Born in 1937, Barks is an American poet and former professor of literature at the University of Georgia. Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is nonetheless renowned as a truly brilliant interpreter of Rumi, one of the more renowned Sufi poets of 13th century Persia.

Barks makes frequent international appearances and is well known throughout the Middle East, and received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Tehran in 2006. Barks’ efforts have significantly contributed to the strong modern following of Rumi in the English-speaking world, and the ideas of Sufism have crossed many previously untraversed cultural boundaries over the past several decades in no small part due to his works.

Quite remarkably, Barks bases his paraphrases entirely on other English translations of Rumi, including the renderings of John Moyne and Reynold Nicholson. In addition, while the original Persian poetry of Rumi is heavily rhymed and metered, Barks uses primarily free verse in his interpretations. In some instances, he will even skip or mix lines and metaphors from different poems to co-generate new, uniquely inspired ‘translations’.

Despite such unorthodox methods, it can hardly be disputed that Barks’ personal renditions of Rumi’s poems capture the brilliance of the original author in ways that most of his contemporary translators simply cannot match. As one Rumi aficionado so aptly put it, “Barks seems connected to Rumi in ways that others simply cannot comprehend … He just ‘gets it’.”

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”
~ Rumi (a la Coleman Barks)

 

Filed under: In LOVE with Humanity by Scaughdt