Sahar’s Reviews > Rumi: A New Translation of Selected Poems > Status Update

“He was initiated into the mystical path by a wandering dervish, Shamsuddin of Tabriz. His love for and his bereavement at the death of Shams found their expression in a surge of music, dance and lyric poems, Divian-e Shams-e Tabrizi.”

“A great spiritual master and poet, Jalal-ad-Din Rumi was born in Wakhsh (Tajikistan) in 1207 to a family of learned theologians. He founded the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam.””

“Issah was no magician
His miracles weren’t magic
The fools who deny Allah
Their ends will be farcical, tragic.”

“O tongue, you are the fount of countless gems
The artisan of complex diadems
You are also the spring of all disease
The plague that withers roses on their stems.”

“When God has made the earth for you to roam
Why have you made a prison cell your home?”

“Material is the earth and material the stars
O Rumi, seek the spirit—the water not the vase!”

“So lover and beloved are the same
Your Zuleika is merely Yusuf ’s name
And even though your linguist thinks it odd
All pronouncements are one—the word is “God.”

“Rumi now set out to express in poetry the insights that had unsettled his life and put him on the path to realization and God. He wrote his magnum opus, the Mathnawi, in the next twelve years, a book of 25,700 verses, which he dictated to Husam-ud-din Chalapi, his disciple”

“The lyrical impulse, over the next twelve years, translated itself into the composition of the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a compilation of ghazals, or lyrics of love and devotion.”

“Had Rumi learned that the absence of the body of Shams was in itself a test? His declarations of the pain of separation, the yearning to have the “beloved” return...
And so began the phase of Rumi’s life that gave the world his poetic works and earned him the reputation of one of the greatest poets of his tradition.”