Word: rumi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most responsible for Rumi's popularity in the West today is Coleman Barks, a poet and retired professor of English at the University of Georgia. Humble and soft-spoken, Barks acknowledges that his translations are often far from exact renditions of the Farsi of Rumi's day?which in any case he doesn't speak. To create them, he has used literal translations provided by others. Barks' emphasis on poetic essence over linguistic exactitude owes a strong debt to earlier poet-translators like Robert Bly, Kenneth Rexroth and Ezra Pound who championed a style of direct, aggressively unacademic translation. Following...
...Shattered by the event, Rumi is said to have undergone a period of profound mourning. Then, at a point of near-total hopelessness and emotional desolation, he experienced another mystical intuition. Though physically dead, Shams was in fact not gone from his life at all but more present than ever?on an inner, spiritual plane. "Shams" means sun in Arabic, and in the words of Rumi scholar Annemarie Schimmel: "He who had searched for Shams, the 'Sun of Truth,' in vain, discovered that he was united with him in himself...
...wake of this experience that Rumi's formidable output of poetry began: a catalog that in its surviving form runs to a dozen thick volumes. Rumi's masterpiece, the Mathnawi, is a fantastical, oceanic mishmash of folktales, philosophical speculation and lyric ebullience in which the worldly and the otherworldly, the secular and the sacred, blend constantly. For Rumi, the universe is like a tavern where people, drunk with desire and longing, collect and carouse until they finally remember their true calling: return to an Islamic God whose all-encompassing love is the core of every earthly love from the most...
...Rumi speaks of in his poems?or at least in Barks' translations of them?is one who seemingly has little interest in the intricacies of orthodoxy and doctrine. "Rumi keeps breaking the mosque and the minaret and the school," Barks told National Public Radio last year. "He says when those are torn down, then dervishes can begin their community. So he wants us all to break out of our conditioning, be it national or be it religious or be it gender based...
...would disagree with Barks that, like the God-intoxicated ecstatics of other religious traditions from the Hebrew prophets to St. Francis of Assisi, Rumi was out to seriously question the spiritual assumptions of his day. By the standards of 13th century Balkh, his songs of union with the divine were rebellious fare indeed. But they were also uttered by a man who, at all points in his life, considered himself a devout Muslim. Rumi scholars like Franklin D. Lewis, author of the recent Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, are anxious to remind the poet's legions...