You fill it with yourself, or it dies! - Rumi Almost 15 years ago, poet Robert Bly handed a younger colleague an accurate but stilted 19th-century translation of the mystic Islamic poet Jalaluddin Rumi. "Release these from their scholarly cages," the poet recalls telling Coleman Barks. Mr. Barks set to work, recasting the poems in fluid, casual American free verse. The results have astonished many. In a country where Pulitzer Prize-winning poets often struggle to sell 10,000 books, Barks's translations of Rumi have sold more than a quarter of a million copies. Recordings of Rumi poems have made it to Billboard's Top 20 list. And a pantheon of Hollywood stars is recording a collection of Rumi's love poems - these translated by holistic-health guru Deepak Chopra - for release next Valentine's Day. Put it all together and you've got a Rumi revival that's made the 13th-century Persian wordsmith the top-selling poet in the country today. "It's a matter of our enormous spiritual hunger matched by our natural anticlericism gone ballistic," says Phyllis Tickle, contributing editor in religion to Publisher's Weekly. "It's also just beautiful poetry." For seven centuries, Rumi's poetry has been sung in the Islamic world from India to Iran, Turkey to Afghanistan. He's considered an ecstatic, a romantic, obsessed with God, exalting the divine universality of the heart in everything and everyone. "He celebrates the Presence, he calls it the Friend or the Beloved, that we sense in the beauty outside of us on a rainy day, or in a group of friends fixing food, a horse being saddled, or a child sleeping," says translator Barks. "All of these things that are obviously beautiful outside of us also touch the beauty inside of us - that jewel-like inner presence that he activates in his poetry."
A celebrated past In his day, Rumi was celebrated by Christians, Jews, and Buddhists, as well as by Sufi Muslims who claim him as a part of their tradition. That is the ecstatic, feeling strain of Islam - less familiar in the West than the severe fundamentalist image of Islam. "He's such a spokesman for freedom and transcendence that people have found him to be a great literary voice for centuries," says Carl Ernst, head of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some scholars compare Rumi's revival to similar fads, such as the burst of interest in Kahlil Gibran's poetry a generation ago. But Mr. Ernst believes the Rumi phenomenon is bigger.
The mystic's current fans range from Islamic scholars to New Age enthusiasts. Barks says he can't explain the phenomenon. Bly says Rumi fills a place in the Christian tradition left vacant when the Gnostics - Christian mystics - were discredited as heretics by early Christian religious leaders. That ecstatic impulse has occasionally re-emerged with St. Francis and some of the medieval mystics, such as St. Teresa. The late 20th century is seeing a revival of the Pentacostal, charismatic movement in the US. But the mystical tradition never blossomed in mainstream Christianity to the extent that it has in the Muslims' Sufi tradition. Rumi was also a rebel of sorts in his day. His poetry, which in the original Persian is densely rhymed and rhythmed, breaks many of the rules of classical poetry. It sometimes runs too long, sometimes too short. His images are playful, full of the richness and abandon of childhood. He compares himself to a magician, creates images the way a wizard makes birds appear from the palm of his hand. "He doesn't try to describe mystical love, he tries to linguistically show it to us," says Fatemeh Keshavarz, professor of Persian language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis. "He mirrors his experience of mystical love." In the Muslim world, many consider Rumi a saint.
"My experience of a poet-saint is that they affect the deepest regions of one's intelligence and heart," says Daniel Ladinsky, a South Carolina poet who works with translations of Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Hafiz, a 14th-century Sufi poet who is also enjoying a revival in America. Mr. Ladinsky learned about the Persian mystical poets while living in a monastic community of sorts in India. He says both Rumi and Hafiz address his "profound need to make sense out of God.... I simply want to get along with the One I have to live with." Addie Wolbach, a mother of three who lives in Boston, began reading the Persian mystics 10 years ago. "People are hungrier and thirstier for things of the heart," says Ms. Wolbach. "I'm not looking for poetry. I'm looking for the 'Master's' words - his 'truth.' " The dual poetic and spiritual nature of Rumi's works has sparked some controversy. In the 19th century, British scholars translated Rumi's work literally, replicating the words and metaphors he used to make his spiritual points. They made "no pretensions to being poetic," says Mr. Ernst. These are the translations that Ms. Wolbach prefers. But for others, the literalness is awkward and inaccessible. Enter poet Coleman Barks. He does not know Persian and works from other people's translations. He also makes no attempt to replicate the rhyme and rhythm of the original Persian, preferring instead to render the essence of the poems into free verse. "Translations should let something of Rumi's culture spill into the translations," says Professor Keshavarz. "Although I do think [Barks] does a good job of capturing the poetic color and fragrance of Rumi." In some poetic circles, the fact that Barks works from other people's translations has raised questions about the authenticity and the relationship of his work to the original.
A spiritual quick fix? "The majority of the people reading Rumi are looking for a spiritual quick fix," says Louisa Solano, owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Mass. "They have no real interest in poetry at all, other than Rumi." But for those who go to Barks's bimonthly readings around the country, the re-worked Rumi poems are exactly what they're looking for. "It's all about honesty and going in deeply within. He's speaking his 'truth' from a place of clarity and openness," says Josie Hanlon of Boston, who recently attended one of Barks's readings, which was accompanied by traditional Sufi dancing. But whatever one thinks about Rumi's work, his popularity in America is difficult to ignore. "I think it's extremely interesting that at the same time, politically speaking, there is this intense, ideological confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism," says Ernst. "This spirituality that Rumi represents has obviously touched a very deep nerve in the American psyche."
There's a reason the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jallaludin Rumi is the best-selling poet in America today: His words express the ineffable longing to merge with the eternal; they reach across eight centuries to speak to us, in our sullen era, and offer not just the vision but also the experience of what yoga calls union--with the Divine. And there's a reason Coleman Barks's Rumi translations, which have filled 15 previous books, are more popular than other renderings of these ancient words: They scratch our spiritual itch better than the others do, getting under the skin of our longing by making Rumi's raptures accessible in language at once ordinary and lyrical. Now Barks has translated and issued a massive collection of previously unpublished Rumi translations, The Soul of Rumi, that should provide enough scratching to satisfy any Rumi enthusiast. The 400-plus-page volume contains hundreds of short-to-medium-length poems plus an excerpt from Rumi's final opus, the Masnavi, a 64,000-line work to which he devoted the last dozen years of his life and which, Barks notes, "has no parallel in world literature." Barks's historical, literary, and personal commentaries illuminate the background and impact (for him as well as for us) of the poetry. But naturally the ultimate value of the collection rests with the poems themselves. At times, and particularly for the uninitiated, Rumi's verses can read like the ravings of a psychotic, but in Barks's hands, Rumi's revelations flow effortlessly forth, his leaps of imagery and intrepid ventures into earthy or revolting circumstances always moving us closer to the object of our hearts' desire. Rumi's repeated and rapturous odes to the Beloved--engendered by his profound love for his mystic friend Shams but ultimately referring to God--infuse the spiritual quest with a companionship that makes it seem less lonely and more like an immortal love affair. "There is a with-ness in Rumi's sense of soul," Barks notes, "a friendship; as in a spiraling cone the periphery stays with the center it began from." This too is a tonic for the contemporary soul. And if that weren't enough, the historical resonance of the fact that Rumi, who founded the "whirling dervish" order of Sufism, was born in modern-day Afghanistan gives his words a geopolitical relevance seldom afforded mystic poets.
But Rumi's appeal is universal. He certainly makes sense to modern yogis; as Barks says, "Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin." Yet Rumi wouldn't be content to appeal to just one type of audience. In one memorable couplet, he says plainly, "What was said to the rose that made it open was said / to me here in my chest." The marvel of Rumi is that the voice that speaks to the rose speaks through him to us.
Translating Ecstasy: Coleman Barks on Rumi with a Side of Curry
Coleman Barks, preeminent translator of the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi, squirms audibly at the suggestion that he may be a prophet. He says only, "I can write and recognize poetry when I hear it." He describes a prophet as "someone through whom some revelation can come — and anyone can. I have met people who have more of the light of God in them than us normal people, but I’m not one of them."
Barks continues to describe himself: "I’m a tremendous doubter." Further, he says that his greatest inspiration has been his encounters with a holy man, first in a dream, and then in Philadelphia; that his practice of communal spiritual worship features going for lattés and driving his convertible; that he is most authentically himself when writing poetry or playing with his grandchildren; and that his idea of a perfect day is one spent working outdoors and working with words. Coleman Barks may participate in a conference diagonally across America from where he lives, but he says, "There’s something always in me that’s waiting until all this public stuff is over so that I can get back home to that place of writing and working in the dirt."
The message Barks conveys is of Rumi’s ecstatic poetry, which, as Barks said to Bill Moyers, PBS journalist, is "trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ... what Jesus referred to when he said, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ "
Barks gave a precise definition of ecstasy in that Moyers interview: "each moment [is] solid and actual, yet numinous, shot through with divine light and guidance." He also gave a telling anecdotal definition of ecstasy when I asked him more recently to define it: "I was with my granddaughter, going around the yard lifting up stones to see what was there — there’s always something good, something interesting — and a woman walking by on the street just turned her head and said, ‘You’re going to spoil her.’ This universe is just so incredible that we’re all spoiled, and it’s okay. Rumi said, ‘The eye is meant to see things; the soul is here for its own joy.’ "
Rumi’s poetry and Barks’ lifework express ecstasy with an openness, whimsy, and practicality that make the everyday resonate with the sacred; that make the everyday holy. So how does one train to be a poet in the ecstatic form? Barks taught his students, "You may as well tell as much truth as you know in poetry, because nobody makes any money off it ... and then I turned out to be a liar!" referring to the royalties he receives from his translations of Rumi.
Beyond writing the truth and the consequences be damned, here’s the curve of wisdom à la Barks: He started out the son of a private school headmaster; as a 12-year old child he began and maintained a notebook collection of words and images. As a high school student, he wrote short stories; in his pursuit of a Ph.D., he persisted in writing poetry "that I was bound upon writing" instead of the required term papers. His first job followed an interview in which he was asked, "Are you a poet or a writer?" and he answered, "I’m a poet."
With the birth of his first child, he forsook trips to mountaintops and an opportunity to ship out overseas so that he could support his family with a teaching position. But "it wasn’t training in poetry." Barks describes his real training as a poet: "You get trained by other people whose writing you love."
Barks says his teaching career "gave me a reliable income and a lot of time off to write in the summers ... that was my way of solving the practical problem of how to get time to write. Maybe I sold my soul, but who knows how these things work out. But never in my training was the name Rumi mentioned."
Harper published Coleman Barks’ first book of poetry, The Juice, in 1972. In 1976, Robert Bly, who said, "I think writing poetry is a matter of agreeing that you have these two people inside: everyday you set aside time to be with the subtle person who has funny little ideas," introduced Barks to the work of Rumi.
Jalal Al-Din Rumi, born in 1207, was the founder of the Sufism, an openhearted exploration of unity. Rumi fled from Mongol-ridden Afghanistan to come to Turkey, where he lived and taught until his death in 1273. Rumi’s words offer an all-encompassing spirituality relevant to our times: being present in the moment, finding the holiness in laughter.
Coleman Barks describes his own practice of spirituality, his worship services: "I go for lattés and I go riding in my ’72 Dodge convertible. Everything is church, isn’t it? I love to sing old hymns ... I used to go to old singings in the mountains of North Carolina.
"I wouldn’t say I was anything: I am everything! Why not a Hindu? I love the dancing Shiva. Surely St. Francis and Buddha Dharma would get along fine. They wouldn’t have an argument. They would laugh a lot, and laughter’s pretty holy to me. I think it’s right at the core of where you lose your boundaries — and some absorption in work that you love. I like to work with stone. I buy these big pallets of stone and they just disappear.
"Rumi was without boundaries. He would say that love is the religion and the universe is the book, that experience as we’re living it is the sacred text that we study, so that puts us all in the same God club."
Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, said, "If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is truly remarkable." What qualifies Barks to translate Rumi? Barks observes, "I’ve always had this contact with the ecstatic part of myself. I’ve always felt lucky, like this life is really fortunate for me. It seems a lot of grace has come to me.
"Sometimes in April, when the sun was going down [with] that gold light, I would just lie on the floor and hug myself. I grew up in a family where that was okay, and anybody could break into song at any moment, or dance, or whatever, and that’s a great help to the ecstatic vision."
Barks claims his greatest inspiration came to him first in a dream on May 2, 1977 ("my only holy day") when a Sufi holy man came to Barks and expressed his love, and Barks expressed his love in return and saw the entire scene as "drenched with the dew of love." Later, Barks was introduced to this person in real life and spent many hours learning from him.
"That felt like the beginning, although I’d already started working on the [Rumi] poems. I don’t know that I’d believe it in anybody else, but I can’t not believe it when it happens to me! He taught me things in dreams like taking tiny, tiny little sips; he said, ‘You want wisdom too quickly.’ "
Rumi’s words, an "expression of praise and grief and gratitude and play," says Barks, were written down by scribes, and were passed down in oral tradition. But Rumi’s eminence in the Persian world was such that for centuries, Persian culture included word games where one line of Rumi was spoken as a challenge for the next player to respond with another line of Rumi’s poetry, beginning with the word which ended the first line of verse.
Today, The Essential Rumi, translated by Barks, is among Book Sense’s top-selling poetry books, along with books of poetry by the Irish Nobel Prize-winning Seamus Heaney, American Poet Laureate Pinsky, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Mary Oliver, and pop singer Jewel. The Soul of Rumi, new translations by Coleman Barks, is due to be published in September 2001 by HarperSanFrancisco.
Barks feels that poetry has a "social function to remind us of our deep self and a core of joy and grief; [it helps] us live in that place rather than in some other less deep place. I love the Cherokee greeting; in the morning, they greet each other and say, ‘How deep is your well?’ Sometimes their well’s not very deep, and sometimes it is, and poetry puts you in that place where it goes down to the water table."
Coleman Barks has performed Rumi’s work along with musicians such as the Paul Winter Consort and "CelloMan" Eugene Friesen and with dancer Zuleikha. "I love to have poetry along with music and movement and even cooking. It’s good to have a lot of different art forms going at once, because they deepen each other ... to go into the heart. These are all the tastes and fragrances that Rumi talks about in knowing the divine ... The written page has become so lonely. I like to bring back a cello near the page, and, if I can, a little curry."
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Special Thanks to the contributor of this article :
1.Coleman Barks Web Articles of Rumi, Home page
http://www.colemanbarks.com/press/newslist.php2.Alexandra Marks “Persian Poet Top Seller In America”
3. Phil Catalfo “ The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems”
4.Margaret Doyle “Translating Ecstasy: Coleman Barks on Rumi with a Side of Curry”
