The Quiet One

Annōsō clam sophō loquēbar nocte,

“Sīs tū mystērium mihī dētegere.” 

Lēni, lēnī vōce loquēbātur tum,

“Vīsum’st, sed nōn loquēris umquam, Rūmī.”

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1035, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 26 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #442 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry. Note: from this

blog entry on, I will no longer use end-rhymes.

بـا پــیر خـــرد نــهفتــه می گفتــم دوش

کــز من ســخــن از ســر جهان مپوش

نرمــک نرمــک مرا همــی گفت به گوش

کین دیدنی است گفتنـی نیست خموش

bā pīr-e xerad nehofta mī goftam dūsh

kaz man soxan az ser-e jehān hīch mapūsh

narmak narmak marā hamī goft be gūsh

kīn dīdani ast goftanī nīst xamūsh 

With an old wise man, I was talking privately last night,

“From me talk of the world’s secrets don’t hide.”

Softly, softly to me he kept saying in my ear,

“It can be seen; it can’t be said, Rūmi.” 

Sufi poets seem to like to talk a lot about secrets. The truth is veiled or hidden or a treasure buried. Its whereabouts are a unknown. In this poem Rūmī tells us that the answer to these secrets is all around us. We just have to open our eyes. The catch is: we have no words to describe what we will experience. 

This is one thought about the poem. Another is that often Sufi poets tell us that one shouldn’t talk about these secrets. One should keep quiet about them. Why, I don’t know, but I do know that for several centuries Sufis were hanged as heretics and punished for openingly declaring what they believed.  This poem ends with the word xamūsh or khamūsh. Khamūsh means “silence” and is often used like our word “hush.” In this way, the last line could mean: “It can be seen, not discussed, shhh!” 

But the word also has another signification. It happens to be Rūmī’s pen name.  Pen names were used by Persian poets as a way of signing off, of claiming the poem to be theirs. Ironic, though, that one of the most prolific poets in the world chose “Hush” as his pen name! So, it is possible that Rūmī is talking to himself, reminding himself at the same time to be quiet and keep the secret.

Why so much ambiguity? The glib answer is that this is a poem. A better answer would be that Persian poetry of this antiquity was never written with punctuation and quotation marks. These were added by twentieth-century editors. Thus it is that these four lines are differently punctuated depending on the book you read. Here, I’ve chosen to make the last line the words of the sage. Most editors don’t see it that way, but I feel that, if xamūsh refers to Rūmī, the word is in the vocative and completes what the wise man says.

By the way, the word for this Persian-type of nom de plume is takhallos [تخلّص]. It comes from an Arabic root khalasa [خَلَصَ],which has a host of meanings, one of which is “to be finished.” It is perhaps this meaning that fits. The poet finishes the poem with his or her name. (By the way, for anyone who has spent time in predominantly Moslem countries, the root khalasa gives us a word that is heard everywhere: khalas. With this two-syllable word you can end conversations, secure business deals, lower the temperature of a heated argument, or storm off in a huff.) 

   

Here is a free translation of today’s rubā’ī in English:

I talked with my mentor alone last night:

“Don’t keep the world’s secrets from me.”

He kept whispering in my ear,

“Look around for them, Rūmī; 

there are no words. 

No words." 

But Wait, There’s More

Nōbis lingua’st sed est quam nostra alia.

Et præter cælum infernumque est alibī

Lībertātī in corde habent vītam aliam

Hæ gemmæ ex cunīculō sunt aliō

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #230, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 26 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #1843 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry. Note: from this

blog entry on, I will no longer use end-rhymes.

مارا به جز این زبان زبانی دگرست

جز دوزخ و فردوس مکانی دگرست

آزاده دلان زنده به جان دگرند

آن گوهر پاکشان ز کانی دگرست

mā rā be joz īn zabān zabānī degarast

joz dōzax o ferdōs makānī degarast

āzāda delān zenda be jān-e degarand

ān gōhar-e pākeshān ze kānī degarast

For us besides this tongue there’s another tongue.

Besides hell and heaven there’s another place.

The free-hearts—alive with another soul.

That pure jewel of theirs is from another mine.

In this rubā’i, Rūmī tells us there is more than meets the eye, the ear, the heart. There is an existance beyond the one we experience daily. Such an existance is open to the free-hearts, those who have untied their souls and broken the bonds that chain them to the conventions of society and religion. This experience—this pure jewel—comes from another mine. There is no road map, no propector’s scribblings to guide you there, but it is there just the same.

Gomard writes on page 579 of his book that this rubā’i was not written by Rūmī. He lists it as “quatrains incorrectly attributed to Mawlana.” (Mawlana, Arabic for “Our Master” is how Rūmī is known in the Persian-and-Turkish-speaking world.) Gomard’s scholarship takes us back before Rūmī was even born to poets who wrote similar lines and thence to books written in the thirteenth century. I will leave it up to the scholar to check all of this out. All I will say is that one of the interesting aspects of dealing with poetry several centuries old is that sometimes in the life of a particular poem, editors or poets insert their own lines, their own ideas. One wonders why. A piggyback ride on the fame of others? An exuberance of feelings that leads to such a poetical intervention?

Interesting are the words that Rūmī uses for heaven and hell. The Persian for the first is ferdōs [فردوس ], which is the Arabicized form of an ancient, ancient Persian word for “paradise.” Actually the word meant some kind of walled garden. As an Indo-European word, it is related to the Latin word for wall: pariēs. As for the word “hell,” Rūmī used dōzax [دوزخ]. This word, also ancient, has Indo-European roots which send shoots all the way up to Latin as in the suffix dys- (dysfunction) and the word dīrus (Eng. dire). The root also gives us the first part of “dinosaur,” and is used in Persian words that have to do with enemies, difficulties, and thieves. If you put all of this bad together, dōzax is obviously not a place you want to go post vītam. 

Here is a free translation of today’s rubā’ī in English:

We speak, but there’s a language, another one.

There’s heaven and hell, but there’s a place, another one.

For the free-hearts, there’s a life, another one.

Theirs is a fine jewel from a mine, another one.

In Plain Sight

In terrā thēsaurus latet cēlātus

Quō crēdit nōn crēdit et abscondītus 

Id quod vīdī amōrem nōs cēlātum

Nūdī factī nōs palam in mōre sumus

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1612, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 21 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #1471 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

گــنجیست نهاده در زمین پوشـیده

از ملت کفر و اهل دل دین پوشیده

دیدم که عشق است یقــین پوشـیده

گــشتیم برهــنـــه از چـنـین پوشــیده

ganjīst nehāda dar zamīn pūshīda

az mellat-e kofr o ahl-e dīn pūshīda

dīdam ke eshq ast yaqīn pūshīda

gashtīm berahna az chonīn pūshīda

There is a treasure hidden in the ground, concealed.

From the nation of disbelievers and the people of the religion concealed.

I saw that it is love for certain concealed.

We became naked from such, concealed.

Rūmī wants to point out a simple truth: love abideth in us all. Those caught up in religion or athesism often cannot see what is in plain sight. But once we see what was always there, we become exposed, naked, unadorned, perhaps—in the Latin sense of nūdus—empty of all other thoughts. We become naked because what was covered—perhaps our hearts—becomes uncovered.

Gamard in his explanation of the last line says that the Persian word برهنه [berahna] “naked, bared”  “has the suggestion of being crazed by mystical love, like a crazy person who is indifferent about being unclothed. Such a person cannot conceal his mystical state.”

Certainly the last line is intriguing, but it is the first line that interests me the most. Why is the treasure hidden and why is it hidden in the ground? Buried treasure is a powerful metaphor and sets us up for the revelation that love is the treasure found in all of us and that we must be prospectors to find it. We must ignore what is unimportant and concentrate on the treasure, perhaps even ignore the treasure map given to us by religious zealots and atheists alike. 

But maybe there is more to be found in this metaphor. Zamīn [زمین] “earth, land, ground” is the word Rūmī uses in Persian. This leads me to the synonym xāk [خاک] “earth, ground, dirt,” a Persian word we use in English to signify a dusty brown: khaki. By extension Persians use this word to mean “mortals,” since we will all turn to dust one day. And because of this, they literally call this world, as opposed to the next world, “a dust-bin” xākdān [خاکدان]. To me, this thought gives a better understanding of the first line: there is the treasure of love hidden in our mortal selves. We will never see it unless we “see” it with an open heart.

Here is a free translation:

There’s a treasure hidden within

hidden from Muslim and infidel

But I found it! It was love.

How naked I feel, how exposed!

 

Who's Calling?

 Nē aufugiās, nam tuus emptor ego sum.

Mē spectās; lux tuōrum oc’lōrum sum.

Adventā; splendor sum tuī effectūs

Nē dēlassēre; sum tuum emporium.

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1268, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 20 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #1210 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

مگریز ز من که من خریدار توام

در من بـنگـر کـه نور دیدار توام

در کار مـن آ کـه رونـق کار توام

بیزار مـشو ز من کـه بازار توام

mag’rīz ze man ke man xarīdār-e to am

dar man benegar ke nūr-e dīdār-e to am

dar kār man ā ke rōnaq-e kār-e to am

bīzār mashō ze man ke bāzār-e to am

Don’t flee from me, for I am your buyer.

Look at me because I’m the light of your sight.

Into my work come, for I am the splendor of your work.

Don’t grow weary of me, for I am your market.

In the days before Caller ID, ‘who calling?’ was a frequent question when the voice at the other end of the line sounded unfamiliar. 

Today’s poem is from a mystery caller. It comes with no Caller ID. Gamard in his translation states right out that it is the beloved speaking. Houshmand is not so explicit, and I, unfortunately, am no help at all.

That the “I” is the beloved seems to be the most logical answer to the question “who’s speaking?” The beloved is your buyer, your illumination, your splendor. However, to some readers, I suppose, the “I” could be “you” begging the beloved not to ignore you because you “buy” whatever he has to sell. You become radiant in his presence. Your work glows because of him and you, like merchandise in a market stall, are “for sale.”

In the last poem, I talked about the common poetic threads tying Judaism, Christianity, and Islam together. In this poem the metaphor of the market place undergirds the message. Indeed, the market place is part of the structure of these religions born in the desert. Jehovah redeems. Christ redeems. Allah redeems. 

One interesting feature of both the Persian and Latin poems is the use of syncopation. Simply put, this is the omission of a short syllable. The first word in the Persian poem is مگریز [magorīz], which means ‘don’t flee.’ In order to make this word fit the meter Rūmī has shortened it to magrīz. Because the Persian/Arabic script does not indicate the short vowels, the spelling remains the same. It is up to the reader to shorten magorīz to magrīz. (Technically the Persian/Arabic alphabet has no vowels. Here is the first line with a one-to-one transliteration with the international phonetic alphabet sign of ʔ for alef (ا): mgryz z mn kh mn xrydʔr tw ʔm. As long as I am talking about the Arabic alphabet, I might mention that it has a beautiful feature, which I will call the lengthener. It can lengthen any word or words in a line of poetry so that all of the lines are the same length. گه ke (that) can stretch itself out to کـه and کــه  and کــــــــــه. This lengthening feature accounts for the beauty of Arabic calligraphy.)

 

The Roman alphabet can do none of this. Moreover, all the vowels are written and so the syncopated vowel must be omitted. Oculōrum ‘of the eyes’ becomes oclōrum. Taking my cue from English poetry, I have uncustomarily used an apostrophe to mark this shortening: oc’lōrum. 

Here is an extremely free translation—almost Christian in the choice of words, but then Rūmī, surrounded by Christian communities in Turkey at the time and a speaker of Greek, may have intended a bit of religious fraternity in these four lines.

Don’t go; I am your redeemer.

Don’t look away; I am the light.

Work with me; you will prosper.

Stay with me; I have what you need.

Although

Quamvis tū mē nōn resalūtēs, summum

Ut gaudium es, et ut salūs vīnōrum.

Pastor es mundī, salūsque vītae nostrae,

Et tū dēpellis sine clāmōre lupum.

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1670, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 19 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain # 968 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

گـر تـو نـکـنــــی ســلام مـا را در پـــی

چون جمله نشاطی و سلامی چون می

چـــوپـان جـــهانـــی و امـــان جــــانها

دفـــع گـــرگی گـر نـکـنی هی هی هی

gar tō nakonī salām-e mā rā dar pēī

chūn jomla neshātī va salāmī chūn mēī

chūpān-e jehānī va emān-ē jānhā

daf’ē gorgī gar nakonī hēī hēī hēī

Although you don’t greet us in return

You are like all joy and you are a greeting like wine

you are the shepherd of the world and the refuge of souls

you drive the wolves away, although you don’t cry hey, hey, hey

Today’s poem hinges on the first word gar (گر), poetically shortened from agar (اگر). Given the context the word can mean ‘if’, ‘even if’ or ‘although.’ I have chosen ‘although’ as the meaning. Basically, the poem means:

Although you don’t greet me, you are still everything good and powerful.

‘Although’ clarifies the poet’s message. ‘If’ and ‘even if’ seem to suggest other messages. Houshmand seems to ask: if you don’t do all things good, who will? In other words, I am counting on you, even if you ignore me. For some people, this is the meaning of trust and belief. I believe in you and trust that you are good. How opposite the Roman idea of dō ut dēs, I give so that you give (see blog Oct 22, 2011)! For the Roman, worship was a transactional affair. Not so the Sufi, waiting, believing, meditating in the hope of gaining some relief from the agony of his soul being separated from the divine essence. Remember the lament of the cut reed in Rūmī’s introduction to his Masnavī? (see blog Nov 26, 2021).

Gamard also echos Houshmand. Unfortunately, his translation gets tangled up in complicated clauses of ‘even if,’ ‘since,’ and ’so’— even if you don’t greet me, since you do good things, so you repel the wolf, if you don’t shout ‘hey, hey, hey.’

If the images in Rūmī’s quatrain sound familiar, perhaps even Christian, it is in part due, I think, to the shared “poetic threads” that are woven into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three, drawing from their environment, talk of shepherds and wolves, of a safe refuge in the harshness of the desert.

And a short note about my Latin translation. Whether a wise choice or not, I decided to play on the two meanings of salūs, which are ‘salutation’ and ‘salvation.’ Persian poets do this type of word play all the time. I haven’t run across much of this in Latin—yet.

Finally, a comment about the rhyming syllable in the Persian -ēī. This adds such a musical quality to the poem. This music is enhanced by the repetition three times of the exclamation hēī at the end. I immediately think of the songs of the sixties, Simon and Garfunkel? The Beatles? For Rūmī, rhythm and dance were as much a part of the message as the words themselves.  

Here is a freer translation:

You don’t say hello back to us

Yet you are joy, a greeting like wine

You are the world's shepherd, the souls' refuge

You drive away the wolf without even a cry, hey, hey, hey.

Paradoxes?

Ad tē accēdō tantum, ut absim longē.

Tē consociō tantum, ut abiungam mē.

Rēs tam nūdae videntur, ut mē vēlem. 

Tantum bene rēs valent, ut angar vērē.

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1197, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 18 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain # 1101 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

از بس که به نزدیک توام من دورم

وز غایــت آمــیزش تـو مــهجــورم

وز کــثرت پیداشده گی مستـورم

وز صحت بسیـار چـنین رنجورم

az baske be nazdīk-e to am man dūram

vaz ghāyat āmīzesh-e to mahjūram

vaz kasrat-e paidāshodagī mastūram

vaz sahhat-e besyār chonīn ranjūram

Inasmuch as I am close to you I am far.

And from mixing with you, I am estranged.

And from the openess, I am hidden.

And from the wellness, I am troubled.

Rūmī sets a paradoxical tone in today’s quatrain by beginning with the expression az baske (از بس که, inasmuch, so much that). With az baske, he juxtaposes opposites and sets us in an impossible world. I am so close I am far — so with you I am separate. Everything seems so out there that I am the one hiding, so filled with well-being that I am the one in pain. 

This list of paradoxes is one way to look at the poem. Another is to ask (as Brandon Stone suggested to me the other day), from whom am I far away or estranged? To whom am I troubled? Perhaps, just perhaps, we might read these lines as:

I am so close to you that [to others] I am distant

I am so in your company that [they see] me estranged 

Things are so clear, that [to them] I am a recluse

Things are so right, that [to them] I am crazy.

There is another way to look at these apparent paradoxes. Just as one might say, for example, the more I know about physics, the more I realize how little I know because there is so much more to learn. Sir Isaac Newton, in modesty and wisdom, said that he had only picked up a few bright pebbles on the shore of a vast sea of understanding. So, returning to the poem, the closer I am, the more I realize how really far away I am from understanding you.

There is probably much more to see in these four lines. From the start, I got the sense that Rūmī was offering me a puzzle to solve, and I have only just begun to put the pieces together.

And a final etymological note. Each line ends in -am, which, it turns out, means ‘am’ in English. The two words are related to be sure, but after five thousand years of separation—and there is no paradox here—it is rare to see them so close.  

Here is a freer translation:

 

The closer I am to you the farther away I am

The more we’re friends, the more apart I feel

The more open things are, the more I close up

The more there is well-being, the sicker I am. 

Fervor

Fervēns pectus petit tuum fervōrem.

Inconscium, tuam requīrit mentem.

Vīrō pōtante quaerit id quō vīvis.

Ānō factō petit tuam hanc aurem.

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #556, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 18 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain # 1004 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

بـــجـوشــــد دل کــه تا بـه جـوش تو رسد

بـی هوش شده است تا به هوش تو رسـد

میــنـــوشـــد زهــر تـا بـــه نـوش تو رسـد

چون حلقه شده است تا به گوش تو رسد

Bejūshad del ke tā be jūsh-e to rasad.

Bīhūsh shodast tā be hūsh-e to rasad.

Mīnūshad zahr tā be nūsh-e to rasad.

Chūn halqa shodast tā be gūsh-e to rasad.

The heart boils so that it arrives at your boiling.

It has become mindless so that it arrives at your mind.

It is drinking poison so that it arrives at your antidote.

It has become like a ring so that it arrives at your ear. 

Each line of this quatrain presents a problem for the translator. For a Persian speaker, the problem is the same. Persian has only one third person: a he-she-it all rolled into one pronoun. This is surprising considering that the language, like all Indo-European languages, once had three genders. This pronomial trinity ended sometime after the Arab invasion in the eighth century.

In the first line it is clear that the heart is in a state of fervor so that the heart reaches your state of fervor. But in the second line, what or who becomes mindless? The heart or an unidentified third person? Is someone mindless so that that someone reaches your mental state? Similarly in the third and fourth lines, is it the heart that reaches for your antidote and for your ear or is it that mystery person? I really don’t know, although I did make a decision in the Latin. I chose to say ‘inconscium’ instead of ‘inconscius.’ The former would refer to pectus, the latter to some unidentified third person.

Then, we must consider who is the ‘you’? The beloved? God? If so, we have three entities: heart, a person, and the beloved. If it is God or the beloved, we find it difficult to make sense of the fourth line. A ring in the ear was a poetic way of indicating servitude. Slaves were made to wear an earring to show their status. Is Rūmī saying that the beloved or God will become a slave to the heart or to that mystery person? I don’t believe so. Rather we might have to look at the fourth line in another way. Perhaps ‘ring’ is just a metaphor for submission (Islam, ’surrender’) and that all the poet is suggesting is that by my submitting to God’s will, God will hear me. In other words, I will become a ring, a slave, so that I will be heard. Both Houshmand and Gamard make it sound as if God or the beloved will wear the ring and thus become a slave. Houshmand: “[the heart] forges itself as a ring to grace your ear.” Gamard: “And it [the heart] became like an ear ring so that it may reach your ear.” 

One last problem. In the third line Rūmī uses a word whose root is nūsh (نوش). Basically the word means to drink [to stay alive]. It is etymologically related to hūsh (هوش) in the second line, which means ‘intelligence.’ It is also related to words that mean ‘clear,’ ‘eternal life,’ and ’sweet.’ So nūsh also has these meanings of sweetness, clarity, eternity, and in some instances antidote. Rūmī states that the way to the sweetness, the deathlessness, the wine of the beloved is by drinking poison. What that poison is, I do not know. A metaphor perhaps of difficulties we must go through in this life to reach a higher level of understanding.  

Here is a very free translation as I try to skirt some of the problems mentioned above:

My heart blazes as a way to your fire.

I empty my thoughts as a way to your mind.

I drink poison as a way to your deathlessness.

I become an earring as a way to your ear. 

Horace and Harry

Slow down, you move too fast

Gotta make the moment last

My apologies for injecting you with a melody that may not leave you for a while. At least that is what happened when these Simon and Garfunkel lyrics popped into my head as I thought about Harry Eyres’ book Horace and Me, Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet. This 1966 song from my youth just about summed up what Eyres was trying to say, what Horace was trying to say, what a thousand poets down through the ages have been trying to say.

Slow down, and carpe diem

For Eyres, as representative of the worldwide Slow Movement, this notion is central to his worldview, to his raison d’être, I suppose. I don’t really know Mr. Eyres except for what I gleaned from reading his book, which tends toward the autobiographical, a diary really of his thoughts on Horace’s poetry.

I only came to know Harry Eyres recently because he posted a comment a month ago on my verbal wanderings about Horace’s ode III:25, “Quō Mē Bacche” (September 10, 2010). He made mention of his book published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2013, which contained his translation and an invitation to look at the book, if I felt so inclined. I was intrigued and bought a copy.

And I am glad I did. I enjoyed finding out about a man who came to Latin and Horace in a way so different from mine. I came to Latin because I found a Latin grammar book in snowy Afghanistan years ago. Eyres, on the other hand, came to Latin the time-honored way—that is, if you believe in Masterpiece Theatre. He went to an English public school. His father was a wine merchant and this too became a path to Latin and Horace. He got scholarships and went to Cambridge. He became a poet, a writer, an oenologist. But above all, he became a connoisseur of Horace’s words—of the richness of the Latin sounds, the bouquet of meanings lingering on the palette. I will stop with the wine-talk words, except for this: if you are interested in really tasting Horace, I would suggest that you get a copy of his book.

Eyres’ translations are lively and up-to-date—no academic language here. He sometimes uses Frenchy words like “off-piste,” “grands crus.” (This last leaves me, a French speaker, wondering how the word is pronounced. Is it “granz crews” or does it have the Gallic nasal quality, the dropping of the s, the umlauted ü?) But in every case, Eyres captures in his translations the music and the spirit of what I think Horace was saying about dying for one’s country, about living in the now, about being a friend.

Eyres mentioned that he carries around a Loeb edition of Horace’s odes. This small fact alone painted a vast picture for me. I saw in my mind not only him sitting in a noisy airport lounge pouring over Latin words and seeking their meaning and music but I saw my Chinese teacher at UCI, in the days when the campus was just a few buildings. She, a refugee from the 1949 Liberation, had her own vademecum. It was not Horace she was reading but the eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Dongpo (蘇東坡). In the winter sunlight, she was scrutinizing the complexities not only of his ideas but the beauty of his style. Harry Eyres and my Chinese teacher Mrs. Loh were both seeking the same thing: a moment when time slowed down—an attempt “to make the moment last” and commune with a fellow human being.

Discipulus

Cor, discipulus tuus, amōrem discit.

Noctis similis ante diem praecēdit

Quōquō vādis, vultus amōris praestat,

Quod ad ardentem oleum lūcem adit.

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #237, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 17 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #1530 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

شاگـرد تـوست دل کـه عشق آمـوز است

مانــنده شــب گــــرفتــــه پای روز است

هر جا که روم صورت عشق است بپیش

زیـــرا روغن در پــی روغن ســـوز است

A literal translation of the Persian gives us:

Your student is the heart because it is a love-learner

Resembling the night it is a follower of the day

Everywhere I go the face of love is at the fore

Because oil follows burning oil.

Rūmī tells us that the heart is open to learning about your love. I will leave it up to you to decide who “your” is. He then follows this statement with a metaphor often seen in Persian poetry about the passage of night into day. The student seeks knowledge just as the night seeks the day. More than that, love as the teacher, is always in front guiding the student. The last line, however, presents us with an unusual metaphor. We can imagine the oil being lamp oil. We know that fire will eventually turn it into light. The mystical—Sūfī implications—seem enormous. What I learn will eventually lead to my own destruction. The self will burn and as it does will become one with the light. At least, this is my take on the meaning of the last line.

Before leaving this quatrain, I want to point out two things. The first is meter. The second is etymology.

Here is the quatrain in Persian and Latin. The bold letters indicate long syllables. The simple letters in italics indicate short syllables. The grey letters indicate that the syllable is dropped. The Latin doesn’t always mirror the Persian, but the Latin does stick to the accepted variation for this meter (see blog posting for October 31, 2021).  

Shāgerd-e to ast del ke eshq āmūz ast

cor discipulus tuus  amōrem discit

Mānandeye shab gerefta pāye rūz ast

Noctis similis  ante diem praecēdit

Harjā ke ravam sūrat-e eshq ast bepīsh

Quōquō vādis vultus amōris praestat

Zīra rōghan dar peye rōghan sūz ast

Quod ad ardentem oleum lūcem adit

Persian and Latin share a common ancestor (Indo-European). These words are highlighted in green below. The two words in black come from Arabic: eshq (love) and sūrat (face). 

Shāgerd-e to ast del ke eshq āmūz ast

Mānandeye shab gerefte pā-ye rūz ast

Harjā ke ravam sūrat-e eshq ast be pīsh

Zīra rōghan dar peye rōghan sūz ast

Although Persian and Latin went their separate ways centuries and centuries ago, some of the words in green still bear some family resemblance, as distant cousins might at a family reunion:  to—tū (to is pronounced tu in Afghanistan by the way), ast—est, ke—quod, ravam—repam, rūz—lux, pīsh—prae, gerefta—capta, pā—pēs, etc. Other words seem to show no resemblance, unless you are a trained historical linguist:  del—cor, shāgerd—socius, har—solidus, jā—itus, etc.  Still other Persian words have no surviving relatives in Latin like rōghan—oil (which can be seen in Old English as reám, ‘cream’), shab—night (which might be related to creper, crepusculum) and sūz—burning. 

Here is a freer translation of the quatrain:

Your heart is a learner, a learner of love

Like the night it follows day

Wherever I go, love’s face is before me,

Like oil before the fire of light.

The Right to Joy

Causā gaudiī nōbis amor dōnātur

Gaudiī jūs est id quod amōre affertur

Nec māter nos creāvit atque ille amor

Illī mātrī bis mīliēns laudētur

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #449, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 17 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain # 1469 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry.

Love lets us have joy. It gives us the right to joy. It created us not just with a corporeal reality but a spiritual one as well. And for this, Rūmī declares that love, as our true mother, deserves all the praise. He is more emphatic than I am: our mothers did not give us birth. Love did.

عشق آن باشد که خلق را دارد شاد

عشق آن باشد که دادِ شادیها داد

مارا مادر نزاد آن عسق بزاد

صد رحمت و آفرین برآن مادر باد

eshq ān bāshad ke xolq rā dārad shād

eshq ān bāshad ke dād-e shādīhā dād

mārā mādar nazād, ān eshq bezād

sad rahmat o āfarīn bar ān mādar bād

Love is what has happiness for the people

Love is what gives the right to joys

Us mother did not bear; that love bore [us]

100 congratulations on that mother let there be.

 

The words dād-e shādīhā (literally: law of joys) is a pun because it resembles dād in the same line, which is the past tense of dādan, ‘to give.’ Dād means both ‘law’ and ‘gift.’ Perhaps it doesn’t really matter which of the two meanings Rūmī had in mind. What is important here is that love has given us joy. What for? Perhaps to chase away all of the opposites of joy: sadness, dispair, depression, unbearable grief. In the Persian language dictionary compiled by a man named Dehkhodā (دهخدا)—a dictionary on par with the O.E.D.—we find this line attributed to Rūmī under the entry for shādī ‘joy’:

شادی بی غم در این بازار نیست

Shādī bī gham dar īn bāzār nīst.

There is no joy without sadness in this bazaar.

The word ‘bazaar’ here sounds humorous if not sarcastic. Perhaps it is both, but often words relating to the marketplace are used in Persian poetry to describe this confusing world. Rūmī wants to tell use that love, once given, confers on us the justice of joy, the right to joy, even when grief and sorrow lurk behind every moment of happiness.

Here is a free English translation:

Love is what keeps the world happy.

Love is what gives us the right to happiness.

A mother did not give us birth. Love did.

Upon that mother let there be all our praise.