Mesnevija I-II

With more than 25,000 verses, it is the most refined spiritual language, a hymn to God and a longing for an encounter with the One and Only. In its vast depths, like an ocean, it has housed all the comprehended and unfathomable knowledge, both about the world and about the transcendent. Completely in line with the Quranic vision of the world, it is a monument of metaphysical and folk language, the language of spiritual heights and the language of plants and animals, the language of the hidden and the revealed, the language of the microcosm, the language of the spiritual heart and the universal language, but at the same time - both hierocosmic and metahistorical. Its poetic imagination and song about the meaning of human existence, its call to transcend one's own self in search of the wine of divine Love, which of course is not made of vines and grapevines but the wine of spiritual union, is an inimitable structure of the spirit. M. Iqbal called Rumi a lamp on the path of a free man. Although he was a pearl from the East, his heart transcended geography. It belonged, and increasingly belongs, to both the East and the West, the North and the South. After all, since the American poet Coleman Barks published an English translation of a selection of his work in 1995, which was little known to the general public until then, Rumi has become the most widely read poet in America after W. Whitman in just a few years. Although he lived in the Middle Ages, the power of his verse still rings true today – 2007 has been marked the year of Rumi worldwide.