Love’s Ripening: Rumi on the Heart’s Journey

Here is more of the thrilling verse of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint, in translations that combine unsurpassed beauty with rigorous accuracy. Helminski and Rezwani’s translations stand out not only for their poetic eloquence, but for their faithfulness to the Persian originals (a rare thing among English versions of Rumi), and for the theme around which they are focused: the ripening, or spiritual maturing, of the soul as it grows in love toward God and others.