Start with the Masnavi, not the lyrics: Book One in Jawid Mojaddedi's verse translation for Oxford World's Classics, published in 2004, is the most inviting door into Rumi in English. Read it slowly, with the notes. Then decide whether you want his teaching stories or his lyric fire first.
Who Was Rumi, and Why Does the Order Matter?
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) was a Muslim jurist, teacher, and Sufi mystic who spent his adult life in Konya, in present-day Turkey, having left Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, as a boy. In 1244 he met the wandering dervish Shams al-Din of Tabriz, and nearly everything he is now famous for followed that meeting.
Until then Rumi had been a conventional scholar, teaching law and preaching in a madrasa. Shams unsettled all of it. When Shams disappeared a few years later — possibly killed by people close to Rumi's own household; nobody knows — the grief cracked the scholar open and the poems poured out. The Turkish honorific Mevlana, “our master,” still names him, and the whirling order his followers founded, the Mevlevi, made his memory into a ritual. None of that context is decoration: the poems are addressed to a specific wound.
What Is the Difference Between the Masnavi and the Divan?
The Masnavi is a six-book teaching poem of roughly 25,000 couplets: stories inside stories, Qur'anic commentary, jokes, folktales, arguments. The Divan — lyric poems, chiefly ghazals, collected under the name of Shams — is where the famous ecstatic lines live. The Masnavi explains; the Divan burns. A reader needs both, but not at once.
The Masnavi opens with the complaint of the reed flute, cut from the reed bed and crying for home, and the opening tells the truth about everything that follows: this is a poem about separation and its possible answers. Because it teaches through narrative, it forgives a newcomer. The ghazals of the Divan are shorter, hotter, and discontinuous; read three or five at a sitting, the way you would take strong tea, not the way you would drink water. Beginning with the Masnavi gives you the teacher; the Divan then gives you the teacher on fire.
Which English Translation Should You Read?
For a first reading, The Masnavi, Book One, trans. Jawid Mojaddedi, 2004: a living verse line that keeps the rhyming couplets without strain, with notes that assume you know nothing and do not apologize for it. For study, Reynold A. Nicholson's eight-volume edition of the Mathnawi, published between 1925 and 1940, remains the monument: deliberately literal prose translation, with commentary on nearly every couplet.
And then there is Coleman Barks, whose The Essential Rumi (1995) has carried Rumi further into American life than any scholarly version ever will. It should be said plainly: Barks does not read Persian. He recast literal versions prepared by the Iranian linguist John Moyne, and by Nicholson before him. The results are often genuine English poetry, and they are often loose — Islamic content thinned, the beloved's gender smoothed, God occasionally generalized into a vaguer beloved. Read Barks the way you would read a poet responding to Rumi, then set the same poem beside Mojaddedi or Nicholson. The comparison is itself an education in what translation is.
Related stories: Reading Dante in English Translation · Where to Start With Simone Weil.
What Order Should You Read Rumi In?
- The Masnavi, Book One, trans. Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford World's Classics, 2004). Mojaddedi continued translating the remaining books for the same series, volume by volume.
- A small selection of ghazals from the Divan. Use Barks as the gateway if you like, then set his version beside a literal one — Nicholson's late-Victorian selection from the Divan (1898) is old but honest about what the Persian says.
- The Discourses of Rumi, trans. A. J. Arberry (1961) — the prose Rumi, recorded at table, more instructive than ecstatic.
- Nicholson's translation-and-commentary volumes of the Mathnawi, if you have been caught properly.
- Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (2000) — the sane, complete companion: the life, the poems' transmission, and the strange history of Rumi in English.
What Should You Read After Rumi?
Attar, for one — Rumi's acknowledged predecessor in Persian Sufi poetry. The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Penguin Classics, 1984), is the best single entry into the storytelling tradition the Masnavi inherits. After that, return to the Masnavi and keep going, book by book; readers who finish Book One usually find Book Two waiting with sharper teeth. The Qur'an itself, in any careful translation, stands behind half of Rumi's allusions, and the poems open further with some of it in your ear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Rumi a Muslim?
Yes, fully. He was a Muslim scholar and a Sufi — an Islamic mystic — and the Masnavi is saturated with the Qur'an, hadith, and Islamic law. Versions that strip that context simplify something specific into something generic.
Why do scholars warn against Coleman Barks?
Because his books are imaginative recastings rather than translations. Barks does not read Persian and worked from literal versions by others; the departures range from small to large, and the Islamic frame is regularly thinned.
What is a ghazal?
A short lyric poem in rhymed couplets sharing one rhyme, often closing with the poet's own name. In the Divan the form carries Rumi's fastest, most disorienting intensity — a poem that can begin in a tavern and end in tears without explaining the route.
Do I need to know Persian or Sufism to start?
No. Mojaddedi's notes in particular assume no background. What you need is patience with stories that loop, digress, and refuse to land where you expect them to.