He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!
Jalal al-Din Rumi: one of the greatest Sufi poets/teachers who wrote in Persian. I have looked and looked in Cairo’s bookstores but I can’t find any recent prints of his works (translated into Arabic). Not even light collections of poetry. Not one.
I even asked a bookstore clerk at Al-Shorouk “how come, don’t people ask for them?” and he told me no one really asks. It seems English translation is the way to go.
This deficiency goes on while constantly decent new translations are showing up in the English speaking world (for example, this in 2007). And studies/review articles in newspapers too.
Franklin Lewis is currently publsihing a series for The Guardian on Masnavi -Rumi’s greatest work, and perhaps the greatest of all Persian literature, some even call it the Persian Quran. He is on part three now of this Masnavi exposition and there will be five more to come.
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December 27, 2009 at 7:39 am
Mae
The Dream That Must Be Interpreted
This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
Then death comes like dawn,
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief.
But there’s a difference with this dream.
Everything cruel and unconscious
done in the illusion of the present world,
all that does not fade away at the death-waking.
It stays,
and it must be interpreted.
All the mean laughing,
all the quick, sexual wanting,
those torn coats of Joseph,
they change into powerful wolves
that you must face.
The retaliation that sometimes comes now,
the swift, payback hit,
is just a boy’s game
to what the other will be.
You know about circumcision here.
It’s full castration there!
And this groggy time we live,
this is what it’s like:
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living
in another town.
In the dream, he doesn’t remember
the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes
the reality of the dream town.
The world is that kind of sleep.
The dust of many crumbled cities
settles over us like a forgetful doze,
but we are older than those cities.
We began
as a mineral. We emerged into plant life
and into the animal state, and then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring when we slightly recall
being green again.
That’s how a young person turns
toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans
toward the breast, without knowing the secret
of its desire, yet turning instinctively.
Humankind is being led along an evolving course,
through this migration of intelligences,
and though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
<3
December 30, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Youssef
Cool :) Where from or did you write it?