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Title: Signs of the Unseen : The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rumi by Jr. W.M. Thackston ISBN: 1-57062-532-8 Publisher: Shambhala Pub. Date: 19 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Noble Effort
Comment: Professor Thackston has done admirably with this translation of "Fihi ma fihi." Especially since, in my opinion, this is the hardest of Rumi's works to translate.
In his poetry, Rumi is sublime, and accordingly difficult to translate, but any translator can only do so much with a poem. If you miss some nuances, it's just the tradeoff that the translator of poetry must make. The "Masnavi", on the other hand, is a lengthy work, but it has a coherence that makes the translator's life relatively easy and compels the reader on.
"Fihi ma fihi", however, very often seems to ramble off in a thousand directions. Indeed, sometimes it's hard to escape the feeling that this book was Rumi's attic, all full of jumbled odds and ends, many of them beautiful, but not necessarily in any coherent order. In fact, however, a second reading can reveal that the book is a great deal more than that. If you have been under the impression that Rumi is a sort of Omar Khayyam for the New Age, this book can convince you that just possibly he belongs in company with Shakespeare, Goethe and Pushkin.
This translation is eminently readable and even prods the reader on. Professor Thackston has certainly succeeded in translating Rumi's infallible knack to make us look at the world through different eyes. The one sacrifice was Rumi's elegant rhetoric, which just can't be translated. For that you'll have to learn Farsi. In the meantime, this book is to be enjoyed.
Rating: 5
Summary: Rumi - The Greatest Poet of the "intoxicated" Sufi School
Comment: It is the translation of Fihi Ma Fihi, which is full of Rumi's discourses. It sort of dispells all notions of "sufism vs islam" rather sufism is Islamic Mysticism in the truest sense and Rumi explains why the outter conformity to the Sharia (Sacred Law)is very important (i.e. the religous dispensations that are given to mankind through the last of the revalatory Porphet, according to Islam; Prophet Muhammed saws). He himself was a Hanafi (one of the four schools of law within the Orthodox Islam).
The book really clarifies his thoughts and ideas behind the poems. Lot of western readers of his poems tend to use his semantics and syntex to project their own meaning to it rather than discover the deep insights and the Reality he is trying to point toward.
"I am the servant of the Qur'an While I am still alive.
I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen One."
(Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi) http://www.jerrahi.org/writings_english/invitation.htm
Rating: 4
Summary: For the Dreamer of God's Logic
Comment: Rumi's discourses are really not so different from his poetry. In each he tries to make the listener (because his style is essentially teacher speaking to apprentice) understand that it is LOGICAL to see how much God loves each person. Because it is more difficult for the rest of us to see what is obvious to those so touched with delight by the intimate presence of God, he uses emotions to convey what to him is the logic. He thus uses poetic language to convey the message, since we find it easier to "understand" an emotive content. Much as Christ spoke in what must have seemed to many impossibly hard-to-understand metaphors, Rumi's discourses do often require an extraordinary "letting go" to sense the logic in his argument. An important work for all the ages.
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Title: Rumi's World : The Life and Works of the Greatest Sufi Poet by Annemarie Schimmel ISBN: 0877736111 Publisher: Shambhala Pub. Date: 22 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Secret Rose Garden by David R. Fideler, Mahmud Ibn 'Abd Al-Kar Shabistari, Florence Lederer ISBN: 1890482943 Publisher: Phanes Pr Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Unlimited Mercifier: The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn Arabi by Stephen Hirtenstein ISBN: 1883991293 Publisher: White Cloud Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam by Annemarie Schimmel ISBN: 0791419827 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: September, 1994 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn Al-'Arabi's Cosmology (Suny Series in Islam) by William C. Chittick ISBN: 0791434044 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: 30 December, 1997 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
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