The Mathnawi of Jalalud'din Rumi, Vol. 2: Containing the Translation of the First & Second Books

by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson

Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi's great poem, the Mathnawi is one of the best known and most influential works of Muslim mysticism. The Mathnawi was begun around 1258 at the suggestion of a disciple, Husam al-Din, who acted as amanuensis, and though the final story is incomplete, composition probably ceased a while before Rumi's death in 1273. The six books of the poem amount to more than 25,000 verses. Loosely structured and at times metrically rough and colloquial in style, the work pursues its way through hundreds of stories, drawn from many literary and other sources and used to illustrate the main theme, man's predicament in his search for God.

Nicholson's critical edition is based on the oldest known manuscripts, including the earliest, dated 1278, and preserved in the Mawlana Museum At Qonya. It remains the standard text and is provided with diacritical marks to assist the student. This prose translation, similarly, is intended to be an exact and faithful guide to the Persian. The commentary, planned to be useful both for specialists and others, in addition to explaining numerous textual questions, traces Rumi's sourcs and cites many parallels to his ideas.

Genres: Poetry

419 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, was the greatest Rumi scholar in the English language. He was a professor for many years at Cambridge Universtiy, in England. He dedicated his life to the study of Islamic mysticism and was able to study and translate major sufi texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. That a Western scholar of "the first rank" dedicated much of his life to the study and translation of Rumi's poetry was very fortunate.

His monumental achievement was his work on Rumi's Masnavi (done in eight volumes, published between 1925-1940). He produced the first critical Persian edition of Rumi's Masnavi, the first full translation of it into English, and the first commentary on the entire work in English. This work has been highly influential in the field of Rumi studies, world-wide. His critical Persian text has been re-printed many times in Iran and his commentary has been so highly respected there, that it has been translated into Persian (by Hasan Lâhûtî, 1995).

Nicholson also produced two volumes which condensed his work on the Masnavi and which were aimed at the popular level: "Tales of Mystic Meaning" (1931) and "Rumi: Poet and Mystic" (1950).

His earliest translations of selected ghazals from Rumi's Divan ("Selected Poems from the Díváni Shamsi Tabríz," 1898) has been superceded by A. J. Arberry's translations ("Mystical Poems of Rumi," 1968; "Mystical Poems of Rumi: Second Selection," 1979), in that Arberry used a superior edition of the Divan (done by Foruzanfar). Arberry re-translated all of the ghazals previously translated Nicholson (his teacher and predecessor at Cambridge University) based on the superior edition, minus seven ghazals which were not in the earliest manuscripts of the Divan (and therefore are no longer considered by scholars to be authentic Rumi poems (Nicholson's numbers IV, VIII, XII, XVII, XXXI, XXXIII, and XLIV).