Page 17 - The Book of Rumi

who have access to a growing number of excellent translations, have chosen
Mowlana Jalal od-Din Balkhi, Rumi, as the spiritual teacher whose coruscat-
ing turn of phrase, coupled with the poignancy of candidly expressed emo-
tion, has been a source of comfort as well as instruction.
Although the extent of academic scholarship on the philosophical and
theological foundations of Rumi’s order of mysticism now outweigh the
poet’s own writings, it is more rewarding to read Rumi’s actual stories, which
open the mystical portal to his world.
The stories that Rumi invents or reuses to aid in understanding the prin-
ciples of Sufi sm are intricately woven into the warp and weft of the fabric
of his teachings, yet to see them in isolation as the parables that they are, we
need to painstakingly work our way through twenty-six thousand double lines
of metrical verse, compiled in the six books of the Masnavi-ye Manavi (Spiritual
Couplets), his magnum opus.
It is a relief and a delight to have the task completed for us by Maryam
Mafi , one of the most respected, faithful, and eloquent translators of Rumi’s
poetry. Mafi the translator moves effortlessly between the two languages of
Persian and English as she delivers the semantic meaning of the original text
in English. However, Mafi the writer and close reader of the Masnavi transfers
the exquisite subtleties, precise vision, and spontaneous wit of the original to
the English version, thus giving life to Robert Frost’s defi nition of poetry as
“that which is lost out of verse in translation.”
Mafi ’s own devotion to Rumi and years of study of his works along-
side scholars of the fi eld in Iran and elsewhere, as well as her impressive
track record in translation, place her in a unique position to sustain “the
afterlife” of the Masnavi, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin in “The
Task of the Translator.” In her latest translation, The Book of Rumi, Mafi has
turned her attention to more than one hundred stories that she has selected
from the Masnavi. These stories include well-known and popular tales such
as “Angel of Death,” “Sufi and His Cheating Wife,” “Moses and the Shep-
herd,” “Chickpeas,” and “Chinese and Greek Painters,” as well as the less
commonly quoted parables, “The Basket Weaver,” “The Mud Eater,” and
“A Sackful of Pebbles.”

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