These eight poems by Rumi are translated by Fatima Haidari with David Keplinger.
Jalaluddin Rumi is a thirteenth-century poet, mystic, Sufi, Islamic scholar, and theologian. His collections of poetry, Masnavi Ma’navi with sixty-four thousand lines, and Divan-e-Shams with over three thousand ghazals, remain one of the most influential works of Farsi literature. He is a best-selling poet in the United States and has been translated to twenty-six languages. In the east, Afghanistan, Turkey and Iran continue to quarrel over his national identity, the highest form of compliment for an artist.
Fatima Haidari grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at American University, Washington, DC.
David Keplinger is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His work has been awarded the UNT Rilke Prize, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Colorado Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Award, and other distinctions. His translations include Carsten René Nielsen’s Forty-One Objects (Bitter Oleander, 2019) and Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary (Milkweed Editions, 2017).