The Unseen Poems

Author: Rumi

Middle East

Published on 3 October 2019 by Everyman (Everyman's Library) in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Everyman's Library POCKET POETS' series.

Rumi: Unseen Poems – the second volume of

Rumi in the Everyman Pocket Poet series – is a treasury of poems which have

never been translated before, researched and translated by Rumi biographer

Brad Gooch and the Iranian writer Maryam Mortaz.

The thirteenth-century Persian poet

Rumi was trained in Sufism, a mystic tradition within Islam. He founded the

Mevlevi Order, often known as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music

as part of their spiritual devotion. His poetry combines the sacred and the

sensual, expressing both rapturous divine love, and aching human love for his

companion and teacher, Shams of Tabriz. It has long been popular in the West,

never more so than in the last twenty-five years, when a new wave of free

translations introduced him to an ever-widening audience. However, some of these recent

translations have been more in the nature of interpretations by writers who

are not Persian speakers. Cultural and Islamic references central to an

understanding of Rumi's poetry have been toned down or omitted. And so vast

was Rumi's output that earlier scholarly translators were obliged to be

selective, leaving a rich vein of verse still unmined. From this Gooch and

Mortaz have made a selection of ghazals (short lyric poems) and rubaiyat

(quatrains), aiming in their own translations to achieve fidelity to the

originals while preserving all Rumi's lyric exuberance.

This book makes a perfect companion to the

first Everyman volume of Rumi, which presents the very best of the

twentieth-century translations.