English Verse Translation of Book Five of Medieval Sufi Poet Jalal al-Din Rumi's Masnavi (The Couplets)

Translation from Persian to English of Book Five of the Masnavi ('The Couplets') by the medieval Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273).This project is to continue my ongoing translation of the six books of the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi's (d. 1273) magnum opus, The Masnavi ('The Couplets'), for the Oxford World's Classics series of Oxford University Press, in which Books One to Four have already been published. The outcome of the fellowship will be the first unabridged verse translation of Book Five of The Masnavi, the only previous attempt being a prose translation published in 1934. In fact, that translation is notorious for rendering lengthy passages into Latin instead of English because of the convention at that time for dealing with material deemed salacious, so mine will be the first 100% complete translation of any kind into English. Rumi's Masnavi is not only considered the greatest work of its genre in the Persian literary tradition, but it is also the source of many of the free-verse renderings of his poetry into English which have made him the best-selling poet in North America for the past two decades.