“That which exists, exists to be lost and treasured,” writes Lisel Mueller in her short, wonderful poem about what makes our mortal lives meaningful.
To be precious — that is the labor of love, the labor of love, the great reward of love. Death compensation. It is a human miracle that makes the passage of life not only bearable but beautiful.
It is sad enough that we lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, to the point that we lose life itself – because we are a function of the universe that would not be otherwise. But it is one of our human-made sorrows that we often face our fear of loss – that deep consciousness of our mortality – by losing sight of how precious we are to each other, we waste a little with love-the miracle of our time together, We write poems and pop songs about our own self-inflicted tragedy — “The art of losing is not difficult to master“; “It doesn't always seem to go away that you don't know what you have until it's gone. – and we continue to live.
Eight centuries before Mueller lived and died, a burning invitation to transcend self-inflicted misery began to take shape in another short, remarkable poem by another poet of rare contact with the deepest part of life's truth: Rumi (September 30, 1207–December 17, 1273), who believed that you must “gamble everything to find love, if you are a true person.” Rumi, ancient and eternal. He is a magnet for his artistic dedication and soulful intelligence. She is stunning in her flowing silk dress and her contempt for the status quo of her culture. A volcano with poetry.
In his sixty-six years, Rumi composed nearly sixty-six thousand verses, inspired by a joyful devotion to living life fully and loving deeply. After mastering the mathematical music of the quatrain, he became a virtuoso of the ghazal and its series of couplets, each calling for a different poetic image, each crowned with the same repetition – a kinetic recording of surprise, rhythmic delight.
A wonderful selection of his poems appears, including some that have never survived in English Gold (public library), recently translated and inspired by poet and singer Haleh Liza Gafori.
Reflecting on the creative challenge of summoning the poetic truth of one era and culture to another, he writes:
The Farsi and English languages have very different poetic resources and practices. In English, it is not possible to reproduce the rich interplay of sound and rhyme (internal and terminal) and wordplay that express and propel Rumi's poetry. Meanwhile, the tropes, abstractions, and hyperbole that abound in Persian poetry contrast with the finality and practicality of English poetry, especially in modern culture. I have tried to honor the demands of contemporary American poetry and incorporate their music while, I hope, continuing the whirling movement and the progressive development of ideas and images in Rumi's poetry…
What emerges is a testament to Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska's vision of “that rare miracle when a translation ceases to be a translation and becomes… a second original.”
Here is Haleh Liza Gafori reading her interpretation of Rumi's invitation to wipe the lenses to move beyond self-inflicted tragedy and into the deeper, perhaps the only truth of life:
LET'S LOVE EACH OTHER
by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)let's love each other,
let's respect each other my friend.
before we lose each other.You'll miss me when I'm gone.
You will make a deal with me.
So why are you taking me to court while I'm still alive?Why do you serve the dead but fight the living?
You will kiss my tombstone.
Behold, I lie here and now like a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!
Complete this section of the Gold with James Baldwin on how separation illuminates the power of love and Thich Nhat Hanh on the call to deep listening – a practice and central to Rumi's life – as the root of romantic relationships, and revisits poet Jane Hirshfield's timeless song of love and loss.
