The Turkish Amir and the Minstrel
A Song Made of Not-Knowing
Masnavi VI · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887“I know not if thou art a moon or an idol,I know not what thou requirest of me.I know not what service to pay thee,Whether to keep silence or to speak.Thou art not apart from me, yet, strange to say,I know not where I am, or where thou art.I know not wherefore thou art dragging me,Now embracing me, and now wounding me!”
- First attested
- 1278Masnavi VI.704–707 in Nicholson's numbering, from the story of the drunken Turk and the minstrel, VI.643–735. No autograph survives. The earliest complete manuscript, the Konya copy, was finished in December 1278, five years after Rūmī's death; Nicholson judged the Qoniya MS., dated 677 A.H., the most authoritative text of the poem, and his printed text from Book III, v. 2836 onward follows it. The English quoted here rests on something later: Whinfield made his translation from the Bulaq edition of 1268 A.H., keying his section pages to the Lucknow edition of 1282 A.H., and it is quoted from the London printing of 1887 (Trübner & Co.).
- Claimed
- the 1270sasserted by Nicholson, in the Introduction to his translation of Books V and VI (dated Cambridge, 19 April 1933), places both books in the years when Rūmī was nearing seventy; Whinfield gives Rūmī's dates as born at Balkh in 604 A.H. (1207) and died at Qonia in 672 A.H. (1273), and Book VI breaks off unfinished. The 1270s decade is this entry's reading of those two statements: no manuscript from Rūmī's lifetime survives to date the book.
Whinfield reverses Rūmī's order. The minstrel's first song, Whinfield's “O give me Thy cup, Thou whom I see not!”, comes at VI.665–669, and the ode of “I know not” only at VI.704–707, after the anecdote of ʿĀʾisha and the blind man; Whinfield prints the ode first and the cup-song after it.
Masnavi VI.665–669 and VI.704–707, with the headings before VI.670 and VI.703 (Nicholson's numbering, checked at masnavi.net); Whinfield 1887, Book VI, Story III, pp. 285–287.
A drunken Turk calls for music; the minstrel sings only “I know not”, and the Turk reaches for his mace.
Masnavi Book VI.643–735 in Nicholson's numbering. Rūmī heads the story with a tradition that God has a wine prepared for His friends. A Turkish amir wakes sick from drink at dawn and calls for his minstrel. Rūmī first sets the spiritual minstrel apart from the sensual (VI.644–663), and the minstrel sings a first song, Whinfield's “O give me Thy cup, Thou whom I see not!” (VI.665–669). The lines here are the second, an ode of “I know not” (VI.704–707). When the refrain passes all bounds the Turk fetches an iron mace; an officer stops him; the Turk mocks such answers, not from Balkh, not from Herat. The minstrel replies that he denies so the Turk may scent the affirmation, and death will tell the rest, which opens Rūmī's commentary on “Die before you die” (VI.723).
Light
The song keeps its not-knowing instead of resolving it: a lover who cannot say what the beloved is, or wants, or where either of them stands, only that the beloved is not apart from him and draws him now into an embrace and now into wounds.
Shadow
It asks the reader to take a drunk lord's wine and a raised mace as figures, and Whinfield records that Rūmī tells it “with an apology for using illustrations derived from drunkenness”; the poem's own warning, in Whinfield's verse, is that “The form misleads, but the inner meaning guides.”
