RaveCleaverIn Gold, Rumi speaks to our inner skeptics. Line by line, he tries to show us how love only helps and never hurts ... Gold, translated beautifully by Haleh Liza Gafori, fulfills the need for a careful, considerate rendition of Rumi in English ... Each poem here had to be cut from this endless cloth, reshuffled, styled with modern enjambments, and, finally, translated. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of Gold not as a translation, but as a collaboration between two equal poets that spans centuries. And what music they make together. Gradually, these poems unearth a love-based philosophy for life ... In the original Farsi, these poems were ghazals, a poetic form wherein individual couplets are linked by a common refrain. Gafori doesn’t reproduce this form exactly, but she does capture its springy, mantric effect. In one poem, Rumi and Gafori create an oasis together ... Gold is filled with these revelatory moments. Often, it’s a single line that neatly ties together a poem like the final, central cog that gets a machine running. Poems build to a pitch, release, and leave perspective in their paths.
Adania Shibli, Trans. by Elisabeth Jaquette
RaveCleaverHer writing is concise ... her sentences are pared down to the bare minimum ... Shibli’s writing is in tension with what it cannot say. Information is cut out not because it’s useless, but because, like the sun, it’s too painful to look at directly ... It’s rare that a novel so subtle in its construction and sparse in its prose can cut so deeply. Shibli warps time, collapsing the past and present, to depict a Palestine that has learned to live with wartime atrocities, \'in everyday life.\'
