Poetry
The Mathnawi
مثنوی معنوی
Rumi · 1270
Synopsis
A long mystical poem in rhyming couplets, divided into six books. It strings together tales, fables, parables, anecdotes and commentaries on the Quran, some of them stories taken from Aesop, and draws from each a teaching on the love of God, the illusions of the ego and the path that leads the soul back to its origin. The author moves from a story to the meditation it calls for, then to another story, in a discourse meant to be accessible at several levels of reading.
Context
The poem was composed in the last years of the author's life, at the request of his disciple and secretary Hussam al-Din Chalabi, who had urged him to write. Its full title means roughly “rhyming couplets of profound spiritual meaning”. Rumi held it to be the very root of religion, and took up ancient fables in it. It was not until 1990 and the work of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch and Djamchid Mortazavi that a first complete translation from Persian into French appeared.
Who it is for
A poem of more than fifty thousand lines in six books, to be read in fragments. It helps to know that each story can be taken on its own, and that the thread is spiritual rather than narrative.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the major works of Sufism and of Persian literature, and meditated upon almost as much as the Quran in part of the Islamic world.