Date
25 November 2002 – 7pm.

Venue
St. John’s, Smith Square, London SW1P 3HA.

Organised by
The Iran Heritage Foundation and
The Nava Art Group
in association with the Temenos Academy.

Box Office
020 7222 1061, www.sjss.org.uk.

Tickets
£6, £9, £12.

Enquiries
Tel: 020 7493 4766, E-mail: info@iranheritage.org.

Sponsored by
Pej Danaee.

Introduction
One of America’s most influential poets, and recipient the National Book Award (1968), Robert Bly (1926-) will read from his translations of Hafiz and Rumi. Bly’s translations of Persian mystical poetry have allowed these medieval Islamic poets to be heard clearly by contemporary audiences. His versions bring forward their ancient wine of ecstasy in an English that is neither bookish nor faddish. The listener will soon understand how this poetry from the peak period of Persian culture has recently become a great favourite of Western readers, so that the translations have sold thousands of copies.

In the 1970s, the Western poetry scene was severely limited in its appreciation of the poetry of the Persianate cultural world. Thanks to Robert Bly, the poetry of Rumi, Kabir and Mirabai was re-introduced to the English-speaking world during that decade. Bly has published over 12 volumes of his own poetry, has been the editor of ten anthologies of poetry, and written some eight prose works. His best-known prose work is Iron John, which for several months in 1991 was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Bly’s other major work of prose is The Sibling Society (1996), a critique of modern society from a literary and cultural standpoint grounded in the symbolism of poetry and myth. Basing himself on a perspective of spiritual understanding founded in what certain modern Catholic Thomist and Muslim Sufi thinkers have termed the philosophia perennis, he clarifies the meaning and relevance of spiritual intellect to modern society, lamenting the hegemony of horizontal literalism in our media organizations and teaching institutions. Wisdom, he declares, lies in the power to think vertically.

Robert Bly will be accompanied by Arash and Koorosh Moradi on the tambour and setar (two classical Persian instruments).