This is Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm. This week, we're re-airing a show from May of 2017.

It's a show about the great medieval Persian poet Rumi, and we're doing this in preparation for our show next week,

when we'll be introducing the work of another great medieval Persian poet,

Sadi of Shiraz, whose work has never before been translated.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books? Where would we be without good-nosed bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm. Well, a remarkable thing has

happened. You know, Rumi, the Persian poet Rumi, has been for a long time the best-selling poet

in America. But not many people know very much about him,

and I'd simply assumed,

since he was born over 800 years ago,

that there wasn't much left to know.

Well, Brad Gooch, who has written biographies

before this of Flannery O'Connor and of Frank O'Hara,

has written a biography of Rumi that takes us from, what is it?

What's the year?

Birth date, 1207, dies in 1273.

Born in Central Asia, in what's now Tajikistan, dies in what's now Turkey.

So, you know, long life and a life that covered 2,500 miles also traveling.

And manages somehow to invent a poetry so joyful, so given to ecstasy, that he is a predecessor

...