99 Poems In Translation

Full of surprising juxtapositions and possessed of a gargantuan range of voices and styles, 99 Poems in Translation is a unique convergence of some of the world’s most beautiful poetry. The poets range from Anna Akhmatova to Yuan Chen, from Charles Baudelaire to Virgil, each of them translated into memorable English by such poetic luminaries as Ben Johnson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Graves. Arranged alphabetically, this collection span centuries and continents.

Full of surprising juxtapositions and possessed of a gargantuan range of voices and styles, 99 Poems in Translation is a unique convergence of some of the world's most beautiful poetry. The poets range from Anna Akhmatova to Yuan Chen, from Charles Baudelaire to Virgil, each of them translated into memorable English by such poetic luminaries as Ben Johnson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Graves. Arranged alphabetically, this collection span centuries and continents.

A unique collaboration between a Cistercian monk and a scholar of Islamic translation, this volume offers fresh and distinctive interpretations of works by the spiritual Sufi poet, Hafiz of Shiraz. Combining scholarly precision with keen sensitivity to the mystic contours of the Persian originals, these esoteric verses are rendered into English without forfeiting the artistry or accuracy of the original intent. Knitting together aesthetics and erudition, each poem seeks to be intellectually stimulating and spiritually invigorating. Generated through conversation and exchange, and supplemented with reflective introductions and notes, these poetic translations provide an authentic means of crossing religious and cultural borders, admitting contemporary audiences into the world of Persian Sufism.

The most recent volume of this distinguished annual

This book is like no other presentation of Rumi you have ever seen: a diversely representative 99-part translation set up as a talk show of conversations in artisanal lyrical verse, where every Rumi selection stimulates a carefully crafted sonnet as a modern-day comment-reply to a medieval Persian poet of world stature. The appealing poet Maulana (or Mevlana) Jalalaldin Muhammad Rumi(1207-1273) gave the impetus for the order of Whirling Dervishes, who emblemize, in their solemn, graceful circling dances with mystically symbolic gestures, the nature of the universe itself. The created world is a gigantic circle of fire that dances forever in amorous adoration around the Throne of God. This God is beyond all concepts: His 99 "names" are only rubrics of qualities or attributes. Closely allied with medieval mystic teacher Ibn Arabi, to whom Rumi is often compared, the Persian lyrical dancer-visionary sees us in God's likeness. God, Ultimate Being, is unknowable; the created world reflects him (or her, or it, or them) only obliquely and incompletely. We, too, are unmanifest, hidden even from ourselves, in our essential Being; and, as with the unmanifest nature of God, we can be known to ourselves only in fragmentary flashes. What does this mean for us? It means we must each be a poet, using metaphor to imagine whatever in ourselves cannot, because of its depth, be known by intellect. God is the First Poet, and we, created in His likeness, must be the creative artists of our imagined worlds as we seek, in our pilgrimage-lives, to imagine the two Great Unknowns, the unmanifest Ultimate Being in our Source and within us. In the book you are holding, I allow myself the privilege to converse with Rumi by means of "dialogic translation"-a newly conceived genre of literature. It's like a series of YouTube or podcast interviews I set up here with my medieval friend, the engaging Sufi mystic who unfailingly invigorates the hearer in many countries of the world today.

This anthology is not about poetry translation, nor is it a book of translated poems, but rather a book of poetry and translation. Each of the 16 poems in the book has been chosen to illustrate a general issue that translators encounter in their daily work.