A Manifestation of Brilliance
Dr. Mir Jalaloddin Kazzazi

This article is a review of the French translation by Yann Richard of lavayeh (Flashes of Light), a small mystical treatise written by Nuroddin Abdorrahman Jami, the prominent Persian scholar, mystic and poet. The treatise, the most famous of Jami’s books, is a clear and precise exposition of the Sufi doctrines of the existential unity of being. Jami’s prose in lavayeh, the writer maintains, hardly reflects the beauties of Persian as it is marred by the writer’s unduly using a large proportion of Arabic words; it is only in the quatrains that Jami’s language captures the grace and freshness of Persian. Considering the difficult prose of lavayeh, the writer describes the translator’s job as “excellent”. He goes as far to confess that, though a native speaker of Persian, at times he has found Mr. Richard’s translation much easier to follow than the original text. The writer then mentions cases where the translator has failed to get the right meaning