Essays
The Soul of Rumi
Jeffery Beam
To go from Antler's boylove to Rumi may seem like a great leap, especially since the powers that be in the Rumi publishing world like to play down the probable physical love between Rumi and his beloved friend Shams. Barks makes a small comment about the question in The Soul of Rumi, but quickly brushes such thoughts aside. But anyone who understands the experience of ecstatic, Bhaktic love through a gay sensibility knows that Rumi's expression must have been much more than symbolic. The gay experience, like the mystical one, is "other" and Rumi's transformation from a respected staid Turkish theologian to a whirling dervish after meeting Shams is not at all surprising to the many closeted men who have flung their doors open. Not to belabor the point, but the important thing is not that Rumi and Shams probably spoke "the Love that dare not speak its name" to each other, but rather that a mystical enlightenment grew from it, and that his earthly love for Shams gave Rumi a vocabulary to describe an even higher experience. The world's great poetry is full of such upheavals, such loves. One of the greatest lessons Rumi teaches is that there is no separation from God in earthly things unless we make it so.
Barks has devotedly been making Rumi versions from other English translations since 1976. His Essential Rumi is one of the most complete collections of Rumi in English available, and now we have this volume to round out Barks' work, and apparently to end it. Barks intends to focus more on his own poetry, and leave room for a number of translators who are now working from the original Persian. Barks' versions are always beautiful, always moving, and always highly emotive. It's inevitable that translations miss the full range of a writer's work. This is a Rumi that Americans, supposedly starved for emotional religion, have needed and adopted. A whole Rumi industry has sprung up around Barks' work. But Rumi's real message, that higher love transcends the physical titillation one gets with lower emotions is oftentimes lost in the avalanche of images Barks extracts. Idries Shah used to remind audiences that the dervish dance was a prescribed teaching tool for a specific time and place, and probably even dangerous for others to adopt. Many of the lovers of Rumi I know seem more enraptured by how the poems make them "feel" than by what they have learned.
Thus Barks' Rumi must be read with restraint and wisdom. One can find the mirror to oneself in these poems, avoiding over-stimulation and emotional excess, by allowing Rumi's ecstatic images to engage a higher sensory organ. Barks has honed his Rumi and Shams to a clearer view of this ecstasy in The Soul of Rumi: "When you feel / longing, be patient, and / also prudent." The trouble with all the Sufi poets translators is a tendency to make the mystics' words seem off-handed, as if they were little radios constantly spewing out advice and knowledge. What's lost is the hard work, the interminable bleeding sweat even Rumi's sudden enlightenment took.
Despite my complaints, Barks is the Rumi translator of our time and much joy, wisdom, and knowledge can be found in his work. Rumi's wisdom is not rational, at least in the traditional sense, but there is method to it. Rumi truly opens the door to a richer relationship to the universe and Divinity with his poems. Barks captures Rumi's ability to break psychological barriers to inner work and to the Divinity that permeates all: "Love comes with a knife, not some shy question / and not with fears for its reputation."
Luckily Bark translates a whole book of Rumi's Masnavi for us. Composed on the tongue as Rumi wandered the streets of Konya, the massive book holds nothing back using everything human, no matter how low or high, as sourcebook for teaching. These are Barks' most felicitous versions yet. Rumi is here in all his opinionated wit, his pointed observations, and his generous soul, and without the heavy-handed sentimentality apparent in some of Barks earlier work. "With your teacher you are safe . . . / He makes you green like / garden ground. He makes you stony and sandy, so roses and / vines may grow there."
Rumi's luminous mysticism is like Whitman's, Blake's, Dickinson's, and Ikkyu's—earthy and otherworldly. It refuses illusionary definitions of time, space, and material: "We give value to a piece of ground for the same reason we / give food to the poor. The / ground has external dullness and internal luminosity. The / two seem opposed like a jewel / embedded in common rock. The outside says, 'This is all / I am.' The inside, 'Look / further. Look everywhere.' The outside, 'There's nothing inside.' Inside, 'Wait. I'll / show you what's true.' . . . Parts of earth have stolen / bits of God. We make them confess."