Growing up in Kabul, I would hear Rumi’s poems everywhere, in old men’s conversations in a corner shop, on the radio before the host started the show, in my mother’s sayings. It was as if Rumi’s poetry was in the atmosphere of the city. Rumi is commonly referred to as Maulana for Maulana Jalaluddin Mohammad Balkhi, his complete name. Balkh is a province in northern Afghanistan, loved by the rest of the country for giving birth to Maulana and many other such figures.  

When I came to the U.S. a couple of years ago, I wasn’t surprised to learn of Rumi’s popularity among intellectuals, social media users, Pinterest boards of teenage girls decorated with “inspirational quotes” of Maulana in English. I soon found myself unpleased by the “inspirational quotes” version of the same poems that I had enjoyed reading and hearing growing up. Part of the reason the poems did not have the same effect on me, I assumed, had to do with the fact that I was now reading them in a third language. But another reason, I came to realize, was because the poems were heavily interpreted in the process of translation. I understand much gets lost in translation, and the translator sometimes must compromise on words to capture the essence of what is said in the original text. 

I wanted to take a different approach translating these poems. My intension was to offer a word-by-word translation in order to give the reader the liberty of interpreting the work themselves. As a native Farsi speaker, my experience of reading Maulana’s poems while translated in this manner, is the closest to when I read the text in the original language. I wanted to offer the reader a glimpse into how the poems could be felt and experienced in the original form by a native speaker of the language.