ABSTRACT
From about 1920 Nicholson had begun collecting materials for the long research which was to lead to his magnum opus. Having begun with Rum}, he returned to Rumi. His first book had been a selection of the mystical odes; he now concentrated all his forces upon the MathnavI which, in his words, 'exhibits, more fully than the DlwGn-i Shams-i Tabriz, the marvellous range of Jalalu'ddin's poetic genius. His Odes reach the utmost heights of which a poetry inspired by vision and rapture is capable, and these alone would have made him the unchallenged laureate of Mysticism. But they move in a world remote from ordinary experience, open to none but "the unveiled", whereas the MathnawI is chiefly concerned with problems and speculations bearing on the conduct, use, and meaning of Life. While the Odes depict Reality as reflected in the clairvoyant consciousness of the Saint, the MathnawI represents the Saint not only as a mirror of Reality, but also as a personage invested with Divine authority and power, an indispensable Guide on the Way to God, a Physician who can diagnose and cure diseases of the soul, a Preacher of the Truth and a Teacher of the law-the law of reverent obedience, through which "Heaven was filled with light and the Angels became pure and holy." Professing to expound the esoteric doctrine of the
Qur'iin, this vast rambling discourse provides instruction and entertainment for all seekers. Few would care to read it through; but everyone can find in it something to suit his taste, from abstruse and recondite theories of mystical philosophy to anecdotes of a certain kind, which are told in the plainest terms possible.' \
Editions of a sort of the Persian text of the Mathnavl were freely available, as well as printed Turkish commentaries, and these had satisfied earlier scholars who took in hand the translation of the great poem, only to admit defeat before they had reached even half-way. The work had been famous in the West ever since Sir William Jones called attention to its unique quality. But Nicholson was not the man to content himself with translating any text which he had not personally edited. A poem so profound in its ideas and so idiomatic in its language needed to be studied de novo and in the minutest detail; corruption had inevitably wreaked havoc with its text during centuries of manuscript transmission, and he saw the imperative need to re-establish as accurately as possible the poet's ipsissima verba. Working alone and unaided, he paid out of his own pocket for the expensive photographs of the oldest extant manuscripts, collected the commentaries, and patiently and laboriously set to work on his greatest undertaking. It was a task which occupied twenty years of unremitting toil, and eventually blinded him. But he completed his edition and annotated translation of the 25,000 couplets in eight volumes, published between 1925 and 1940 and totalling in all some four thousand pages. I quote Professor R. Levy's comments on this performance, a judgment heartily subscribed to by every scholar, whether of Europe, America or Asia, who has looked into Nicholson's Mathnavl. 'The editing of a difficult text not far short of 26,000 lines in length, in a script which provides endless possibilities for copyist's errors, is in itself an immense task, physical and intellectual. Yet Nicholson was never content to regard as final what he had set down. As better materials became available to him in the course of his transcribing and editing he revised and corrected whole sections, running into thousands of lines. The translation-guided, of course, by the commentaries in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, as well as those in European languages-is an unsurpassable rendering of the original, in a style which has made it eagerly
223 sought after even by people who have little interest in orientalism but who find in the work food and illumination for their beliefs.' A small and relatively unimportant detail, of which I happen to have personal knowledge, illustrates the thoroughness with which Nicholson prepared himself for his interpreter's part. Certain passages in the poem, occurring in some of the anecdotes, contain obscenities which he was not willing to reproduce in English; yet for the sake of completeness he felt obliged to include them somehow, and decided upon the decent obscurity of Latin. In order to enrich his vocabulary with the necessary if distasteful words, he made Juvenal and Persius his constant companions.
