America's best-selling poet wrote in 13th-century Persian — and almost no one who loves him has ever read a single line as he wrote it.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear Rumi — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
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This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Rumi’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
The Rumi on English shelves is often paraphrase at several removes. The original is stranger and hotter: a scholar turned ecstatic by grief for his lost friend, spinning verses about reeds cut from reed-beds and moths in love with burning.
An interlinear is the honest way in — each Persian word glossed under your eye, nothing silently smoothed into aphorism. Meet the actual poet behind the quotations.
Making an interlinear Rumi is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, One poem gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Rumi that anyone can read for free.
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