Rave4ColumnsFrom rubble, from memory, the poems salvage shards. They curve lovingly around \'what we have.\' They carve not into silence, the marble of peacetime, but into a storm of noise: aerial bombing, shattering glass, surveillance drones intruding on every thought. What Abu Toha makes of this hard material is disarming. His voice tends to gentleness and wonder, nosing out beauty in all its small places.
Rumi, Tr. Haleh Liza Gafori
Rave4ColumnsRhythmic, intuitive arrangements revive the conditions in which this poetry came into being. An early meaning of translation was the movement of a saint’s body from one place to another. Through these outbursts, these notes from the edge of sense...we are drawn into the dance. We hear \'the ruckus the muse makes\' ... they speak of both heaven and earth. Mystical ideas are wrapped in the stock images of Persian love poetry—eyelashes, cupbearers, nightingales. Objects of everyday life become channels to the divine ... Coleman Barks, who since the 1980s has turned Rumi into America’s favorite guru, sought to \'free his text into its essence\' by shaking the ghazals loose of their religious content, and sometimes altogether of their meaning. Gold steers between these rocks: here is a supple, intimate idiom still anchored to the sacred, a poetics of arousal that puts \'mystery in the middle\' ... In the serene grandeur of these poems...there are traces of the Central Asian melting pot he left behind: Buddhist renunciation, Zoroastrian fire ... Beneath the gorgeous imagery, there are hard questions about how to live in times of crisis.
