Background
Son of paleontologist Henry Alleyne Nicholson, Nicholson was born in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England and died in Chester, Cheshire.
translator university professor
Son of paleontologist Henry Alleyne Nicholson, Nicholson was born in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England and died in Chester, Cheshire.
University of Aberdeen.
Educated at Aberdeen University and Trinity College, Cambridge, Nicholson was lecturer in the Persian language at University College London from June 1902 to 1926, and Sir Thomas Adams"s Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge from 1926 to 1933. He was able to study and translate major Sufi texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish to English. Works on Rumi
Nicholson"s magnum opus was his work on Rumi"s Masnavi, published in eight volumes between 1925 and 1940.
He produced the first critical Persian edition of the Masnavi, the first full translation of it into English, and the first commentary on the entire work in English.
This work has been highly influential in the field of Rumi studies worldwide. Work on Ali Hujwari Daata Ganj Bakhsh
Works on Iqbal
Being a teacher of the then Indian scholar and poet Muhammad Iqbal, Nicholson translated Iqbal"s first philosophical Persian poetry book Asrar-i-Khudi into English as The Secrets of the Self.
Other significant translations
The Sufi treatise of Hujviri
Rumi"s Mathnawi and Divan e Shams
Ibn Arabi"s Tarjuman al-Aswaq
Poetry by the Sindhi language poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
Students
Among Nicholson"s students is A. J. Arberry, a translator of Rumi and the Quran.