring us into something like that turning dance, turning toward the heart where there is extraordinary energy, I know everybody can feel the energy that you bring to this but there's also, there is a stillness, there's a clarity and a strange anarchy and that stillness too of a void of something that can't be grasped in language. So thank you for the phenomenon that you bring to us in all that you've done here. I know that I am just one of all the people who are listening to this live now and also who might, who listen to this on the recording of Portschland Boundroom, we release it later on in the year, who's filled with gratitude for the dedication, the scholarship, the love that you bring to this. Your translations are Water, which is released this year, 2025 by New York Review Books and Gold, which was released a few years back and you are available for all kinds of consultations as well. So you've got the covers there.

55:16I want to thank you so very, very much, Holly. Thank you. Holly Liza Gafori is a New York City-born translator, poet and musician of Iranian descent. Her most recent book of translations of poetry by the 13th century Mystic Roomy is entitled Water and was released in April of 2025 by New York Review Books. Her first translation of Roomy was the acclaimed Gold, released in 2022 also by New York Review Books. Deepest thanks again to Holly Liza Gafori and to Paul Norther, Jane Cooxon, Joanna Booth, Stream 7, Christian 8, and all the volunteers and staff and audience members at the Greenbelt Festival for hosting and organising this conversation. Poetry and Bound is Andrea Provo, Carlisan-Oni, Darrel Chen, Sparrow Murray,

56:19Chris Hego, Bale Seagmund and me, Rodrigo Tuma. Our music is composed and provided by Goutham Shrikishan and Blue Darts Sessions. These episodes were made in New York City on unceded Linape land. Special thanks to Will Salwen, Adam Morel and Sam Girardi at Digital Island Studios in Manhattan. Thanks as well to Frederick Courtwright of the Permissions Company. Poetry and Bound is an independent, non-profit production of the on-being project founded and led by the wonderful Christopher Tipper. Poetry and Bound is made possible by a grant from the Henry Loose Foundation. Our other founding partners include the Leana Foundation, the Bideal Foundation, Engaging the Census Foundation and the listeners who give so generously via on-being and substack. Poetry and Bound will be nothing without the listening community. Thanks to all who listen and those who engage with the weekly substack newsletter. For links to that substack and to find out more about Poetry and Bound books and events, visit Poetry and Bound.org.