Masnavi of Rumi, Book Two

Mowlana Jalaloddin Balkhi (1207-1273), known to the West as Rumi is a Persian poet comparable to the greatest poets of Europe. In 1244, Rumi began the composition of a body (divan) of lyric poems (ghazals) totalling 35,000 verses. In the early 1260s he turned to the composition of his most mature and final work, the mystical masterpiece in six volumes of Persian verses known as the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi ‘The Spiritual Couplets’.Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester and the translator of Spiritual Verses (London, 2006).

• PrefaceChronologyIntroductionFurther ReadingNote on the TranslationEnglish translation of the Masnavi Book 2 ‘The Ending of the Self’Notes to Rumi’s PrefaceNotes to the Masnavi Book 2Appendix: Analytical Index of the Stories and Discourses of Masnavi Book TwoIndexPersian Text of the Masnavi Book 2, Edited by Mohammad Este?lami

In mid-thirteenth century, as the Mongol hordes were destroying the fabled city of Baghdad, in the small city of Konya to the northwest Rumi was erecting a world of mystical vision in words whose amazing architectonics and blinding beauty would prove hard to imagine and harder to grasp with any sense of immediacy. In Alan Williams' English translation of the Spiritual Couplets, we finally stand a chance not only to access that vision in all its inner glory and eternal grandeur, but ultimately to gain an immediate sense of its graceful relevance not just to our time but to all of humanity through the millennia.