Rumi transliterations?

[Joseph H. Rowe]

I'm looking for transliterations of Rumi, especially the Masnavi : i.e., the original Persian, but in Roman alphabet phonetics.

The only ones I've been able to find are at http://www.khamush.com/persian/   ... but these are only selections from the Ruba'iat.

Does anyone know of a good online source, or book I can buy, of Rumi transliterations?

I'd also be interested in bilingual editions of Rumi. I've only found one, so far, by a woman whose name I forget at the moment.

For many sacred texts in Sanskrit, publishers in India have produced books with 4 columns: 1)the original Sanskrit; 2) Roman phonetic transliteration of the Sanskrit; 3) literal translation in English; 4) literary translation in English.

What a gift to humanity it would be, if someone were to do this with Rumi!

[Ibrahim]

Dear Joseph,

The only Romanized transliterations of the Masnavi are ones (about 150 selections) that I have put on the dar-al-masnavi.org website. These follow translations and explanatory notes and appear in a blue font. Please read the following article: http://dar-al-masnavi.org/transliterations.html You can also listen to audio recitation of the Persian at the same time that you are reading the transliteration of it (see same article).

There are Romanized transliterations of about 140 of Rumi's quatrains in Rasoul Shams, Rumi: The Art of Loving (Salt Lake City UT: Rumi Publications, 2012).

For bilingual editions, there is my translation, with Afghan scholar Rawan Farhadi), "The Quatrains of Rumi" (about 1,960 quatrains). There  is Nicholson's "Selected Poems from the Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz" (London: Cambridge University, 1952, 1977, first publ. 1898). However, the translations in this book are outdated and retranslated by Arberry in "Mystical Poems of Rumi."

Ibrahim

[Joseph H. Rowe]

Dear Ibrahim — many thanks for your useful links and comments! I've ordered your book with Rawan Farhadi; I also got a Kindle copy of Rasoul Shams’s The Art of Loving, which is a very major discovery for me — Alhamdulillah! it's the closest I’ve found to the ideal I’ve been looking for (I was also delighted to find your transliteration of the celebrated Song of the Reed …)  If you have any more recommendations or advice, I'd be most interested. Perhaps I should tell you something about my own background and my motivation to search for Roman phonetic transliterations of Rumi. It so happens that I’m a professional translator myself (from French to English); but more importantly, I’m a poet and a composer of spirtually-oriented songs. My current project is to compose bilingual songs of verses by Rumi, whose words would be sung mostly in English (or perhaps in French), but with substantial sections and refrains in ancient Persian — the language of Rumi himself, which you implicitly recommend on your site, not the later, Turkish-influenced pronunciation, with v instead of w, for example. My problem is that I know very little Farsi, and read Arabic script painfully slow, so that I need some help, in the form of transliterations. As for the final English translations, I plan to gradually arrive at my own, after having pondered several different examples of previous translations, ranging from Nicholson/Arberry, etc, to Barks, and everything in between. By the way, though I love most of  the latter's translations, I feel that it's a pity he didn't take the trouble to learn more Persian. Coleman Barks's greatest contribution, by the way, is one which very few people seem to be aware of: when he set out to translate Rumi, he had the following profound and inspired intuition as to what was needed, in order to free Rumi’s mystical poetry from the cages of old-fashioned, 18th- and 19th-century English: to model his language on that of America's own greatest mystical poet,  Walt Whitman. (Whitman's own "conversational" style of mystical poetry was a radical and controversial innovation, in the context of late 19th-century Anglo-American poetry, by the way.)

If you have any further comments, or reflections, I'd be very happy to hear them. 

Barakat aleikum,

Joseph 

PS -- I translated Henry Corbin's book, "L'Iran et la philosophie"  into English, from French. (English title: The Voyage and the Messenger]At the end, I was faced with the daunting, yet thrilling task of translating Corbin’s French translation of the Song of the Reed into English… 

[sandeep raina]

Hi, i am looking for some good translation of the following Rumi quatrain- can someone help?

Yari keh beh nazd e oo gol o khar yekist

Dar maz hab e oo mos haf o zonnar yekist

Ma ra gham e on yar che bayad khordan

Koo ra khar e lang o asb e rahvar yekist

[Ibrahim]

I have translated it with an Afghan scholar, Rawan Farhadi. At first I thought it was praise of a Sufi mystic ("There is a beloved..."), but he clarified that it is actually criticism of someone:

یاری كه بنزْدِ او گُل و خار یكیست           در مذْهبِ او مُصْحف و زُنّار یكیست

زِنهار ، بنزدِ او كسی را مفِرِست               كاو را خرِ لنگ و اسپِ رهوار یكیست

 

There is a comrade¹ for whom a rose and a thorn are one;

In his school of thought,² the Book*³ and a non-Muslim’s belt*⁴ are one.

Beware, don’t send anyone to him,

Because for him, a lame donkey and a swift⁵ horse are one.*⁶

No. 36: F-364.

1. a comrade [yārē]: See Note 188.

2. school of thought [maẕhab]: See Note 39.

*3. the Book [muṣḥaf]: refers here to the Qur’ān.

*4. non-Muslim’s belt [zonnār]: See Note 255.

5. swift [rah-wār]: lit., ‘suitable for the road’; an idiom meaning easy-paced and swift. This word was chosen 

for the rhyme.

*6. line four: This quatrain does not refer to a spiritual master, such as Shams-é Tabrīzī. Instead the verses 

express, beneath outward praise, Mawlānā’s anger toward someone who perhaps devalued those who possessed true worth and over-valued those who did not.

--from "The Quatrains of Rumi," translated from Persian by Ibrahim Gamard and Rawan Farhadi, 2008, p. 13

https://www.amazon.com/Quatrains-Rumi-Jalaluddin-Muhammad-Balkhi-Rumi/dp/1597314501/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=books+quatrains+of+rumi&qid=1558376522&s=gateway&sr=8-4

Ibrahim