Rumi’s Birds of Wonder
The Great Sufi’s Life and Poetry (Selections from the Dīvān-e Shams)
Translated by Iraj Anvar
Paperback
ISBN 9781966608332
$24.95 US
eBook available
July 14, 2026
The ecstatic love poems and life of Rumi, the world’s most popular poet
Rumi has left us thousands of lyric ghazals in Persian, covering every imaginable note and nuance of human experience. Choosing from this multitude of songs is a daunting and revealing task that translator Iraj Anvar has done to perfection in this new collection.
In this volume, our Iranian-born translator has opted for the ecstatic, “drunken,” love-struck Rumi whose intoxicating rhythms, breathless urgency, and dizzying epiphanies of spiritual union and transformation are beautifully carried into the twenty-first century. This collection of 104 ghazals is presented in modern English, and their Persian originals are included as well. Together they present Rumi as the world’s timeless, classic interpreter of the human soul’s love-sickness, with lament and deepest longing for love of every kind—divine and human.
A thorough and complete Introduction not only “sets the scene” for the poems, but offers an essential glimpse at the life and times of the great poet.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, most often called simply Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. His influence transcends religion and nationality. Rumi has been described as the world’s most popular poet.
Translator Iraj Anvar is an actor, singer, director, translator, and educator. After completing a degree in Rome, he returned to his native Tehran and cofounded the Tehran Theater Workshop where he directed and performed, and translated plays and film into Persian. A few months before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he moved to New York City, where he received his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU and taught Persian language and literature. In New York he continues to translate and sing Rumi, Hafiz, and other classical poets in Persian. His published work also includes the ghazals of Hafiz in The Green Sea of Heaven (Monkfish, 2024).
For the author’s earlier books:
“Achieves the almost impossible, rendering the virtually untranslatable Hafiz into beautiful and accurate poetry. There are so many fake translations of Hafiz floating around, offering ‘versions’ that have no earthly connection to anything that the Persian poet and sage of Shiraz named Hafiz ever said.” —Omid Safi, professor of Islamic mysticism, Duke University; author of Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition
“This is a groundbreaking work, one that places the ghazal of Hafiz into a contemporary English poetic idiom. After too long a wait, we encounter Hafiz, come alive in an English style that is at once natural and intricate. This is a remarkable achievement.” —Michael Sells, author of Mystical Languages of Unsaying
“These are truly remarkable and moving translations: the first English versions of Hafiz to read as poetry while still capturing the unique qualities of concision, multivalent meaning and spiritual depth which have for centuries made his Persian ghazals the acknowledged masterpiece and exemplar of poetic art throughout the Eastern Islamic world.” —James W. Morris, professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College
