Maulana Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī - Spiritual verses: the first book of the Masnavi-ye Manavi

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3 Copyright Alan Williams, 2006
All rights reserved The moral right of the translator has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 9781101491690 Though Rumis Masnavi is vast in scale, it is one of the most personal poems ever written. It is a revolution against imprisonment in personality and against estrangement from our true selves. I first encountered the Masnavi more than thirty-five years ago, in Reynold Alleyne Nicholsons (London, 192340) translation. It was an experience of entrancement but also perplexity. What poetry lay in the Persian, behind Nicholsons highly literal, prose, version? I ended up switching from an undergraduate degree in Classics to the study of Persian and Arabic language and literature.

Now I could read the Masnavi in Persian, I saw just how much of the original is lost in prose translation. It was only later, in the experience of trying to teach students how the poetry of Rumi works , that I began to wish to do my own metrical English translations of the Masnavi . Initially I was asked by my editor to translate the entire work: I pointed out that that would be a long time in preparation. I resisted the idea of anthologizing: this has been done before, and, more importantly, what is lost in such story-based anthologies is the coherence of the didactic structure. So I translated the first book as faithfully as possible, and at the same time into a poetic form, namely iambic-pentameter couplets of blank verse. I have tried to keep faith both with the Persian language and with the poetic integrity of the couplet form.

This first book of the Masnavi is the key to understanding the whole work. Nobody who translates the Masnavi can step out of the long shadow cast by Nicholsons monumental work of scholarship. However, readers often find his translation difficult to understand because of its archaic language and difficult phrasing; moreover his literalness in explaining the letter of the text in prose loses the poetic coherence and power that drive the Masnavi forward and hold the readers attention. Though a great deal has been written about Rumi over the last hundred years, and about his ideas in the greater context of Sufism, to date there has been little written in European languages about the actual poetry of the Masnavi. Scholars have laboured to translate this and other Sufi classics, but very little analytical work has been done on the literary and linguistic form of the texts. Such is the reverence many readers have for Rumi that in some cases what are intended as serious academic studies are in fact more celebrations than elucidations.

This is not a new phenomenon, as for many centuries a devotional culture has surrounded the figure of Rumi: he has been seen, especially outside Iran, as a saintly sheikh at the centre of the Mevlevi tradition rather than as a poet whose works could be thought about. There are signs that this is about to change. Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own. In reading the text with my students, and in reading my translations out to listeners, I began to engage with the structures of Rumis method of communication and his poetic voice in a way that went beyond merely studying the original text privately. I was particularly fortunate to benefit from working with a master of the Persian nay (flute) and voice, Ostad Hosayn Omoumi, in a recitation of the Masnavi and musical performance in London in 2002 an experience that made me realize that any translation must be worth reading aloud! I am deeply indebted to him, and also to the many students with whom I have read the Masnavi at the University of Manchester over the years.