The Festival of Spring, from the Díván of Jeláleddín: Rendered in English Gazels after Rückert's Versions, with an Introduction and a Criticism of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám — Rumi — John Shaqi
The Festival of Spring, from the Díván of Jeláleddín: Rendered in English Gazels after Rückert's Versions, with an Introduction and a Criticism of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
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has translated the First Book of the Mesnevi in rhyming couplets, with
the utmost fidelity and care; and another distinguished Persian scholar,
Mr. Whinfield, the most faithful English translator of Omar Khayyám, has
given an abridged version of the whole immense work, which in the
Persian original contains about 70,000 lines.[7] The Mesnevi has thus
come now to be pretty well known by English readers interested in the
subject; and in the last edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
Professor Hermann Ethé, an unquestionable authority, in his valuable
Articles on Persian Literature and Jeláleddín Rumi, sums him up as 'the
_greatest_ Pantheistic Writer of _all_ ages,' and speaks of 'his
_matchless_ Odes in which he soars on the wings of a genuine enthusiasm,
high over Earth and Heaven, up to the Throne of Almighty God.' Be it
noted, in passing, that it is at least remarkable how two such different
writers as the Turkish Devlet Shah and the learned German Orientalist
should both write of Jeláleddín in terms that undesignedly, but
irresistibly, recall by their very superlativeness, the famous lines of
Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare:—
'Each change of many-coloured Life he drew,
Exhausted Worlds and then imagin'd new;
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.'
All this makes it now intelligible that the late lamented Editor of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_, Dr. W. Robertson Smith, when Professor of
Arabic at Cambridge, with the fine insight of the far-seeing scholar,
should have directed the attention of a young, enthusiastic student to
the 'Lyrical Poetry of Jeláleddín Rumi'; and it is to the loyal devotion
of this young scholar that we owe the first appearance from an English
Press of a Volume of forty-eight 'Selected Poems' of Jeláleddín, in a
critical Persian Text and with accurate and elegant prose renderings.[8]
Mr. Reynold A. Nicholson has thus established a right to pronounce
judgment on the merits of Jeláleddín, and we now listen to him with
deference, and no longer with astonishment, when he deliberately
characterises him as 'the _greatest_ Mystical Poet of _any_ Age.'