Publisher's Synopsis
The Portable Rumi contains verse from Rumi's The Mathnavi and The Divan of Shams-i Tabriz. Rumi's mystical epic poem The Mathnavi was chanted aloud to Husam al-Din Hasan, to whom he was passionately attached, beginning around 1258. The series of stories, although unfinished, is regarded by Persians as "the Persian Koran" and as one of the two most important works of Persian literature. Just as beautiful is Rumi's The Divan of Shams-i Tabriz, a work written expressly for his mentor Shams and titled to indicate that Shams is the author, as if the two men had become one person. Rumi believed Shams to be perfect, in the image of God. Thus, he believed that when he loved Shams, he was loving God in body and soul. Not even Rumi knew exactly how to describe his relationship with Shams. "Even friend and beloved are wrong words for this," he said. The tone of The Divan is uplifting, and Rumi manages to mix mysticism and the deeply spiritual with an eroticism that approaches the sublime: "My mouth tastes sweet with your name in it." For a world more accustomed to reading praises of the older man for the younger (Shakespeare's Sonnets, poems in the Greek Anthology, etc.), The Divan provides a moving account of love from a younger man to an older: "I turn my face to you, and into eternity: / We have been in love that long." Rumi's idea of paradise is to be with Shams: "There is a grainy taste I prefer to every / Idea of heaven: human friendship." At his best, Rumi expresses love for another man more profoundly and more poetically than any other writer except, perhaps, Shakespeare or Hafiz. "I see my beauty in you," Rumi says in another ghazal for Shams. For seven centuries, readers have discovered their own capacity for beauty in the words of Rumi.
