Rumi (1207–1273)

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

show more

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

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

I was introduced to the Sufi mystic Rumi in a college Religion course on mysticism, and fell in love with the depth found in the simplicity of his words. I now use this book as a "Magic 8-Ball" of sorts...if I have a problem, I flip through it and stop at random, and read through Rumi's answer for me. His poetry is beautiful and his wisdom leaps off the page into your heart: "you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop," "maybe you are searching among the branches, show more for what only appears in the roots," are only a few of my favorites. Rumi is truly timeless. show less

I've read poetry in the past, never really enjoying or disliking it, just reading because I was either told to for a class or out of curiosity. The poetry of Rumi made me truly appreciate poetry, GOOD poetry, and why it's one of the oldest art forms of humanity. His words made me both laugh and think deeply, usually in the same sentence. I can see why he has been so loved through the ages.

If you're on the fence about poetry, read Rumi.