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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Translator Coleman Barks discusses the bestselling poet who's loved equally among Yanks and Afghans.
Oct 12, 2001 | Coleman Barks, 21st century poet, likes to point out that Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century poet, is both the bestselling poet in the United States and the one most often played on Afghan radio stations. Given the current situation, it's unlikely anyone will be able to confirm the latter. But it is fair to say that one thing currently binding these two warring nations is a poet born in a time when neither country existed.
It would be a dissapointment if there wasn't a story about how Barks became the country's most popular Rumi translator. Rumi lore is studded with stories marking beginnings and endings and revelations. Nothing gradual happens to mystics. Life-changing events are spontaneous and total. Insight flashes; Teresa de Avila falls into an ecstatic trance, a crash, an explosion and everything is different.
The story of how Barks, Southern-born poet and University of Georgia English professor, became a Rumi scholar begins in 1977. On the night of May 2, Barks dreamed he was lying in a sleeping bag on the banks of the Tennessee River, near where he grew up. Suddenly a flash of light lit up the sky and, as Barks describes in the introduction to his new book, "The Soul of Rumi": "A ball of light rises from Williams Island and comes over to me -- revealing a man sitting cross legged with head bowed and eyes closed, a white shawl over the back of his head. He raises his head and opens his eyes. I love you he says. 'I love you too,' I answer."
One year later Barks found the same figure in waking life: The man was a Sri Lankan Sufi saint named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen who would instruct Barks -- who did not and still does not speak Farsi, the Persian dialect in which Rumi originally wrote -- to pursue his translations.
If you are not generally inclined to believe stories about prophetic dreams and other supernatural events, then you are also probably not a Rumi fan. Stories of the mystical and miraculous don't constitute all of Rumi's writings, but they're a part of it. For better or for worse, they've helped cement his stubborn association with the new age movement. But a suspension of belief, or at least the ability to appreciate the symbolism of a far-fetched story, gives life to Rumi poems.
This particular genre of life-changing events has a familiar structure; Rumi's own account of his genesis is made up of similar components: protagonist, mentor and one puzzling proclamation that divides life into before and after.
Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, a city in what is now Afghanistan, to a long line of Islamic theologians and poets. When he was a child, his family moved from Afghanistan to Konya, Turkey, presumably to get out of the way of the invading army of Genghis Kahn. Rumi became a scholar, a poet and a teacher as his father had been.
One day in October 1244, Rumi was sitting by a fountain, reading his father's writings, when he was visited by what Barks calls an "ecstatic soul" -- an Islamic mystic named Shams of Tabriz. Shams approached Rumi, grabbed the manuscript from his hands and flung it into the water. When Rumi protested, Shams asked what must have sounded, even then, like a rhetorical question: Would Rumi prefer to live with God, or continue reading about him? The drenched papers, said Shams with a miraculous flourish, "will be as dry as they were." And he was right.
