If life, not paper, is the path to the divine, Barks' translations may be closer to Rumi's ambitions than those produced by scholars of Farsi, the Persian dialect in which Rumi originally wrote. Barks deals very little with the original Farsi: He starts by comparing existing English translations, which he then rephrases into his own. Often this means giving up the rhyme and tempo of Rumi's original Farsi, but it allows Barks to bring the poetry a jauntiness and modernity. Rumi's jokes become funnier with Barks behind the wheel. Thus we get: "Someone born deaf has no more use for high notes than newborn babies for a fine merlot." It's a style Barks hinted at when he criticized a contemporary, Farsi-speaking Rumi translator who "uses words like 'unfathomable' a whole lot."
Barks, 64, is a big man with dark circles under his eyes. He's a little disheveled and wears a full white beard. We sit down to talk at a restaurant in Oakland, Calif. "I once met the living end of Rumi's lineage," he tells me. "Twenty-eight generations have traced their line down through. He was in Atlanta with the dervishes and he sat me down at the table to give me this beautiful book, this gift, and he said, 'What religion are you?' and I just threw up my hands and he said, 'Good.'" Later Barks says, "Love is the religion and the universe is the book. So if the universe is the book, that is your life as you're living it, that's the universe for you. That's your text."
He sees the Taliban as differing little from Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalists. "This is a bunch of brainwashed terrorists who are literalists and who are insane. They seem like scholarly narcissists. They seem like kids. They don't seem to have ever met a fully mature woman or man; I don't think they know one. They haven't been initiated into the mysteries of compassion. They're stuck in some literal way like a verse-quoting Southern Baptist would be. There are fundamentalists in every religion," Barks says.
I ask him, "How can it be that millions of Americans are picking up the same poetry books perused by the inhabitants of a country we're currently dropping bombs on?"
"Well, he reaches such a wide expanse," Barks answers. His audience "can include very devout Quranic scholars who hear his poems as some commentary on verses in the Quran. We can find Muslims and talk truly to them. That's how both countries can love the same poet. And he can also appeal to people like me, just gnostics who only accept their own experience rather than any revealed interpretation of it through a book. He has always been able to embrace that wide band of seekers."
One reason Rumi reaches audiences this diverse is that he's rarely very specific about who he's talking to or, for that matter, what he's talking about. Here he is, in Barks' translation, on the idea of the "beloved," a concept that includes virtually all of the visible and invisible world:
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know
first, last, outer, inner only that
breath breathing human being.
It's likely this emphasis on the abstract over the specific is what keeps new agers and Muslim fundamentalists thumbing the same pages. Still, Rumi was born a Muslim. He lived as a devout Sufi Muslim, took a pilgrimage to Mecca, acted charitably in his community and fulfilled the duties of a Muslim. But woven through his poems is the insistence that sectarian differences don't really matter -- a conviction Barks shares. Like Rumi, Barks is less interested in religious distinctions than he is in the religious experience.
"Those who divide people from the ones who love the Quran and ones who love the Bible," Barks says, "and ones who love the Torah -- it's not part of that. There's no exclusive document that reveals. It's a family of people who are trying to learn how to love. And that's a very broad version of religion, but I think it's a valid one."
Even by Islamic standards, there's nothing terribly radical about that. It's a basic, if frequently ignored, aspect of the Islam that Muslims are instructed, by the Quran, to live in peace with Jews and Christians (if not actually befriend them). "Surely," reads the Quran, "those who are Jews and Christians -- they shall have their reward from the lord, and there is no fear in them, nor shall they grieve."
To make name distinctions, says Rumi, is to miss the point. He makes his point with a fish metaphor -- Barks gave one rendition: "One of [Rumi's] jokes about what theology is, he says it's like we're a school of fish getting together to try and discuss the possibility of the existence of the ocean. There is no separation. So don't try to find names for it."
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