مثنوی

What it means

مثنوی (masnavi) names two things at once. First, a Persian poetic form: a long poem in rhyming couplets, where each beyt (couplet) has its own internal rhyme (aa, bb, cc…) instead of the single end-rhyme of a ghazal. Second, when Iranians say “the Masnavi” with no qualifier, they mean Rumi’s six-volume Masnavi-ye Ma’navi (“Spiritual Couplets”), composed in the thirteenth century.

Loanword from Arabic, root th-n-y (ثنی) “to double, to bend”: the form’s defining feature is doubling, two hemistichs paired by rhyme.

How to use it

• مثنوی مولوی (masnavi-ye Mowlavi) “Rumi’s Masnavi”
• یک مثنوی نوشت (yek masnavi nevesht) “he wrote a masnavi” (the form)
• مثنوی شریف (masnavi-ye sharif) “the noble Masnavi” (honorific for Rumi’s work)
• قالب مثنوی (qâleb-e masnavi) “the masnavi form”

The form

The masnavi form unlocks long narrative. Rhyming the two hemistichs of each couplet (aa, bb, cc) frees the poet from finding new rhymes for hundreds of lines, which is why every Persian epic uses it: Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Nezami’s Khamse, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, and Rumi’s six-volume mystical poem. Persian classical literature without the masnavi form is unimaginable. The form is also generous to teaching and storytelling, which is why didactic and mystical works gravitate to it: each couplet can hold a complete thought, and the chain of couplets builds an argument or a narrative one step at a time.

The Masnavi (Rumi’s)

Rumi’s Masnavi-ye Ma’navi is the central text of Persian Sufism. Six volumes, around 25,000 couplets, composed over the last decades of his life and dictated to his disciple Hosâm al-Din Chalabi. Persian-speaking Sufis call it “the Quran in Persian.” In Iran today the Masnavi sits alongside Hafez’s Divan as the two literary anchors of cultured speech: a quote from either lands without footnote. The opening eighteen couplets, the famous نی‌نامه (Ney-nâme) “Song of the Reed,” are memorized by schoolchildren and quoted at gatherings; the line بشنو از نی چون حکایت می‌کند (“listen to the reed as it tells its tale”) is among the most recognizable in Persian.

Related

See غزل (ghazal) for the lyric form, دیوان (divân) for the collected works format, and بیت (beyt) for the couplet itself.

Etymology

Arabic root th-n-y (ثنی) “to double, to fold.” The adjective masnavi means “doubled, paired.” Persian adopted the term for the doubled-rhyme form. Same root behind ثَنا (sanâ) “praise” (where speech is doubled in honor) and tasnif (composing in pairs).

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab
• Wiktionary