Abstract:
The six-volume poem by the thirteen-century great Persian poet-
mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207 – 1273) is still actively translated and
studied worldwide. Mathnawi is an inexhaustible source of themes,
plot allusions, and reminiscences. Rumi’s contemporaries rightly
recognized it as the “Encyclopedia of Sufi sm”, and the last classic
Persian poet Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414-1472) even called it the “Persian
Qur’an”.
The “Muslim-Eastern part” of the narrative has been thoroughly
and elaborately studied over the centuries. From the creation
of Mathnawi until today, dozens of commentaries have been written,
authors have interpreted the poem from different angles, and almost
no aspect of Rumi’s masterpiece remained untouched and unexplained
or unclassifi ed as much as possible in these commentaries.
Against this background, we were surprised by the fact that
there are certain passages or places in the text, in front of which
the commentators admit their weakness and, despite the proposed
version, they reason with a phrase-code common in the Arab-Muslim
literature of the Middle Ages: ولله أعلم , „and Allah knows better”,
which shows the uncertainty of the aforementioned idea.
The fact is that this above-mentioned phrase is used not only
to explain complex Sufi concepts but also with certain lexical items,
the exact content of which is unknown to the commentator, and it
is up to the context only to find out what was meant by the “Great
Esoteric”.
In the case of a large part of such lexical units, the text of Jalāl
al-Dīn Rūmī ‘s poem includes Georgian words as an artistic technique
to create the effect of “alienation”.
Our special research and observation showed dozens of such
words, which are being discussed in the paper. We classified such
lexical units into two parts – words of Georgian origin (for example,
“morning” دیلا , “castle” سیخه ) and those whose Georgian Origin is
doubtful, but we still think that Rūmī used Georgian material and
context (for example, “bread” .(بوری Apart from lexical units, we have cases where we come across
Georgians and Georgia in different contexts and for various artistic
reasons. For example, Georgians as a symbol of undefeatability and
bravery, are used to create numerous artistic metaphors and hyperbolas.
