The Grammarian and the Boatman

The Sea Floats the Dead

A certain grammarian embarked in a boat. That self-conceited person turned to the boatmanAnd said, “Have you ever studied grammar?” “No,” he replied. The other said, “Half your life is gone to naught.”The boatman became heart-broken with grief, but at the time he refrained from answering.The wind cast the boat into a whirlpool: the boatman spoke loud (shouted) to the grammarian,“Tell me, do you know how to swim?” “No,” said he, “O fair-spoken good-looking man!”“O grammarian,” said he, “your whole life is naught, because the boat is sinking in these whirlpools.”Know that here maḥw (self-effacement) is needed, not naḥw (grammar): if you are maḥw (dead to self), plunge into the sea without peril.The water of the sea places the dead one on its head (causes him to float on the surface); but if he be living, how shall he escape from the sea?Inasmuch as you have died to the attributes of the flesh, the Sea of (Divine) consciousness will place you on the crown of its head (will raise you to honour).(But) O thou who hast called the people asses, at this time thou art left (floundering), like an ass, upon this ice.If in the world thou art the most learned scholar of the time, behold the passing-away of this world and this time!We have stitched in (inserted) the (story of the) grammarian, that we might teach you the grammar (naḥw) of self-effacement (maḥw).In self-loss, O venerated friend, thou wilt find the jurisprudence of jurisprudence, the grammar of grammar, and the accidence of accidence.

Masnavi I.2835–2847 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926

First attested

1278No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya manuscript (G), which Nicholson describes as “transcribed in A.H. 677-A.D. 1278”, five years after Rūmī's death at Konya on 17 December 1273. Nicholson's edition of Books I and II was not founded on G; in 1930 he printed an Appendix of the changes needed to bring his translation of those books into agreement with it. For I.2835–2847 the Appendix lists none — its nearest entries are at vv. 2832 and 2850 — so Nicholson's English for these lines needs no change to agree with the oldest copy.

A grammarian scorns a boatman who never studied grammar; in a whirlpool the boatman asks if he can swim.

Mathnawī I.2835–2847. A self-conceited grammarian asks a boatman whether he has studied grammar and, told no, says half his life is gone to naught; when the wind drives the boat into a whirlpool, the boatman asks whether he can swim, and tells him his whole life is naught. Rūmī then turns the tale on a pun that Nicholson keeps in transliteration — maḥw, self-effacement, against naḥw, grammar — and on the sea that floats the dead and drowns the living. The story is an insertion and says so at I.2846: it interrupts the tale of the Bedouin who carried a jug of rain-water from the desert to the Caliph at Baghdad, and at I.2848 the narration returns to that jug. Rūmī dictated the Masnavi at Konya to Ḥusām al-Dīn Chelebi; the English is Nicholson's of 1926.