This Divan is Not Furniture

The local poetry scene is buzzing with the news that an internationally known poet and translator is coming to town for Rumi's 800th birthday celebration next month. This American writer is best known for his translations of the 13th Century Persian mystic, all taken from a book called the Divan-I Shams. Sounds like some kind of sofa with a frilly strip of fabric around the bottom, doesn't it? In Persian (sometimes called 'Farsi' -- another misnomer, according to some sources), the title means The Work of Shams -- with the word "Shams" being an Arabic (I think) word for "light." The man in question was more fully known as "The Light of Tabriz" -- being a reference to his renown as a mystic from that city. The title refers to the profound effect knowing this man had on Rumi's life. The poetry as translated by Coleman Barks comes off as delicate and romantic, almost erotic in nature. It was madly popular in the 90s. And that's part of the problem.

Barks reportedly took the "word-for-word" Rumi translations made by a British colonel -- H. Wilberforce Clarke, who had converted to Islam in the 19th Century -- and "transcreated" them in a modern English idiom. Barks reportedly beheld a vision of Rumi that had the Moslem holy man offering his approval for the method. I won't argue with that, or with "transcreating," either -- as long as you know the language of the original, so you don't fall off course. Unfortunately, Barks reportedly (at the time, anyway) did not know any Persian. Uh-oh.

This has happened before. Back in the early 70s (I think), a charismatic Christian decided the King James translation of The Bible was too stilted and remote from modern English. So he just decided on his own to "rewrite" the King James Version -- without knowing any Greek or Hebrew. The book, known as The Living Bible, was a huge best-seller at the time. Unfortunately, this 'translator' got a lot of stuff wrong, making incorrect guesses as to what the King James translators had intended, and he unintentionally put words and phrases in his version that were never in the Bible at all.

This is not as far-off a comparison as you might think, at least in terms of comparative religion. In much of the Persian-speaking world, Rumi's work is held as near-canonical Islam. While certainly no one (that I know of) considers Rumi's poetry a replacement for the Koran or the Hadith, many Persians esteem his work as an important medium for understanding the inner nature of Islamic sacred text. You have to be really careful in translating it, in other words.

What has happened since, to both Barks and the Living Bible guy, is that they teamed up later with knowledgeable linguists and scholars to revise or redo their "transcreations." I hope if Barks comes to our area as scheduled, he'll bring some important insights into this process. The upcoming conference should be well worth attending for that alone (and there's a lot more going on at this event, by the way. People I know are really looking forward to it.).

Rumi's Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz is held as a masterpiece -- poetically, ethically, spiritually. The intimate terms it contains are said to be metaphors, even allegories, for the spiritual states he and Shams experienced together (in what we might call "contemplative prayer.")

An online reference says (and I didn't know this beforehand) the Divan contains some 40-thousand "verses." While I don't know if that number refers to lines, quatrains, or whole poems -- even if it were 40-thousand words, it would be astonishing. FORTY THOUSAND! And it's only one of Rumi's many works!

Shams himself is said to have written excellent mystical verses -- but I know nothing about them. He comes off as kind of mysterious in sources I have consulted. Whatever the case may be, the point I'm trying to make is that we in the West know next to nothing about this mystical culture. I think we must not presume that we do. It is sacred, or at least near-sacred, to those who are knowledgeable about it.

The irony is that there are many poets in English who have written spiritually-rich material -- a body of work that has been largely (at least when I was in school) overlooked. Check out any edition of Emily Dickenson* (I'll have more to say about her in an upcoming post) or George Herbert, or Auden's war sonnets, or Eliot's Four Quartets -- just for starters. If you read them with an open mind, I think you'll be astonished.

The bottom line? I don't think there is a conventional love story behind the relationship between Rumi and Shams. But there is a beautiful (and true) love story that involved a contemporary of Rumi's that you might want to know about.

More, next time.

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*Again, left Emily Dickinson's name misspelled, as in the original, though other typos I spotted have been corrected. In subsequent posts, I softened considerably my harsh judgment against "transcreation".


LJ orig.: 09/02/07