 My name is Nargis Farzad and I'm a staff member of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Surah's University of London. As an Iranian and a Persian speaker, I'm already programmed to love poetry and to find solace in poetry. In these unpredictable days of self-isolation, I keep making lots of different lists of my favorite poems and poets, both English and Persian, modern and classical. And Moulana Jaloludine Balkhi Rumi turns up on every list. So I wanted to talk about Rumi and his poetry to someone who really knows a lot about Moulana. I've invited my friend, a colleague, a leading authority on the life and poetry of Rumi and last but not least an alumnus of Surah's, Professor Alan Williams. Alan, welcome to the online Surah's on the lockdown. Can I start by asking Alan where have you been since graduating from Surah's? Since graduating from Surah's? Yes. I've started off getting the first job I could, which in those days I was able to without a doctorate because I left Surah's before I finished my doctorate. After three years I needed a job. I was getting married and I went down to Sussex and for six years I taught as a lecturer in the School of African and Asian Studies there. But I also taught part-time at Surah's in that period while I was still finishing my doctorate. You could do that in those days. I mean, I know you have GTAs now, but I got my full-time job and tenure in 1979 which I only retired from last September after 40 years before I got my doctorate. So, I mean, that's how much the world has changed. But this academic path started before Surah's at another institution. Am I right? Well, actually, to be honest, if you're talking about my interest in Rumi, it started before I even left school. Because when I was at school I was a classicist and I was a reader. I was a nerd. And I started, I came across the Sufis. It was those days when there were probably three or four books in the shops about Sufism. Now there are hundreds, of course. But in those days there were just a few and one of them I was fortunate to pick up was Nicholson's translations of the Divan of Shams, his translations of the, they're mostly from the Divani Shams, but some of them are also from the Masnevi. And the interesting thing, and the tantalizing thing for me was that they were parallel, it was a parallel text. So it had the Persian text on the left and the English text on the right, which is the wrong way around actually, but there it was. And it fascinated me. I couldn't read the script, but I was still at school and I was, I started to read Nicholson's Masnevi. I didn't go and read Persian at Oxford. I went up to read classics at Queen's College, the Queen's College. But I was there at a difficult time. I mean, not for classics. Classics was chugging along when I got bored with it. I had been doing classics all my school days. And I wanted to change to Persian and Arabic because I'd been reading the Masnevi and in short, I wanted to read it in the original. And that's, so Molana is the reason I changed to Persian. I was persuaded by a very good friend of mine to go ahead and do it. And she reminds me to this day that it was she that's responsible for my career. But yes, it was a difficult time at Oxford for Persian, because you know George Morrison, you know, much missed. But even then, he was very poorly. He was elderly before his time really, because he wasn't that old even when I knew him. But this was in 73. And he was in his anecdotage. Any way to put it. Brilliant teacher. Obviously, he had been a brilliant teacher and his translations are wonderful, and so on. But the other Persianists there were not interested in poetry so much. I mean, there were options in modern Persian that I wasn't so interested in. But it was a difficult time, except I had the great fortune to be taught by some really wonderful Arabists, Albert Horani. And then Shafiq Khadkani, who is one of the greatest poets from Iran, still alive. And you keep in touch with him. And I keep in touch. In fact, I translated with an artist, we translated some of his poetry. It's a nice book published by Sohan. But I met him after 40 years. I met him again in Leiden, actually, recently. And it was a wonderful reunion. But yeah, my interest in Persian goes a long way back. But the weird thing is that I went to Iran for the first, would you believe it, and the only time. And I'm Professor of Persian for many years now. I have only been to Iran once in my life, physically. And that was in 1975. I think he was still in Iran. Yes, yes. And I was a Calo youth. And I was there for months. But I came back. I went there to visit the principally, I mean, I went all around Iran, but except to the far, the far east, I didn't go to the to, to Mashhad. But I, I wanted to go to the Zoroastrian villages near Yazd. And I made it my business, a very long journey south. And I was there for a couple of weeks. And so this was in the August, the worst time of the year to visit Yazd. I mean, I remember it. I came back in September 75, after having been in these villages, and discovered that there was a series of lectures going on at Zoroast called at Oxford, the Oriental Institute, called the Rutten by Katra lectures. And the lecture was Professor Mary Boyce of Zoroast. And I listened to these lectures with my mouth sort of aghast. I was aghast because I was listening to her talking about those villages I had just come from, 10 years previously in the, in the mid 60s when she had spent a year in Sharifabad. And I heard her talking with great feeling and in great detail about those days. And after the lectures finished, I went up to her and introduced myself and said, can I come and see you in London because I would be interested in, in doing a PhD with you. And she said, oh, so we made an appointment. And I went to visit her. It was my birthday. I remember it was in March 1976, just before my finals. And I then went to Zoroast and did three, three years at Zoroast learning all the languages I had never thought about before. That is Pahlavi, Manichean, Sogdian, Avestan, Old Persian, all at one go. We, we more or less started these languages all at one go. And the idea was that you couldn't really do much on Zoroastrianism until you were at least familiar with Pahlavi, Middle Persian, Avestan and Old Persian. So that was a very steep learning curve. And it was an interesting time to be at Soas. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's amazing. I mean, I'm delighted to say that you're a regular visitor to Soas as a guest lecturer, as an examiner, as a visiting examiner. You've examined many PhDs since then at Soas. And this extraordinary circle seems to have come, this journey seems to have come full circle. Despite your extraordinary career as a professor of comparative literature, professor of comparative religions, it's back to Rumi. Yeah, it's very strange. I mean, it took me by surprise. To some extent, I didn't know where my career was going. I had published my PhD, which was on a Pahlavi text. It was a very large two volume edition and translation and commentary on a Pahlavi text. And it kind of, I won't say it finished me off for Pahlavi, because I was still interested in the more metaphysical texts of in Middle Persian, the Dain card in particular and other, can I call, yeah, more scholastic, mystical, not mystical, but metaphysical texts and philosophical texts. But I had really come to the end of my interest in Iranian studies quay, old Iranian, and was interested in going back to the poetry, because as you know, Middle Persian is unfortunately rather devoid of poetry anymore. Much of it was translated and rendered into the most famous example being the Sharname, being rendered from the Chodainomag into the Sharname. But I was hungry for poetry, which I was missing terribly. And by great fortune, I was invited by Penguin to do one volume of translation of the Masnevi, which I had always been interested in rather more than most people are interested in Rumi through his ghazals. Everybody admits to loving the ghazals and finding the Masnevi hardgoing. And for Iranians, I think it's different because they're brought up on the stories. But reading the Masnevi in English is a labor of love because it had only been translated into rather archaic English by Nicholson, who I have a picture of here. Just for the road, this was my supervisor, Mary Boyce. Oh, it's very much an absolute legend. She was a brilliant teacher, but like a Zen master, I mean, she's a very unassuming presence in the sense that she had to teach from a horizontal position because of her spinal problems, spinal injuries. But Nicholson's translations to go back to him were almost, well, they've made reading the Masnevi very difficult. So when Penguin asked me to do a translation of them, I said to them, well, I'm not going to do an anthology, that's been done. And I'm not interested in filleting it to produce little gobbits of, you know, they wanted an anthology. And I said, oh, I want to do a whole book because I had a sense that there was something I wanted to discover about the Masnevi. And I think I did find it. And that is that by translating the whole book, I began to get a sense of the way that Rumi's mind works. Yeah. The most remarkable mind. You know, I've been going back and reading and rereading just those first 18 lines of the opening of the Naename, the song of the reed flute. And it's, it's really quite apposite in these days of compulsory or voluntary self-isolation, the idea of Beshra's Nei, Chon Shekha Yatmi Konad, Azjodayi Ha Hekha Yatmi Konad. And I want you to, before giving me a translation of that, for our audience who may not know what Masnevi is, tell us a little bit about Rumi's Masnevi. What is it? And what is it composed of? Well, Rumi's Masnevi is about that big. Okay. On a bookshelf, it is six volumes of very, I mean, the Masnevi form, the most famous is the, perhaps the Mandep Oter, the Conference of the Birds. And typically a Masnevi would be a couple of thousand, three thousand bates, three thousand verses. In other words, and then we find that each of Rumi's six books are longer than those standard Masnevi. So his total, the Masnevi is of epic proportions. It is 25 and a half thousand couplets, the equivalent of over, you know, 50, 50,000 verses of English poetry. Just one verse in my new volume, my new edition, one book, one volume is that thick. That's because actually, I mean, I've included the Persian text in this volume, but nevertheless, it is an extremely, an extremely large and comprehensive volume. Now what is it? The title tells you nothing. It just means couplets. Masnevi, the Arabic word isna, meaning two couplet, means a couplet form the double bait, the two hemi sticks of a verse. And it is a didactic text. And that means that unlike the Razals, which are like hymns or psalms, they're celebrations of a particular idea. Of one seed is allowed to flower within a few lines. You find that a Razal moves through variations on a theme, but it's basically got a certain unity to it. Whereas the Masnevi is this great, I wouldn't say lumbering, but this great monster of a vehicle that moves forward at, by modern standards, quite a slow pace. So it contains hundreds of tales, but it is not a storybook. And that's the odd thing. It's a paradox that it seems that Rumi hit upon this formula to tell the story of the read, to tell the story of humanity. And in doing so to lead the imagination where he wanted it to be, which was in the palm of his hand, so that he could guide the adept up the spiritual path, the Sufi path. I don't even like to call the Masnevi a Sufi text, because it is fundamentally a poetry. And that's why I've retained the poetry of the form I've translated it into. I translated it into blank verse. Fantastic. And you and I agree that our Maulana, Maulavi for the Persian speakers and the man you've devoted so much of your academic career to promoting is different to the Rumi of Madonna or breathless renditions of Demi Moore or the other American celebrities. Who is Rumi? Put him in a context for me, please. Well, that's a difficult question to answer. I don't know who Rumi is. I am very familiar with what Rumi says. And I believe I've become familiar with what Rumi loves, because his text is all I have of him, although I hear his voice when I read him. Where did he come from? And, you know, how was he just an always a warm poet? And, you know, I call him Balchi and Rumi. Moore was his, give us a little bit of information about his biographical information, I suppose is what I'm asking for. He was born in the province of Balch or ancient Bactria. There is dispute among scholars about exactly which modern country he was born in. But we're talking about an area far to the east of present day Afghanistan, which are modern nation states Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. So that area, several thousand miles to the east of where he ended up in Konya, he lived most of his adult life, all of his adult life in Konya, which is in Central Anatolia. Of course, why travel so far away from his first place? Like many, like many, he had, his family had to migrate westwards. I think, I mean, it's, it's pretty certain that he had to, his father, Bahauddin Valad, moved the family westwards, not simply because of the approaching Mongol invasion. But several, only a few years after they, the family left that area, ancient Samarkand and several other major cities were completely destroyed. So he and his family went 2000 miles westwards and arrived in Anatolia in the late teens, early 20s of the 13th century. And there he remained. He went to, he went to study at Madrasas in Aleppo and in, it's said that he listened to an Arabic lecture in Damascus. A lot of it, a lot of the information we have about Rumi is what we might call hagiographical. But some people have argued that he taught the doctrine of Arabic that, and I'm not going to dispute that because they are teaching from similar traditions, whether they're doctrine is exactly the same. I somewhat doubt myself, but the man himself moved, so to speak, inwards during his life. He began as a teacher who was very famous and in having inherited his father's role as head of a madrasa. But as he aged and having met, of course, the famous teacher, Shamsuddin of Tabriz, after which his divan is named in dedication to him, he seems to have matured and become this uniquely profound teacher. And that is what I think is attractive to Westerners is that his poetry is both very beautiful, but it's also got an incredible depth to it that is rare, very rare. Absolutely. Well, I think a good moment too. I'd love to have a little bit of the Masnavi, maybe the opening, and then hopefully a qazal as well, one of the lyrical songs. And I'm so grateful if you sent me some lovely images, which I'll also share. So I'm just reaching for my copy. I know it by heart, but I don't trust myself to not read. I'm just going to do a few lines of the opening of the nai name. Be shnw im nai, chon shekaayat mi konad, az joda'i haa hekaayat mi konad. So I'll read it from my translation, yes. Listen to this read as it is grieving. It tells the story of our separations. Since I was severed from the bed of reeds in my cry men and women have lamented, I need the breast that's torn to shreds by parting to give expression to the pain of heartache. Whoever finds himself left far from home looks forward to the day of his reunion. I was in grief in all society. I joined with those of sad and happy state. Each one assumed he was my bosom friend, but none sought out my secrets from within me. My secret is not far from my lament, but I and ear have no illumination. There's no concealment of the soul and body, yet no one has the power to see the soul. The reed flute sound is fire, not human breath. Whoever does not have this fire be gone. It is the fire of love that's in the reed, the turbulence of love that's in the wine. And I think by the time I got to that, I was already hooked, and I know why thinking about it this morning because I knew you're going to ask me to read this passage. That phrase, it's something that it crops up very frequently in mystical writers such as Saint John of the Cross, Saint Theresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and all the great mystics of the European tradition who have so to speak gone all the way to union. And here we have it and it's a strange image for a Muslim to use because fire in Islam is more usually used as a symbol of punishment. And is, of course, this is not true of the Sufis, but the fire of love is using this old Iranian word, Not Nar, but the old Persian word, and using it in this very positive, but this deeply mystical sense of that which is a spark in the human soul, and which lights up the human soul, but which may be doused by life in the flesh, but which may just survive and may be kindled by love. And so that's why I stopped at that line because he says, he's pointing out that the love that's in the reed, the fire that's in the reed, the love that's in the wine, this is a mystical love. And the rest of the masonry, you could say, is a meditation on this power, the power of this love in the human spirit. Amazing. Amazing. Have you been to his mausoleum? As we speak, I'll try to share this. Yeah, I was there just recently. Yeah. Can you see that? That's a nice picture of Azreti Mavlana, or as they call him in Turkey nowadays, a traditional image. We don't really know what he looked like, of course, but there is a traditional image of him, and this still to this day is reproduced. There we have a picture of the mausoleum. It's called a museum now, Müzesi in Turkey, since the secularization of Turkey by Ataturk. But you see the beyond, on the left hand side, you see the of that black and white photograph, you see the mausoleum, and that green dome, that turquoise is still standing. And yes, it's believed to be one of the Sufis, and for Mervelevis, it's one of the most sacred sites. It's changed rather a lot, I think, from that black and white picture. I mean, now I understand it has its international airport, and it's quite a metropolis. It still does have, this is the entrance to a very beautiful Mosaic. When I was there 18 months ago, unfortunately, it was under renovation. Of course, now, at this moment, it's under lockdown, so it's completely closed. But when I went to, I was fortunately able to see the tomb. I had first gone there in 1973, which happened to be the 700th anniversary of his death. That was when I was a mere 20 years old. And then, some 40 years later, I went again in 2007, which was the happened to be the 800th anniversary of his birth. So those were two very auspicious times to visit, and I recently went back to, on a particular purpose, which was to get photographs of the Konya manuscript, original photographs, that is, photographs of the manuscript as it is unrestored, that I could put these photographs into my new book. That's right, well here, I can come to, oh yes. That is the divan, that picture. That's the divan that is on display in the Konya Museum. The pictures that you have of the frontispiece of the nenome. Those are the pictures that I obtained from the director who kindly took the assistant director who took the photograph. Beautiful, they're just the illumination and the, you know, they are still under, they're in remarkable condition in spite of the fact that they are, I have to say, solely in need of some high-tech preservation. The atmosphere in Konya is heavily polluted. Those are images that I've used on the cover of my books, the British Library, from a Safavid manuscript of 1532. Yeah, I know that, you know, you've devoted so much of your time and scholarship to the translation of Masnavi and I have to add that it's not just a pure translation, which is a Herakulian task. I know you also work a lot on, you know, theory and practice of translation and it's really quite a claim. It was a conscious decision to translate this poetry into a blank verse because I didn't want to lose the rhythm of the poetry, although I've translated it into Ayambic pentameter, not into Masnavi meter, Ramal meter, but I thought it necessary to keep the musicality of the original there, to some extent, as far as I could. Of course, and but your work of translation, I know you, as you mentioned earlier with Shafiq al-Khamni, you've translated modern poetry as well and it's, you've also done some of the Qazals and I also note now that I omitted another institution where a lot of your work, both as a faculty administrator, professor, you know, teaching was, perhaps you've said you've just retired from how long way you're working for them in a very reduced capacity as a professional professor, but yeah, I've been there very happy at University of Manchester for many years, 35 years, but it made, it had the fortunate effect on me of having to teach many, many subjects, not just Iranian studies, not just Pahlavi or Avestan language and it broadened, well Susiq started by beating it out of me, this sort of ivory tower-ness that we tend to take to as academics sometimes, especially tech scholars who are wrapped up in their texts. So I was teaching large classes of students of comparative literature, comparative religion and yeah, I can see why this poetry is extremely communicative, it's, you wanted to read Abazal. Yes, absolutely, because I was so excited you have, and I have such fond memories of when we were at the whole festival of, contains a strong language I think and I know that this Ghazal, she's one of my favourites, I love it, it makes me want to get up and dance, and I thought perhaps we could finish off on reading, I'll do the Persian and your wonderful English translation, so okay, would you be happy if we do this Ghazal, I think Amirah Ghazal is a number 37 for that, okay, Alan, Professor Alan Williams, it's been such a pleasure as always to chat to you, I can never have enough, and I'll do the Persian and I'll leave you to, I think perhaps we could even come out of this, okay. Ruh toy, fote homa ftuh toy, siney mash Ruh toy, bardare asrar maro, noor toy, sur toy, doulate man sur toy, morghe kohe tur toy, chassebem em ghor maro, qatre toy, bar toy, loth toy, qar toy, kand toy, zah toy, bish mayo zor maro, pojreye khorshid toy, khaneye nahid toy, rhoseye omid toy, ragh deyar maro, rhose toy, rhuz toy, rhuz toy, hausele dar yhuz toy, ab toy, kumze toy, ab deyin bar maro, dhane toy, dhom toy, bode toy, jom toy, pohde toy, khom toy, khom be magzor maro, in tanayar kham tanadi, ragh deylam kham zanadi, ragh shudit toy, nabodi, in hame goftar maro. Beautiful, you read the whole thing. I'm just going to read four bits of that, because of course it, the wonderful thing about what you've read is that it's so rhythmic and so lilting. The rhythm is wonderful. I can't do justice to it in translation. My friend, my refuge and my heart-consuming love. You are my friend, my refuge and my master guardian. You are the Noah, you are the spirit, you are the opener, you are the opened, you are the breast that's laid bare. You're at the door of my secrets. You are the seed, you are the snare, you are the wine, you are the cup. You are the cooked, you are the raw. Don't leave me in the raw state. If this body were diminished, then my heart would not be ambushed. You'd be my path. There would not be all of these words. Wonderful, Alan. Wonderful, Alan. Thank you so much for giving us your time. You've made the lockdown a lot more bearable. Thank you.