English Verse Translation of Book Five of Medieval Sufi Poet Jalal al-Din Rumi's Masnavi (The Couplets)

FAIN: FEL-262742-19

Jawid Mojaddedi
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

Translation from Persian to English of Book Five of the Masnavi ("The Couplets") by the medieval Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273).

This project is to continue my ongoing translation of the six books of the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi's (d. 1273) magnum opus, The Masnavi (“The Couplets”), for the Oxford World’s Classics series of Oxford University Press, in which Books One to Four have already been published. The outcome of the fellowship will be the first unabridged verse translation of Book Five of The Masnavi, the only previous attempt being a prose translation published in 1934. In fact, that translation is notorious for rendering lengthy passages into Latin instead of English because of the convention at that time for dealing with material deemed salacious, so mine will be the first 100% complete translation of any kind into English. Rumi’s Masnavi is not only considered the greatest work of its genre in the Persian literary tradition, but it is also the source of many of the free-verse renderings of his poetry into English which have made him the best-selling poet in North America for the past two decades.

Associated Products

The Masnavi: Book Five (Book)
Title: The Masnavi: Book Five
Author: Rumi
Editor: Jawid Mojaddedi
Abstract: This is the first ever translation of the entirety of Book Five of Rumi's magnum opus, The Masnavi, into English. Prior to this verse translation in heroic couplets, translations were either of selected passages or in lineated prose with passages deemed too salacious rendered into Latin, as was the convention in Britain of the early twentieth century. This fifth book of Rumi's The Masnavi is well-known to contain much sexually explicit content within teaching stories about the path of annihilation of the self in a total and uncompromising way.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-masnavi-book-five-9780192857071?lang=en&cc=se
Primary URL Description: page of the book on the Oxford University Press website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Translation
ISBN: 978-0192857071
Translator: Jawid Mojaddedi
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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