Rumi

We are pain and what cures pain, both.

We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,

so that we can cry out with loving.

Would you rather throw stones at a mirror?

I am your mirror and here are the stones.

In the lover’s heart is a lute

Which plays the melody of longing

You say he looks crazy

But that’s only because your ears are not attuned

to the music he’s dancing to

You are sitting here with us,

but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

 

You are yourself the animal we hunt

when you come with us on the hunt.

 

You are in your body

like a plant is solid in the ground,

yet you are wind.

 

You are the diver’s clothes

lying empty on the beach.

You are the fish.

 

In the ocean are many bright strands

and many dark strands like veins that are seen

when a wing is lifted up.

 

Your hidden self is blood in those,

those veins that are lute strings

that make ocean music,

not the sad edge of surf,

but the sound of no shore.

Venus touches the strings of her lute

 to lure out essence of this poem

My heart is like a lute each chord crying with longing and pain.

My Beloved is watching me wrapped in silence.

 

Jami

aan zamzameyam ze paye taa sar hame ‘eshq

Haqqa keh be ‘ahdha nayaayam birun

Bar ‘ude delam nawaakht yak zamzameye ‘eshq

Az ‘ahdeye haqq gozaari yakdameye ‘eshq

 

On the lute of my heart plays only one song of love:

Because of this melody, from head to foot, I am in love.

Truly, for ages I’ll never be able

To pay what I owe for one moment of love.

 

 

Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi 

(trans. William Chittick and P.L. Wilson)

Love plays its lute behind the screen –

where is a lover to listen to its tune?

With every breath a new song,

each split second a new string plucked.

The world has spilled Love’s secret –

when could music ever hold its tongue?

Every atom babbles the mystery –

Listen yourself, for I’m no tattletale!

 

 

 

 

The Guitar

by Federico García Lorca translated by Cola Franzen

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible 
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant 
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.

Guitar

Six bars cage my lonely heart

And rattle with its sad love moans

Six stars cluster round my eye

and dance, shimmering on silver thrones

 

Six dark girls, three bronze, three thin

Sing sighing for their distant homes

Six hairs heave with love’s breath

Braid flames into my wooden bones

 

Six rivers run over my mouth

And ripple with its quiet groans

Six threads from your skirt’s wide hem

Have hooked my ear and won’t let go

 

Six barbed lines make a net to catch

My spirit in its shadowed grove

Six bolts of lightning flash across

My mouth, smiling as thunder rolls

 

My body pierced by music from

The six strings of this compound bow

These six veins wrap around my heart

And bleeding song from five swords’ strokes

 

Form six paths for your love to flow

Through my heartsick and stricken soul

And weave love’s sweet, sad melodies

Between your fingers; strikes and blows

 

Segovia

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

In the violin and cello, we feel the human warmth of their timbres; and the guitar–the guitar condenses and refines the music played on it as the hundred fragrances of the forest are refined and condensed in a tiny flask.

I like very much the true flamenco, which is played with heavy fingers, roughly but from the soul. But flamenco has departed from the good simple tradition. The flamencos should not be professionals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I belong to the scarce minority of artists who work in good faith, around whom the phenomenal world vanishes, as it happens to the mystics when they give themselves to prayer.

 

 

Among God’s creatures two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all the sizes and all the shapes, in order not to be separated from the man.

 

 

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly….

 

 

Music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

 

 

The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.

― Ludwig van Beethoven