Discover the Moment

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[From our retreat: here are a few lines from Rumi translated by Coleman Barks.]

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his son and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down
and brings up a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins
Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories,
how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth,
without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.


For more poems by Hafiz and Rumi..

Comments

Charles upton said…
Sufi-Dari Books

(An imprint of Sophia Perennis)

Announces the Publication of

The Quatrains of Rumi

(Beginning of Marketing Campaign: May 20, 2009):



Rubâ‘iyât-é

Jalâluddîn Muhammad Balkhî-Rumî

ISBN 978-1-59731-450-3; $25.95, £19.50



Translated by

Ibrâhîm W. Gamard

and

A. G. Rawân Farhâdî



COMPLETE TRANSLATION WITH PERSIAN TEXT,

ISLAMIC MYSTICAL COMMENTARY,

MANUAL OF TERMS, AND CONCORDANCE



The first complete English translation of the Quatrains -- over 700 pages -- based on the Persian of the original, complete, and uncorrupt Forûzânfar edition –

translated with close attention to Rumi’s idiomatic usage,

with the collaboration of scholar from Afghanistan,

whose native Persian remains close to Rumi’s own



The “version-makers” of the poetry of Jalâluddîn Rumî have helped to make him perhaps today’s most popular poet in the English language.

But they have not served his intended meaning with equal zeal,

often portraying him as a “universal” mystic who had somehow “transcended” Islam, even though his celebrated Mathnavi has been called “the Qur’an in the Persian tongue.” Ibrâhîm W. Gamard

and A. G. Rawân Farhâdi have labored to set the record straight,

and to demonstrate that Mawlana’s universality is inseparable

from his Islam -- from the depth of his Islam.



For more information, contact Sufi-Dari Books/ Sophia Perennis at:

jameswetmore@mac.com

or info@sophiaperennis.com
6/13/2009 8:03 AM
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