Rumi: Swallowing the Sun PDF
Preview Rumi: Swallowing the Sun
prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page i Rumi: Swallowing the Sun prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page ii RELATED TITLES Rumi: Past and Present, East and West Franklin D. Lewis Rumi: A Spiritual Treasury Compiled by Juliet Mabey Sufism: A Short Introduction William C. Chittick The Wisdom of Sufism Leonard Lewisohn prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page iii Rumi: Swallowing the Sun Poems Translated from the Persian Franklin D. Lewis prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page iv RUMI: SWALLOWING THE SUN First published by Oneworld Publications 2007 Copyright © Franklin D. Lewis 2007 All rights reserved Copyright under Berne Convention ACIP record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN: 978–1–85168–535–6 Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India Cover design by Design Deluxe Printed and bound by XXX Oneworld Publications 185 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7AR England www.oneworld-publications.com Learn more about Oneworld. Join our mailing list to find out about our latest titles and special offers at: www.oneworld-publications.com prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page v table of contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction ix Poems Orisons to the Sun: Poems of Praise and Invocation 1 Poems of Faith and Observance 9 Poems on Poetry and Music 29 Poems of Silence 41 Poems of Loss and Confusion 55 Poems from Disciple to Master 65 Poems from Master to Disciple 75 Poems from Master to Master 87 Poems of Dreams and Visions 99 Poems about the Religion of Love: Ways of Reason, Modes of Love 113 Poems Celebrating Union 129 Poems of Death and Beyond 143 Poems about Birthing the Soul 151 Notes on the Poems 167 Index of First Lines 201 v prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page vi prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page vii acknowledgements Many individuals have helped me puzzle out complex passages in the new poems of this collection, particularly Naeem Nabili-Akbar and Heshmat Moayyad, to whom my deepest gratitude. My colleagues John Woods, Robert Dankoff, Kagan Arik, Tahera Qutbuddin and John Perry have also kindly put their expertise at my disposal in response to specific queries. I am especially grateful to readers and reviewers of my earlier study, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West(Oneworld, 2000) who have provided useful comments and correctives about the translations con- tained in that book, which have been incorporated here. Though there have been many, Hassan Lahouti and Ibrahim Gamard stand out. For their encouragement, I am indebted to many further friends and col- leagues, including Soheila Amirsoleimani, Carl Ernst, Saeed Ghahremani, Hasan Javadi, Gökalp Kamil, Manuchehr Kasheff, Todd Lawson, Sunil Sharma and Ehsan Yarshater. For the opportunity to work on further translations and to think carefully and critically through many poems, I am thankful to the graduate students at the University of Chicago who studied Rumi with me, including Samad Alavi, Rajeev Kinra, Hajnalka Kovacs, Mary Musolini and Azad Amin Sadr. Thanks also to Katayoun Goudarzi, on whose 2006 CD Rooz o Shabseveral trans- lations first appeared. A very big thank you to the very patient people at Oneworld, especially Juliet Mabey, Kate Kirkpatrick, Mike Harpley and Novin Doostdar. More patient still, Foruzan, Sahar and Ava, who con- tinually put up with lexicons and Divâns strewn across living room, den and divan, with scattered papers, distracted thoughts and stolen moments – they have my apologies, my undying gratitude and my love. Franklin Lewis, Chicago vii prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page viii prelims_Rumi.qxp 9/6/07 12:31 PM Page ix introduction ON TRANSLATING PERSIAN POETRY The extraordinary success and influence of certain translations and adap- tations of Persian poetry into western languages – those by Sir William Jones, Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Rückert, August von Platen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward FitzGerald, Basil Bunting, Robert Bly, Coleman Barks and Dick Davis – makes the burden of the translation past and present especially weighty. A meta-translation question must therefore be resolved in the mind of any would-be Persian translator before they begin: who is the intended audience of this translation, and what use do they have for it? One may of course translate for the love of translating, but even then the endeavor may run aground on unforeseen shoals. As H.afez.(d. 1391) famously observed in the first line of the first poem of his Collected Poems, or Divân, a line whose first hemistich is in Arabic and second in Persian: alâ yâ ayyohâ as-sâqi ader ka’san va nâvel-hâ ke ‘eshq âsân nemud avval vali oftâd moshkel-hâ Come, Saqi, pour out a cup and pass it around; Love – which first seemed easy – comes fraught with complications That word “Saqi” (sâqi) was introduced to many an English-speaking reader in 1868, in the phrase “the Eternal Sákí,” which appeared in the second edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. FitzGerald published four different editions of his Khayyám translation; in the first edition of 1859, the word “Sákí” had not appeared – though Goethe and others had previously introduced it to western languages in their translations and adaptations of “Eastern” ix
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