This existence is a snare -- Rumi

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Dear Friends,

The Mathnawi, Volume VI, lines 216 - 227 -- the first an interpretive

version by Coleman Barks, which Barks developed relying on Professor

Reynold Nicholson's translation; the second, Nicholson's classic,

literal translation: The attached picture is a sketch done by my Dear

friend, Linda Stewart.

....

....

....

I am part of the load

not rightly balanced.

I drop off in the grass,

like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse

wherever I fall.

....

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains

floating and flying in the will of the air,

often forgetting ever being

in that state, but in sleep

I migrate back. I spring loose

from the four-branched, time-and-space cross,

this waiting room.

....

I walk into a huge pasture.

I nurse the milk of millennia.

....

Everyone does this in different ways.

Knowing that conscious decisions

and personal memory

are much too small a place to live,

every human being streams at night

into the loving nowhere, or during the day,

in some absorbing work.

....

.... -- Version by Coleman Barks,

"We Are Three"

Maypop, 1987

....

....

Let the ill-balanced load drop from me, that I may behold the

meadow of the pious.

(Then), like the Fellows of the Cave, I shall browse on the

orchard of Bounty – not awake, nay, they are asleep.*

I shall recline on the right or on the left, I shall not roll save

involuntarily, like a ball,

Just as Thou, O Lord of the Judgement, turnest me over

either to the right or to the left.

Hundreds of thousands of years I was flying (to and fro)

involuntarily, like the motes in the air.

If I have forgotten that time and state, (yet) the migration in

sleep (to the spiritual world) recalls it to my memory.

(Every night) I escape from this four-branched cross and

spring away from this (confined) halting-place into the (spacious)

pasture of the spirit.

For the nurse, Sleep, I suck the milk of those bygone days

of mine, O Lord.

All the (people in the) world are fleeing from their free-will

and (self-) existence to their drunken (unconscious) side.

In order that for awhile they may be delivered from sobriety

(consciousness), they lay upon themselves the opprobrium of

wine and minstrelsy.

All know that this existence is a snare, that volitional thought

and memory are a hell.

They are fleeing from selfhood into selflessness either by

means of intoxication or by means of (some engrossing) occupa-

tion, O well-conducted man.

....

-- Translation by Reynold A. Nicholson

"The Mathnawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi"

Gibb Memorial Trust

 

 

 

LoveAlways,

 

Mazie

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