10
Februrary 2013
INTERVIEW
CATALYSTMAGAZINE.NET
Ecstacy and the Beloved A conversation with Coleman Barks on the poet Rumi
BY MELISSA BOND AND ALICE TOLER
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
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hether or not you remember his name, you’ve likely heard the words of Rumi — declared “the most popular poet in America,” by the BBC in 2007. Also known as Jalal adDin Muhammad Rumi, he was born 806 years ago in Central Asia. Rumi was a Persian Muslim, jurist, theologian and Sufi mystic. His words captured the ecstasy of being human, and explored the twinned joy and grief of our self-aware longing for connection with the divine. His works would reach across centuries and across religious and
national boundaries to touch the hearts of countless millions. Rumi’s fame in the West can be traced to 1976, when the author Robert Bly challenged 39-year-old Tennesseean poet Coleman Barks to release Rumi’s poems from their “cages” of academically literal translation, and a new amanuensis was created to give wings to Rumi’s spirit. On February 28, the Jung Society of Utah along with the Two Arrows Zen Center (formerly Boulder Mountain Zendo) is bringing Barks to Salt Lake City to perform readings of Rumi, gracefully accompanied by Grammy-award winning cellist David Darling. In spite of the fact that Barks does not speak or write the Persian language, his interpretations of Rumi’s works are regarded as some of the most beautiful and accurate available to the English-language reader. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tehran University in 2006 in consideration of his work. Barks has compared his interpretations to “trying to translate Shakespeare
into Chinese,” and says that Rumi’s poetry rightfully deserves “hundreds of translators” in deference to its importance and profundity. Local poet and “CATALYST 100” honoree Melissa Bond sat down with Barks to chat telephonically about his experiences with Rumi and with his own poetry and life. MB: What is your process when you are distilling the translations that are mostly from English? CB: I look at an English translation, a scholarly translation, and I try to feel into what information, what spiritual information is coming through in the poem—it’s almost like sensing a presence of someone—and then I try to let that take me. I don’t add images. Some poems pick up various things that are difficult for an English reader, an American reader, to deal with, like Koranic references. Not always, but sometimes I will put them in a note and say this whole poem is a gloss on a certain passage in the Koran, which they often are. I didn’t grow
up reading the Koran. I didn’t even hear Rumi’s name until I was 39. I never had this great literary education at Baylor or at Chapel Hill. Over here, it’s a great blind spot in our culture. We don’t know the Koran and we don’t know this magnificent 12th, 13th, 14th-century poetry in Persian, the greatest in the world. MB: Reflecting back on my own education, I had never thought about the fact that Rumi wasn’t part of my education at St. John’s. CB: I never taught him; I taught American poetry. I never taught a class in Rumi, except this one I am teaching now. MB: So there are people out there who will not have heard of Rumi. Going back to the beginner’s mind, what first drew you to Rumi when you first read him? Did you think that this would become a life work? CB: It was actually a suggestion and an assignment, by Robert Bly. It was a writing exercise and I just kept on doing it. It felt so deeply relaxing and sublimely invigorating. It felt like a new, but very familiar, kind of voice that Rumi was speaking in. All of his poems, you know, are spontaneous. They were just spoken. He had scribes to write them down. MB: What do you think Western culture can learn from ecstatic poetry? What have you learned? CB: Well, you can learn something about the opening of the heart, which is what Rumi said was the work of his Dervish and learning community. All the poetry, too, was about the opening of the heart; so some kind of generosity can be learned, and compassion. He said when you do things from your soul, you feel a joy, a big joy that is moving like a river through you. When you feel that, you feel it with Rumi. It is a vast feeling of something coming through him. It might be the presence of his teacher and friend Shams-e Tabrizi, actually. It was deep love. It was in the heart, it was beyond mentoring. It was maybe just a mystery we just don’t have any words for just yet. Whatever it was, it comes through the poems. MB: I’ve thought a lot about ecstasy and states of ecstasy and how it can help us to move outside of ourselves; and also about the darker side of human experience, like grief and sadness. What does Rumi say about the dark standing alongside the light? CB: There is an ecstatic dimension to grief too. They say that Rumi’s and Emily Dickenson’s