The Masnavi of Rumi, Book Two: A New English Translation with Explanatory Notes

by Rumi, Alan Williams (Translator)

Overview

Jalaloddin Rumi's Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, or 'Spiritual Couplets', composed in the 13th Century, is a monumental work of poetry in the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism. For centuries before his love poetry became a literary phenomenon in the West, Rumi's Masnavi had been revered in the Islamic world as its greatest mystical text. Drawing upon a vast array of characters, stories and fables, and deeply versed in spiritual teaching, it takes us on a profound and playful jourbaney of discovery along the path of divine love, toward its ultimate goal of union with the source of all Truth.

In Book Two of the Masnavi, the second of six volumes, we travel with Rumi toward an understanding of the deeper truth and reality, beyond the limits of the self. Alan Williams's authoritative new translation is rendered in highly readable blank verse and includes the original Persian text for reference. True to the spirit of Rumi's poem, this new translation establishes the Masnavi as one of the world's great literary achievements for a global readership.

Translated with an introduction, notes and analysis by Alan Williams and including the Persian text edited by Mohammad Este'lami.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788313148
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/20/2020
Edition description:	Annotated
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	1,005,815
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.52(h) x 1.31(d)

About the Author

Mowlana Jalaloddin Balkhi (1207-1273), known to the West as Rumi is a Persian poet comparable to the greatest poets of Europe. In 1244, Rumi began the composition of a body (divan) of lyric poems (ghazals) totalling 35,000 verses. In the early 1260s he turbaned to the composition of his most mature and final work, the mystical masterpiece in six volumes of Persian verses known as the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi 'The Spiritual Couplets'.

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester and the translator of Spiritual Verses (London, 2006).

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Chronology xi

Introduction xiii

Further Reading xxiii

Note on the Translation xxvi

English Translation of The Masnavi Book Two 'The Ending of the Self 1

Rumi's Preface 3

Poem on the fantasies of self-love and illusion 5

How, in the time of Omar, May God be pleased with him, the moon appeared to someone's imagination 12

A snake-catcher's stealing a snake from another 13

The request of the companion of Jesus that Jesus should bring bones back to life 13

A Sufi tells a servant to look after his mount and the 'God help us!' of the servant 14

The King finds his falcon in the house of a poor old woman 25

Sheikh Ahmad son of Khezruya buys halva for his creditors, by the grace of God Almighty 28

An ascetic who was warned not to weep 32

The peasant who stroked a lion in the dark 36

Some Sufis sell a traveller's beast to pay for a Sufi Sama' 37

The publicising of a bankrupt by the public criers of the Qadi 41

How people blamed someone who killed his mother out of suspicion 52

How a king tested two slaves he had just bought 56

The domestic servants' envying the special servant 69

The capturing of the falcon among the owls in the wilderness 74

A thirsty man throws a brick into a river 77

'Uproot this thorn bush you have planted in the road!' 79

The coming of friends to the asylum to question Zu'l-Nun the Egyptian 89

How Loqman's master tested his intelligence 94

A king and a sheikh 101

Solomon, Bilqis and the hoopoe 102

A philosophers denial of scripture 104

Moses takes offence at the prayers of a shepherd 109

An Amir's harassment of a sleeping man into whose mouth a snake had gone 119

On putting one's faith in the fawning and trustworthiness of a bear 122

The blindman's saying 'I have two blindnesses' 126

How Moses said to the calf-worshipper 'Where's your vain scepticism and precaution?' 129

How a madman sought to ingratiate himself with Galen and how Galen was afraid 132

The crow and stork 133

Mohammed's visit to the sick Companion 135

God and Moses 136

How the gardener separated the Sufi, the jurist and the Alavid from one another 137

A sheikh and Bayazid 140

A novice who built a new house 141

Another anecdote about Bayazid 143

Dalqak and the Seyyed-e Ajal 148

The holy man who rode a hobby-horse 148

How a dog attacked a blind beggar 149

How a constable summoned a fallen drunkard to prison 151

Iblis and Mo'aviye 165

A judge who complained of the disaster of being a judge 173

The remorse of one being absent at prayers 175

The escape of the thief 177

The atheists and their building a mosque of opposition 179

Someone who was seeking after his stray camel 184

The Indian who quarrelled 191

The Ghuzz Turcomans' attack 193

An old man complained of his ailments 195

Juhi and the child 197

A boy who was afraid of an effeminate man 200

The archer and the horseman 200

The Arab and the philosopher 201

The miracles of Ebrahim son of Adham on the sea-shore 203

A stranger reviling a sheikh and the sheikh's disciples answer 209

Sho 'eyb 213

The Prophet to Aisha, on ritual prayer 217

The mouse and the camel 217

The dervish suspected of being a thief 220

Some Sufis reproach a Sufi 222

The mother of John the Baptist and the mother of Jesus 229

The search for the Tree of Life 230

How four persons quarrelled about grapes 233

How Mohammed established unity amongst Muslims 235

The Story of the Ducklings 238

Pilgrims amazed at the miracles of an ascetic 240

Notes 243

Appendix: Analytical Index of Stories and Discourses of Masnavi Book Two 301

Index of Proper Names, Terms and Selected Themes 309

Persian Text of The Masnavi Book Two, Edited by Mohammad Este 'lami 484

Editorial Reviews

In mid-thirteenth century, as the Mongol hordes were destroying the fabled city of Baghdad, in the small city of Konya to the northwest Rumi was erecting a world of mystical vision in words whose amazing architectonics and blinding beauty would prove hard to imagine and harder to grasp with any sense of immediacy. In Alan Williams' English translation of the Spiritual Couplets, we finally stand a chance not only to access that vision in all its inner glory and eternal grandeur, but ultimately to gain an immediate sense of its graceful relevance not just to our time but to all of humanity through the millennia.” —Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, author of Recasting Persian Poetry

“The Masnavi's new English translation is the publishing event of the year. At the hands of Alan Williams, Rumi's “cumulative polyphony” resembles a Shakespeare play where the poet speaks 'in one character after another . . .' This monumental poem's opening couplet, among the most captivating ever written, fills my heart with sadness every time I read it: “Listen to this reed as it is grieving, / it tells the story of our separations”. Who could stop listening to this music after hearing these first notes?” —Kaya Genc, author of The Lion and the Nightingale

“Alan Williams has done full justice to a moving part of Rumi's spiritual masterpiece and readers will find themselves turbaning the page almost unconsciously, eager to discover what comes next… For the second time Williams' masterly translation, the detailed contents list, the deep scholarship, lightly worn, of the introduction and the notes, all combine to make this book a spectacular triumph.” —Carole Hillenbrand, Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh, UK

“Alan Williams brings us an English version of that epic spiritual masterpiece which is both reliable and fluently readable. The Introduction provides an indispensable key to the Masnavi's sudden, bewildering shifts between multiple dramatic voices and perspectives, the distinctive feature which makes this poem, for every reader, “the mirror of our innermost state.”” —Professor James W. Morris, Boston College, USA

“While maintaining the Persian flavour of Rumi's epic and lyric virtuosities, this superior translation by Alan Williams brings Rumi fully to life in English. Professor Williams combines his erudition and sophistication as a scholar with his poetic flair, to do justice to Rumi's sublime poetry for a modern readership.” —Ali-Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, Associate Professor of Persian, Leiden University, The Netherlands

From the Publisher