Rumi (Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)

Rumi was born in 1207 near Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan; his family fled west ahead of the Mongol armies and settled in Konya, in Anatolia, where he became a respected professor of religion. Then, in 1244, a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz walked into his life — and the scholar became an ecstatic poet.

When Shams vanished a few years later (likely murdered), Rumi poured his grief and longing into thousands of lyrics, naming the great collection not for himself but for his lost friend: the Divan of Shams. His other masterpiece, the Masnavi — some 25,000 couplets of stories and spiritual teaching — has been called "the Quran in Persian." His followers founded the Mevlevi order, the whirling dervishes, who turn his poetry into motion.

Seven centuries on, Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in America. We present him here in public-domain English translations by the Victorian-era scholars R. A. Nicholson and E. H. Whinfield — formal in flavor, but faithful to the originals.