Introduction of “Rumi and Friends”

Hamid Zavosh a well-known author and translator living in Southern California has recently written a book on the great Persian poet, Rumi. The following is an introduction to his work.

"My name is Hamid Zavosh, I reside in Los Angeles. For several years I worked on selecting poems of Iranian poets and translated these into English.

This last August, IUniverse, Inc. published the book titled: "Rumi and Friends", a selection of poems from 19 Iranian Poets, but mainly poems of four of the world-famous ones, to wit: Rumi, Sa'di, Hafiz, and Khayyam, which were translated into verse form.

The first intended audience and the main focus of the book, are young Iranians who, due to circumstances, were not fortunate enough to learn to read and write in their mother-tongue, and who as a result are unable to tap into the vast spiritual resources of their forefathers, so very much required in modern stressful times!!

By bringing the spiritual messages of our sages to these young folks, it was and is my intention and hope to attract and entice them, through the medium of poetry, back into their cultural-spiritual roots. It is my belief that any person of whatever background who does not respond to the needs and denies food and drink to sustain his or her spirit, is destined to lie on the couch of psycho-analysts/therapists and drugs like Prozac, etc. which provide temporary relief, but may cause harmful side-effects.

The above statement is made as a result of my discussions with a group of psycho analysts/therapists I met during the "Rumi 2000 Conference " in San Bernardino, California, in October of the year 2000. When I asked them: “what are all you psychos.... doing here?”, they answered that they use poems of Rumi, etc. to bring relief and soothe the psyches of their patients!! (Not one of them was an Iranian!!!) Some years before that I had already embarked on writing this book, but was happy to learn, that besides the intended educational and cultural benefits for Iranians, these poems are and could be used, according to the experts, to heal certain disturbances and stresses of the human psyche, regardless of their cultural background!!

I would like to remind the reader that Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi is the 13th Century Persian Poet, whose translations have sold 750,000 copies here, and is quite well-known in certain circles in the U.S. literary and intellectual world.

For this book I selected 33 of Rumi's poems and 6 of his Quatrains, 21 of Hafiz's Ghazals, 12 of Sa'di's poems, 17 Quatrains of Khayyam, with 17 poems of several other Persian poets, and translated these into English verse forms. It can be viewed/purchased from Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Books-A-Million.com.

This message is for poetry-loving people. I am informing them of the publication of this book, assuming that they may wish to avail themselves of the pearls of wisdom and flower garlands of joy contained in their poems."

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Khorsheed.com – Nov, Dec 2003