Rumi/Coleman Barks

Via Juan Cole, Ryan Croken’s Found in Translation: How a Thirteenth-Century Islamic Poet Conquered America:

The best-selling poet in America today could never have known that someday there would be such a thing as America. Born over eight centuries ago in what is now Afghanistan, Jal?l ad-D?n Mu?ammad R?m?, a Sufi mystic, has traversed some rather astonishing cultural and temporal boundaries to become one of the most improbable leaders in American letters. A study of Rumi�s success, however, would not be complete without exploring the relationship between the poet and his most popular translator, Coleman Barks.

On the spiritual and textual plane in which Rumi and Barks encounter one another, we find not a clash, but a fusion of civilizations, out of which has emerged a 13th-century Sufi devotee who is devastatingly fluent in postmodern American English. As throngs of Americans now worship Rumi for the way he worshipped Allah�at a time in which �Allah� has become a scary word in the �Western world��the political significance of Barks� accomplishment cannot be overstated. Barks, a white man from Tennessee, doesn�t speak or read a lick of Persian, and this fact both complicates and facilitates his ability to make a historically accurate Rumi accessible to mainstream America. A poet himself, Barks �re-Englishes� existing translations, releasing, in his own words, �the fire and ecstasy of Rumi�s ghazals� from the stale confines of their scholarly translations. But because Barks himself has become a palpable presence in these ghazals, some critics have lambasted him for the liberal manner in which he has popularized Rumi.

. . .

Poetically, this is significant. But politically, it is momentous. Although something may have been lost in his �translations,� something more priceless has been found: in this American Rumi we have acquired a dazzlingly cogent ambassador of a slandered religion, and a most unlikely cultural bridge that could not have come at a better time.

Step outside the library for a moment, and consider the circumstances on the ground. The United States is fighting a war in Afghanistan, the birthplace of Rumi. We�re fighting a war, of sorts, in Iraq, the birthplace of Sufism. We have been for some time now teetering on the brink of disaster with Iran, formerly known as Persia, and amid all of this, who rises to become America�s most beloved poet? Walt Whitman? Robert Frost? No, a Persian Sufi whirling dervish from Afghanistan who preached of unconditional compassion and sang of the glories of abandoning oneself entirely in the annihilating light of Allah. There is powerful communal capital packed inside this peculiar factoid that could reverberate well beyond the poetry of Rumi. We should not let the organic cultural matter responsible for this transcontinental connection go to waste.

I will admit that I have not read Rumi. So many poets, so little time.

And I do not do translations so I can’t speak to that.

But I thought the ideas presented here of some interest.

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