The Unseen Poems

A collection of never-before-translated poems by the Persian poet and Sufi master Rumi - the only medieval poet to have become a modern bestseller!

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.