Indeed, amongst the Persian poets Jalálu'd-Dín Rúmí has been singularly fortunate in his English interpreters. Besides Jalálu'd-Dín's English translators. the “Song of the Reed” mentioned above, there is the complete versified translation of Book I made by Sir James Redhouse and published by Messrs. Trübner in their “Oriental Series,” which also contains in another later volume an abridgement, with selected extracts rendered in prose, of the whole poem, by Mr. E. H. Whinfield, who, both here and in his edition and translation of the Gulshan-i-Ráz, or “Mystic Rose Garden,” of Shaykh Maḥmúd Shabistarí, has done such excellent work in investigating and interpreting the pantheistic mysticism of Persia. Nor has the Díwán been overlooked, for Mr. R. A. Nicholson's Selected Poems from the Díwán-i-Shams-i-Tabríz, edited and translated with an Introduction, Notes, and Appendices (Cambridge, 1898) is, in my opinion, one of the most original and masterly studies of the subject yet produced. In particular his classical scholarship enabled him carefully to examine and demonstrate the close relation which, as both he and I believe, exists between the doctrines of the Ṣúfís of Islám and the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria; a thesis treated in a masterly manner in the introduction to the Selected Poems, and one on which he is still working. His edition of Shaykh Farídu'd-Dín 'Aṭṭár's Tadhkiratu'l-Awliyá, or “Biography of the Saints,” of which vol. i has been already published and vol. ii will shortly appear in my “Persian Historical Texts Series,” has furnished him with much fresh material, and he tells me that he is now inclined to ascribe the definite eclectic system of philosophical Ṣúfíism more to Dhu'n-Nún of Egypt than to any other single individual; a fact which, if confirmed, is of the utmost importance, as supplying the final link connecting the Ṣúfís with the School of Alexandria.
The existence of the translations mentioned above renders it
unnecessary for me to quote largely from the works of Jalálu'd-
“Nightly the souls of men thou lettest fly
From out the trap wherein they captive lie.
Nightly from out its cage each soul doth wing
Its upward way, no longer slave or king.
Heedless by night the captive of his fate;
Heedless by night the Sultan of his State.
Gone thought of gain or loss, gone grief and woe;
No thought of this, or that, or So-and-so.
Such, even when awake, the Gnostic's * plight:
God saith: ‘They sleep’: * recoil not in affright!
Asleep from worldly things by night and day,
Like to the Pen moved by God's Hand are they.
Who in the writing fails the Hand to see,
Thinks that the Pen is in its movements free.
Some trace of this the Gnostic doth display:
E'en common men in sleep are caught away.
Into the Why-less Plains the spirit goes,
The while the body and the mind repose.
Then with a whistle dost Thou them recall,
And once again in toil and moil they fall;
For when once more the morning light doth break;
And the Gold Eagle of the Sky * doth shakeIts wings, then Isráfíl * -like from that bourn
The ‘Cleaver of the Dawn’ * bids them return.
The disembodied souls He doth recall,
And makes their bodies pregnant one and all.Yet for a while each night the Spirit's steed
Is from the harness of the body freed:
‘Sleep is Death's brother’: come, this riddle rede!
But lest at day-break they should lag behind,
Each soul He doth with a long tether bind, *
That from those groves and plains He may revoke
Those errant spirits to their daily yoke.O would that, like the ‘Seven Sleepers,’ we
As in the Ark of Noah kept might be,
That mind, and eye, and ear might cease from stress
Of this fierce Flood of waking consciousness!
How many ‘Seven Sleepers’ by thy side,
Before thee, round about thee, do abide!
Each in his care the Loved One's whisper hears:
What boots it? Sealéd are thine eyes and ears!”
In the East the Díwán is much less read and studied than the Mathnawí, though by some European scholars it is placed The Díwán-iShams-i-Tabríz. far above it in poetic merit and originality. And, if we are to credit one of al-Aflákí's anecdotes (No. 14, pp. 28-30 of Redhouse's translation), this was the opinion of some of Jalálu'd-Dín's most illustrious contemporaries, including the great Sa'dí himself, who, being requested by the Prince of Shíráz to select and send to him “the best ode, with the most sublime thoughts, that he knew of as existing in Persian,” chose out one from the Díwán in question, saying: “Never have more beautiful words been uttered, nor ever will be. Would that I could go to Rúm (Asia Minor), and rub my face in the dust at his feet!” * Of these odes Mr. Nicholson has treated with so much learning and taste in the monograph to which I have already referred that for me, who have made no special study of the Díwán, to add anything to what he has said would be superfluous. I cannot, however, forego the pleasure of quoting two of the beautiful verse-translations (portions of Odes xxxi and xxxvi of his selection) which he has included in the second Appendix to his monograph. This is the first:—
“Lo, for I to myself am unknown, now in God's name what must
I do?
East nor West, land nor sea is my home, I have kin
nor with angel nor gnome,
I am wrought not of fire nor of foam, I am shaped not of dust
nor of dew.
I was born not of China afar, not in Saqsín and not in Bulghár;
Not in India, where five rivers are, nor 'Iráq nor Khurásán I
grew.
Not in this world nor that world I dwell, not in Paradise neither
in Hell;
Not from Eden and Riḍwán
*
I fell, not from Adam my lineage I
drew.
In a place beyond uttermost Place, in a tract without shadow of
trace,
Soul and body transcending I live in the soul of my Loved One
anew!”
This is the second:—
“Up, O ye lovers, and away! 'Tis time to leave the world for aye.
Hark, loud and clear from heaven the drum of parting calls—let
none delay!
The cameleer hath risen amain, made ready all the camel-train,
And quittance now desires to gain: why sleep ye, travellers, I
pray?
Behind us and before there swells the din of parting and of bells;
To shoreless Space each moment sails a disembodied spirit away.
From yonder starry lights and through those curtain-awnings
darkly blue
Mysterious figures float in view, all strange and secret things
display.
From this orb, wheeling round its pole, a wondrous slumber o'er
thee stole:
O weary life that weighest naught, O sleep that on my soul dost
weigh!
O heart, towards thy heart's love wend, and O friend, fly toward
the Friend,
Be wakeful, watchman, to the end: drowse seemingly no watch-
man may.”
I can recall but few English verse-renderings of Eastern poetry which seem to me at once so adequate and so beautiful as these of Mr. Nicholson; and I only regret that the drudgery of editing, proof-correcting, attending futile meetings, and restating ascertained facts for a public apparently insatiably greedy of Encyclopædias, hinder him, as they hinder so many of us, from pursuing with more assiduity the paths which we are alike most fitted and most eager to tread.