I have to disappear — with Rumi

By Gloria S. Redlich, "Coleman Barks: poet and translator" - The Rhode Island Times - RI, USA
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

This is Coleman Barks’ second visit to Block Island; he was here for the Poetry Project last year. About his second visit to the island, Barks says, “It’s an absolutely spectacular place.”

Born in 1937 in Chattanooga, Tenn., and receiving a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and a master of arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Barks is renowned for his collaborative translations of the poetry of Jelaludden Rumi, a 13th-century Persian mystic.

Barks works with the Islamacist scholars John Moyne, A.J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson to rend literal and more formal translations of the Persian poetry “into American free verse.”

His interest in Rumi was piqued in 1976 when the poet Robert Bly shared some of the scholarly translations of the Persian poet, suggesting, “These poems need to be released from their cages.”

Barks says he was initially drawn into Rumi’s poetry, “entering a new region that felt very familiar — very new and very alive.” He adds, “The poetry couldn’t always be understood by the mind; it had to be inhabited by the heart and soul.”

An example is his translation of Rumi’s “A Community of the Spirit”:

“There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise. . .”

The speaker eventually asks,

“Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.”

Barks points out that he intends his translations to be non-intellectual; he is more interested in what he calls “sublime relaxation.”

He says that after teaching three classes at the University of Georgia, he would pour himself some hot tea and work on one of Rumi’s poems, “going into the trance of the poem.” He describes this experience as feeling “the soul growth.”

Using the images of the poem, he worked to translate it into accessible English from more scholarly or formal English. He calls it “movement toward the emotional and spiritual — toward that which is felt.”

Breaking into a broad grin, he adds, “Who knows what I’m leaving out?”

Translator and poet
A poet on his own, Barks explains the distinction he experiences in his two poetic endeavors: “I like translating Rumi and writing my own poems. But in one,” he notes, “I have to disappear — with Rumi. In the other, I have to get in the way — get my personality and my delights and my shame into the poem.”

At his reading Saturday evening, May 3, Barks said of Rumi’s work, “There is a sense of presence” embodied in an “all-purpose pronoun that means I, you, he, we, they and God.”

This notion is conveyed in Rumi’s “Two Friends,” which Barks translates as:

“A certain person came to the Friend’s door and knocked.
‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me.’

The Friend answered,
‘Go away. There’s no place
for raw meat at this table.’”

After wandering for a year, the caller learns humility
and finally returns to knock “gently” on his Friend’s door:
“Who is it?’
‘You.’
‘Please come in, my self,’
there’s no place in this house for two.

The doubled end of the thread is not what goes
through the eye of the needle.
It’s a single-pointed, fined-down, thread end,
not a big ego-beast with baggage.’”

In his own verse, Barks weaves in the emotion of his own deepest attachments and his acute sense of the transience of life, as reflected in a poem he read called “New Year’s Day Nap”:

Fiesta Bowl on low.

My son lying here on the couch
on the “Dad” pillow he made for mein the Seventh Grade. Now a sophomore
at Georgia Southern, driving back later today,
he sleeps with his white top hat over his face.
I’m a dancing fool.

Twenty years ago, half the form
he sleeps within came out of nowhere
with a million micro-lemmings who all died but one
piercer of membrane. specially picked to start a brainmaking,
egg-drop soup, that stirred two sun and moon centers
for a new-painted sky in the tiniest ballroom imaginable.
Now he’s a rousing, six feet long,
Turning on his side. Now he’s gone.

Having taught American literature, poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia and other universities for more than 30 years, Barks’ translations of Rumi have grown to 19 volumes and led to the sale of more than three million copies.

It has been suggested that this makes the Rumi the most-read poet in the United States.

[Picture: Coleman (Professor Coleman Barks) and Boo, Woody, Benjamin, Keller, and Tuck. Photo from Prof. Barks' Web site http://www.colemanbarks.com/].