A Poet Speaks

"A Poet Speaks" is a sound and image installation created by Zahra Partovi for the Sundaram Tagore Gallery. The installation represents a "Temple" to poetry and homage to the words of J.M. Rumi, whose poetic and philosophical ideas have survived 750 years and traveled across many lands.

Upon entering the upstairs gallery one is faced with a temple, and surrounded by sounds & voices. The temple structure is a square wooden lattice 7' x 7' wide and 6' high, which is covered by 3,000 sheets of paper with the words of the poet. The sound installation is bilingual utterances of Rumi's poetry sometimes as a recitation and often in speaking tone. Almost all poetry is spooken by non-professional male and female voices. The selection of poetry, translated by Zahra Partovi, represents the poet's fundamental ideas both lyrical and philosophical.

Divan-e-Shams is a collection of odes writen in Persian by Jalaluddin Mohammad Rumi between 1247 and 1273. After the compilation of all the odes and the addition af all the quatrains, there are 3,229 Ghazals (ode) and 1,983 Rubais (quatrains) in the Divan.

In Persian poetry, one verse consists of two hemistichs. In the Persian Ghazal the first two hemostichs, and all the subsequent lines carry the same rhyme. Although a Ghazal usually has between 7 and 13 lines, Rumi's can have as few as 3 and as many as 80 lines. The poems in the Divan are not titled. They are arranged alphabetically by rhyme and numbered accordingly.

An early form of coyrighting was the use of the poet's name in the last line of the ode. Rumi's admiration and sense of unity with the mystic shams of Tabriz was so profound that he signed over 700 of his odes with the name Shams: hence the title Divan-e-Shams.

The most definitive compiled and edited printed Persian text of the Divan-e-Sham is the B. Froonzanfar Edition published by Tehran University in 1957. This edition makes use of 8 earliest and most reliable manuscripts of the Divan, and annotates the difference between the manuscripts, which are kept at the Mavlana Museum, The Chester Beatty Library and in private collections.

The Masnavi is a text written in Persian between 1258 and 1273 by the Persian poet Jalaluddiin Mohammad Rumi. It is a narrative poem in six books with 25,685 verses. Tha Masnavi consists of hundreds of intertwining long and short stories adorned with lyrical soliloquies and wieghty philosophical arguments. The Masnavi contains as many verses as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined and twice as many as the Divine Comedy.

The word masnavi refers to the form: rhyming couplets, used for epic or other long narrative texts, Rumi's opus, being the most important masnavi, has received the title The Masnavi. The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Masnavi are: two dating back to the thirteenth century and kept at the Mavlana Museum in Konya, Turkey, and one at the Cairo Museum.

Since early 20th century until recently, the most definitive printed Persian text of the Masnavi was considered to be the Nicholson Edition. However, with new research done by various Iranian scholars, other editions, which annotate between all reliable manuscripts, are available.