Editor’s Note: In this section, we share texts originally published by our parent publication, World Literature Today (WLT), now in bilingual edition. This text was first published in World Literature Today Vol. 100, No. 4 in July 2026.
Click here to subscribe to WLT:
Rumi (1207–1273) incorporates everyday words drawn from the Sufi lexicon as he addresses concerns ranging from materialism and warmongering to spiritual communion and the evolution of consciousness. A contemporary translator shares excerpts featuring these words, revealing how Rumi enriched them and extended their reach.
The thirteenth-century Persian sage Rumi stepped down from the pulpit around the age of thirty-eight, turning from sermons to poetry, but his impulse to offer spiritual guidance and navigate us through the baffling experience of being human never died. In this endeavor, he called upon all his resources, drawing on his own struggles and observations, the teachings of his beloved guide Shams, as well as literary and spiritual texts, including poetry by Sufi forerunners Attar and Sana’i, Persian folktales, the Qur’an, Hadith, and on rare occasions, Pali Buddhist stories. His work often incorporates words from the established lexicon of Sufism, including common words from the kitchen, street, market, and tavern, which he further invests with a spiritual charge of his own. He turns to these words when addressing some of his most urgent concerns, such as stages of spiritual development or the materialism and warmongering that afflicted his world as it does ours. When translating Rumi’s poetry, these everyday words present a challenge. The translator must preserve their familiar ring while also imparting the deeper meanings he intended. Let’s look at six of these words, starting in the kitchen.
Raw, Cooked, Burned (khaam, pokhteh, sookteh)
Summing up his life, Rumi once said, “I was raw. I was cooked. I was burned up,” a blunt and bewildering declaration. And yet, with these three sentences, he also sums up the Sufi path.
Rumi applies the words “raw,” “cooked,” and “burned” to the human psyche and ego, marking three stations along a path of evolving consciousness, which, he insists, is open to anyone with the will for introspection and a devotion to spiritual practice.
To be khaam or uncooked is to dwell in the earliest stage of the mutable self, to be bound up in self-interest and blind to the deeper truth of interconnection. To varying degrees, the uncooked may be prone to greed, lust for dominion, and obsession with status. They may cling to false certainties, choosing dogma over bewilderment. They may fear the emptiness and the ache of separation so much that they scramble to find relief in possessions, control, or spectacle. The most benign are shackled by self-consciousness while the most malevolent wreak havoc. Addressing the warmongers of his time, Rumi writes:
What kind of lightning are you setting farms on fire?
What kind of cloud are you raining down stones?
What kind of hunter?
Caught in your own trap—
a thief stealing from your own house.
You’re sixty years old. You’re seventy years old,
and you’re still uncooked?
Still won’t let love’s flames near,
Won’t let them burn you up?
Enthralled by stuff and status,
The crown, the turban, the king’s beard—
thorns pricking your hands
and where is the flower?
In another direct address to a blustering leader, Rumi writes:
Master, your head is swollen with fantasies.
One moment, you celebrate,
one moment, you sulk.
You’re in the fire now. I’ll leave you there
till you’re cooked,
till you’re no longer a slave to your mind,
till you’re its master.
Not limited to warmongers and statesmen, hierarchical thinking, grandiose fantasies, and obsession with status were common in Rumi’s scholarly and religious milieu. While preaching about ego dissolution and self-transcendence, sheikhs and scholars vied for robes of honor and VIP seats, and, as size indicated status, some stuffed their turbans with rags. As Rumi neared the apex of his career, preaching for thousands in a massive turban and silk robe, he was growing weary of fame and the hypocrisy he sensed around him and perhaps within. Later, he writes:
I wanted to be a kingpin,
top dog, bigger than big.
Like smoke, I climbed greedily,
going nowhere—
a crooked plume, wayward,
drifting over parched land,
thirsty for meaning.
I didn’t know when Love hunts you down,
when you fall prey to Love,
you only rise higher.
Whether Rumi’s confessional poems are reflective of his own experience or not, his choice to write in first person creates an intimacy and sense of solidarity with listeners. He speaks not as a distant saint but as a peer evolving alongside or just ahead of us. In another stream of confessions, he writes:
I saw myself sharp as a thorn.
I fled to the softness of petals.
I saw myself sour as vinegar.
I mixed myself with sugar.
An aching eye seeing through pain,
a stewing pot of poison,
I was both.
Reaching for the antidote,
I touched compassion.
I touched mercy.
I was a cup holding only dregs.
I poured in the water of life.
Raw and callow,
I followed the one already cooked by Love’s fire.
The one he “followed” was a scruffy mystic, lone traveler, and spiritual master in common clothes named Shams of Tabriz. Rumi was around the age of thirty-eight when they met, sitting on a horse, in a lavish robe, surrounded by followers, weary of fame and hungry for meaning. Over the course of a few years, Shams cooked Rumi. Their love, their unmasked conversations, the character-forging demands Shams made, the devotional practices he introduced, and the turbulence of their relationship, which alternated between periods of intense intimacy and sudden estrangement, all fed the fire that transfigured Rumi. Under Shams’s influence, not only did Rumi convert from preacher to poet, but he finally experienced the spiritual states he had been preaching about for so long.
From the start of their relationship, Shams knew Rumi was a formidable creative force but one shackled by his reputation and guarded in his communication. Still attached to reputation, name, and rank, still “raw and callow,” Rumi had yet to experience fana or dissolution of self and union with the divine. And he had yet to find his true voice. Shams insisted an essential step toward his liberation involved rebelling against the expectations of conservatives and even staining his reputation in their eyes. To that end, he sent Rumi to a Jewish neighborhood where wine was freely made and sold, demanding he return carrying a jug on his back so everyone could see—the latter, a blasphemous act for a Muslim sheikh. Along with many other tasks and challenges, Shams introduced Rumi to sama, a practice of deep listening and whirling dance. It was an act of love, and rebellion, to engage in sama, which conservatives considered at best a distraction, at worst a sin, sometimes attempting to outlaw it. Likely echoing Shams, Rumi writes:
Let them judge. Let them talk.
Let them smear your good name.
You’ll have less to guard!
Lover,
the eyes of lovers behold you.
Your friend is the sea.
Rumi whirled for hours on end, spinning free of what Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.” Thanking Shams, Rumi calls out:
Light, feast, triumphant blessing,
friend, trickster, haven for my drunken heart . . .
you shattered my cage . . .
You fountain of grace,
you fire in thickets of tangled thought.
Today you arrived beaming with laughter—
that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.
A propensity for laughter is an important mark of spiritual development. The ones who have burned up and merged with love’s fire are quick to laugh, and their sense of humor is contagious. “It tears through me like fire. It teaches me,” Rumi says. And later:
Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl.
I’ll still be laughing.
It’s the rookies who laugh only when they win.
Rumi uses the word khaaman here, which I translated to “rookies” rather than “the raw ones,” “the uncooked,” “the beginners,” or “amateurs.” “Rookies” connotes competition, which struck the perfect note as Rumi uses the words “win” and “conquer,” poking fun at the ego’s fixation on victory and undue distress at defeat. He continues:
Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold—laughing in fire, daring you,
“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”
We’re fodder for death so learn to laugh
from the angel of death
He laughs at the jeweled belt and crowns of kings—
all that splendor’s just on loan.
Presence and permeability to both the comedy and the tragedy of life distinguish the cooked and burned from the raw who will fortress themselves in myriad ways to avoid intimacy with life’s ups and downs. The raw resist the fire of love, sorrow, discipline, and longing. The cooked endure and eventually welcome it. The burned become it. To be burned up is to be liberated from the cramped architecture of a narrow and defensive self, from its calculations and fears, and to exist, bravely present, merged with a divine love.
Rumi writes:
Leave your tricks and schemes behind.
Like a moth, hungry for light,
dive into the blazing heart of the flame.
Be a stranger to yourself.
Wreck the house you call self.
Wake up in Love’s house.
Rumi surely woke up there and, once again, acknowledges Shams:
You brought my spirit to a boil,
turned my grapes to wine.
You lit a fire to the fragrant wood
and body of song in me.
Watch the smoke rise.
Morsel (loghmeh)
Rumi equates the word “morsel” with material gain, intentionally using the diminutive term to downplay the importance of material pursuit. No matter how grand the material acquisition, it is still a mere morsel, fleeting and unable to satisfy the deeper hunger of the soul. He writes:
You are a guest on this earth, not a beggar.
Don’t trade the water of your soul
for a morsel of bread.
End to end the whole material world
is less than a single morsel.
Greed for crumbs dries up the river.
For Rumi, to be obsessed with material gain is to be more beggarly than beggars. An impoverished beggar needs the money he begs for; the rich do not, and yet wealthy hoarders take and take, mistaking wealth for life’s deepest reward.
The last line quoted above brings to mind bodies of water dried up by corporate diversion and extraction, though Rumi, writing eight hundred years ago, is more likely speaking of our internal landscape. “In the depths of the soul, there is a gushing spring, invisible to the eye,” he says. Aabeh hayat, the “water of life,” “bubbles up from its depths.” When we tend to our soul, this water, this life force, “flows through our veins” and does not run dry.
Addressing one in thrall to material cravings like the hungry ghost of Buddhist tradition, grasping endlessly and never satisfied, Rumi writes:
Why scheme for a morsel?
Curb your insatiable hunger
and you won’t be seduced by a trickster
nor reduced to being one.
When greed groans,
I play deaf.
In these stanzas and throughout his poetry, Rumi mixes the imperative voice with the confessional, assuring us again that he is not holier than thou but just another human, experiencing the challenges of being both matter and spirit, with all its attendant hungers. In the last stanza above, like a true friend, he shares a favorite strategy for managing lesser impulses.
Biographers from medieval to contemporary times confirm that Rumi walked his talk. One night, after whirling at a sama gathering and wandering through town in his elated state, he hears the robab, an instrument he adored. It’s “the sound of a creaking door opening to paradise,” he would tell his son. Ecstatic, he hands over gifts he received that night to a beggar, including a fur-collared robe. Later, he writes:
Lovers whirl in devotion. Ecstasy their crown.
Where they are, what use is the royal cloak?
Beautiful one, dressed to serve, come and dance.
Speaking to the Love within us all, Rumi urges, “Unveil your face . . . so water reflecting you becomes the jewel.” Far more precious than any gemstone—any “morsel”—is Love reflected in our world.
Poverty (faghr)
In a poem from Divan-i-Shams, Rumi begins, “Last night in my dream, I saw my poverty (faghr).” The literal translation is stark and cofounding if we only have access to the common meaning of faghr.
In Rumi’s poetry and in Sufi literature, faghr does not refer to material poverty but to spiritual poverty, a hunger in the soul satisfied only by communion with the divine. Some call it a God-sized hole. Rumi believes this emptiness is part of the human condition, no need to avoid it nor to futilely fill it with stuff. In fact, faghr is a coveted, holy state. It “makes room for Love’s wine.” He writes:
Last night in my dream,
I saw my hunger. I saw my need.
I saw an emptiness only God can fill.
Enchanted by the beauty of this poverty,
I nearly fainted.
Enchanted by its perfection,
I lay awestruck till dawn.
This poverty is a mine of rubies.
Its red glow drapes me in silk.
Rather than adding a footnote or endnote to a literal translation of faghr, I decided to unpack the word inside the poem, baking the spiritual connotations into the first stanza. Then, in the second and fourth stanzas, I was able to simply use the word “poverty,” knowing it would carry the penumbra of meaning that Rumi intended and could not be flattened into its colloquial meaning.
The poem closes with paradoxes and stunning beauty—a full emptiness, a rich poverty, and a sensual experience of the divine. Far from the notion of a harsh and punishing God, here is an inviting, silky, and rosy vision of communion
Drunk (mast)
In Rumi’s poetry, mast most often means drunk on God, drunk on love, drunk on the miracles of existence and mysteries of nonexistence, reeling with wonder and awe. Mastee is a state of rapture.
In colloquial Persian, the intoxicant is alcohol. Rumi acknowledges the many sources of mastee and includes wine and hashish on his list as well as power, doubt, and delusion. Highlighting the range of possibility, he writes, “Jesus was drunk on God’s Love. His donkey was drunk on barley.”
The notion of divine Love as intoxicant is a common Sufi trope. Poets such as Attar and Sana’i, Rumi’s predecessors, invoked it to communicate an absorption in God and the dissolution of the rational, calculating mind. They conceived of mastee as an exceptional state. Rumi takes the trope further, proposing that divine intoxication is a basic, underlying condition of the cosmos. He writes:
Gardener, listen.
Thunder beats a drum. Clouds pour the wine.
The garden is drunk, the meadow is drunk,
the buds and thorns are drunk.
Whirling sky, watch how the elements whirl!
Water is drunk, air is drunk, earth is drunk, fire is drunk.
Don’t even ask about the unseen.
Spirit is drunk, intellect is drunk, imagination is drunk,
and the mysteries of eternity—
they’re the drunkest of all.
Liberate yourself from the tyranny of self.
Be humble as soil and you will see
every particle of soil is drunk on Love—
by the Creator’s design.
In winter, the garden is still drunk.
The roots of trees secretly sip wine.
The whirling elements and drunk particles of soil bring to mind electrons spinning around the nucleus of atoms like whirling dervishes. And though Rumi had no notion of subatomic happenings, he was mirroring a recurring motif in the spinning Milky Way when he whirled for hours on end. He saw mastee in every particle of every being, a rapturous life force coursing through all. And though it is often buried or obscured by the mundane demands of material existence and the mind’s attachments and delusions, he invites us to burn through the latter and access the wellspring. Rumi seems divinely compelled to raise the bar on feeling states we deem accessible, and perhaps simply by invoking mastee again and again in his intoxicating verse, he inches us closer.
In the first poem I ever heard by Rumi, he praises the mastaan or Love-drunk. My father recited it in Persian, and I think of him every time I recite it. He was a doctor, a gynecological oncologist and master surgeon, sometimes called in for emergencies in the wee hours of the morning. He once asked me, “Haleh, do you know who’s in the hospital working at four a.m. every day? The janitors,” he said, answering his own question. “They’re mopping the floors and cleaning the toilets. Not easy. Don’t ever look down on them. Respect them, respect people of service.” My father was khaaki, another everyday word that recurs in the poetry and has its own spiritual dimensions. To be khaaki literally means to be “of the soil.” In Rumi’s poetry and beyond, this coveted attribute means humble, reverent, free of obsessions with hierarchy and status. It opens us to awe and mastee. Here is a translation of the first poem I heard my father recite:
The house overflows with drunkards,
drunk on Love.
More come knocking.
Crazed but still bound,
they tore off their chains.
You can’t quiet this ruckus.
The heavens are beating the drums in celebration.
Ecstatic souls,
hearts that serve the heart,
broke free from their prisons
and launched like birds.
They shattered the jugs.
They don’t need them.
Their bodies are barrels,
their blood is wine.
Oh God, what wine did they drink?
Oh God, what Love did they taste?
Rumi invites us to live by an ethic of Love, care, and reverence, knowing there are a multiplicity of inclinations within and temptations without that may “drag us this way and that.” Like a whirling dervish who turns and turns, straying from one point to arrive there again, it is the nature of humans to forget and remember, forget and remember the soulful truths of interconnection and oneness. In cultures steeped in of materialism and militarism that rely on spiritual impoverishment and polarizing narratives, it becomes even harder to remember. Rumi’s verses constitute a poetry of remembrance. He is rooting for humanity, and it is a testament to his devotion that he summons all his poetic resources—dazzling images, form, meter, rhyme, rich metaphors, leaping progressions of thought, confessional and didactic tones, as well as these spiritually charged everyday words—not only to create aesthetic masterpieces but also to communicate his liberating visions.
Author’s note: All poems and excerpts are translated by Haleh Liza Gafori from Gold (2022) and Water (2025), published by New York Review Books / NYRB Classics.
Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!
