In 1903 William Hastie, Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, published fifty ghazals of Rúmí in English. He worked from Friedrich Rückert’s celebrated German versions and kept their form: the gazel, with its single rhyme running through every couplet. The poems sing of spring, the Beloved, the reed and the wine of union. Hastie’s introduction places Rúmí among the great mystics of the world and takes issue with the fashion for FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám.
The paperback is available on Amazon. The complete text is free to read online; the Kindle edition is not yet released.
This edition is newly typeset from the complete text. It was compared word by word, by machine alignment, with independent transcriptions of the original printing, and every disagreement was checked against the page images. Nothing is abridged.
Rúmí also appears elsewhere on this site: see The Mystics of Islam for Nicholson’s account of the Sufi path.
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Hidden Lantern