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.