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Rumi: Swallowing the Sun
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RELATED TITLES
Rumi: Past and Present, East and West
Franklin D. Lewis
Rumi: A Spiritual Treasury
Compiled by Juliet Mabey
Sufism: A Short Introduction
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Leonard Lewisohn
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Rumi: Swallowing the Sun
Poems Translated from the Persian
Franklin D. Lewis
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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
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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
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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
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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”
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Description:Timeless and eternal, the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi is loved the world over and he is a best-selling poet from America to Afghanistan. Commemorating the 800th anniversary of Rumi's birth, this beautiful volume draws from the breadth of Rumi's work, spanning his entire career. Franklin Lewis's evoc
