Rumi (1207–1273)

Having read about how inaccurate and insensitive most English translations of Rumi are, I was glad to come across this slim selection of his work translated directly from the original Farsi and with much more attention to the Islamic cultural and religious contexts within which Rumi lived and worked.

Since I'm neither a believer nor mystically inclined, I'm not the best audience for Rumi's work—particularly with most of the very brief ones, if you're not reading them with the eyes of show more faith, they seem a bit Instagram caption-y. He's also revisiting and reworking a set of themes and images, so the poems can get repetitive. But Rumi does have a handful of bangers here ("See how the fruit is trapped—/first by its seed, then by its husk./See how I was trapped—first by circumspection, then by calculation. / Like a fig split open,/my seeds are bare. /Our first meal on earth begins with blood and ends with milk."), and they made me glad I picked this up. show less

0 stars, only showed 0.5 for rounding purposes.

I've read a couple of poems by Rumi before and thought they were beautiful, so when I saw this bind-up with a new translation, I thought, "why not?" BOY WAS I WRONG.

The entire set of poems was forced into a very specific rhyming pattern, even when it made no sense to do so. The translation was neither beautiful nor faithful; it was ugly, jarring, and abrasive. By about half-way through the poems, I started looking them up to see what other show more translators had done for those poems, and had an incredibly difficult time finding any of them because this translation had changed them so much, they were no longer Rumi's poems.

At that point, I flipped to the back of the book to read the translator's appendix and see what his methodology was in translating. Come to find out, the "translator" does not speak Persian, is not Sufi, is not a poet, and has never translated anything before. Additionally, he does not know and never bothered to look up the meaning of "transliteration" (which, by the way is not the same thing as translation, yet he uses the terms interchangeably).

Never in my life have I hated a book so bad that I wanted financial compensation for the waste of time I spent reading it, but that is what I want for this abomination. show less

Coleman Barks is a poet in his own right, but he is perhaps better known as the self-styled 'translator' who makes Rumi legible to the West.

This is an undeserved label.

George Quasha has a video portrait series called "Poetry Is…” and includes a “portrait” of Barks, who gives the following definition of Poet:

My feeling is that we are about a great work, that there is service to be done [...] it has to do with truth-telling about what is to be alive… And so Art is tremendously

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important and -- call it myth, storytelling, whatever, consciousness, whatever it is that plays and delights in consciousness is so important, now, because we have so many things that deaden and dilute the soul and insult the soul. Whitman says, “reject whatever insults your own soul,” and so we know what does that… And the Artist, the myth-maker is one who honors the majesty and the sweetness and the courage of the individual soul.

Good sentences, and well pronounced, but Coleman Barks is utterly devoid of any knowledge of the Persian or Dari languages. That he has become synonymous with Persianate Sufi Master and poet Rumi in the Anglosphere is a travesty. At best, he is the editor of The Essential Rumi, as his strategy is to take lines of translations belonging to Englishmen from the 18th and 19th centuries––lines from disparate poems (the remainders insult his soul, perhaps), and re-articulates them as one poem and then has the gall to say that the poem is authored by Rumi. [Essential, he says. Essential.]

Almost any quotations ascribed to Rumi in English are the product of this charlatan, and while one might argue that there is an entire spectrum between Coleman Barks as an articulator and Lawrence Venuti’s agitation for translators as creators, I confess I have very little patience for it. show less

Esotericism, anthroposophy, New Age and other vague spiritualities are not my thing. That may be a flaw, but I cannot (any more) change my down-to-earth disposition (my wife agrees 😊). Yet I ventured into this Rumi. The 13th century Islamic poet has caused a furore in recent decades. His melodious and profound-looking verses are ubiquitous. Unfortunately, these are usually the result of major editing, especially a certain Coleman Barks has been profilic in this regard, without knowing a show more word of Farsi (you can find a nice overview of all aberrations concerning Rumi on this site: http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/corrections_popular.html).
Fortunately, there are those who have gone out of their way to produce a reliable translation. In the mid 20th century, Cambridge Professor A.J. Arberry completed the present (selective) translation of the "Divan", the mystical poems of Rumi. It is – he concedes – a very literal translation, which mainly follows the meaning and much less the literary aspect. Of course, that reads less smoothly, especially because the many references of Rumi to religion and culture do require some prior knowledge.
Mystical poetry, it is not an easy genre in any religion, especially because of the intensity and magnificence that characterizes this poetry, often with hermetic content. This is certainly also the case with Rumi, but at the same time his mystical lyricism is also more accessible. After all, Rumi addresses his love lyric not only to the Almighty, but strikingly also to his great dervish teacher Shams al-Din. With Rumi, becoming annihilated in the spiritual master is the necessary step to be able to become annihilated in God/Allah. That may provide a certain ambiguity, but it is more concrete to imagine. Nature also often is present in his verses (which is also a constant in mystical poetry), and this often produces gems. Still, reading this book remains a hard task to digest. My suspicion is that his best known work, the Masnavi, may be more accessible. Maybe I should try that. show less