Rumi: A New Translation of Selected Poems

Description

Championed by the likes of Madonna, Donna Karan, and Deepak Chopra, Rumi has won such a following in this country that a few years ago he was proclaimed our bestselling poet. But translations that have popularized the work of this thirteenth-century Sufi mystic have also strayed from its essence. In this new translation, Farrukh Dhondy seeks to recover both the lyrical beauty and the spiritual essence of the original verse. In poems of love and devotion, rapture and suffering, loss and yearning for oneness, Dhondy has rediscovered the Islamic mystic of spiritual awakening whose quest is the key to his universal appeal. Here is at once a great poet of love, both human and divine, and the authentic voice of a moderate Islam-a voice that can resonate in today's turbulent, fundamentalist times.

Rumi was born in 1207 in Vakhsh (now Tajikistan) to a family of learned Persian Muslim theologians. He founded the Malawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. Rumi's masterpiece, the Mathnawi, has been called the Koran in Persian. He died in 1273 in Konya in present-day Turkey. Farrukh Dhondy is a London-based writer, screenwriter, playwright, and activist of Indian Parsi descent. He has published novels and short stories, written screenplays for Bollywood, and been a commissioning editor at TV 4 in the UK. In 2012, he celebrated the opening of his opera based on Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

East and west, readers are passionate about Rumi. But the poet recently called 'America s favorite poet, ' born in what is now north Afghanistan, is also the jewel of thirteenth-century Persian poetry. Farrukh Dhondy uses the patternings of pre-modernist English to reflect Rumi s antiquity and traditional poetics, as well as his lively and often humorous take on life. Like all translations of Rumi, this is a labour of love. --Ruth Padel, author of The Mara Crossing Farrukh Dhondy conveys to us Rumi as a universal poet and thinker and captures in verse the spirit of Rumi s philosophy in an authentic fashion often missed by some of the modern interpreters of Rumi. His introduction gives us an overview of the essential message of Sufism and its relevance to the modern world. --Mahmood Jamal, author of Islamic Mystical Poetry Transcendent yet simple, Rumi s words in this exquisite translation by Farrukh Dhondy forever remain the anchor of the human condition. --Mira Nair Transcendent yet simple, Rumi's words--in this exquisite translation by Farrukh Dhondy--forever remain the anchor of the human condition. --Mira Nair