Beyond all time, beyond all “you” and “I”
The vessel of your body can consign
Your soul to the fires of love divine
From which fires all wisdom can disperse
Essences beyond all insights of verse.
I AM YOU
I am the dust that dances in the light
I am the sun that chases out the night
I bid the particles of dust to stay
I beg the sun, “Continue on your way!”
I am that veil of earth, the morning mist
I am the twilight flock of birds that twist
And turn and wheel and return to the nest.
The surf that gives the rocky cliff no rest
And turns again to waves to lash the hull
Of shipwrecked vessels. And I am the skull
Of the body washed up on the coral reef
Time makes no difference between priest and thief
I am the parrot captive in the cage
The silence, word, the whisper, and the rage
Or melody that pours out of the flute
The spark of flint, the candle flame and soot
I am the moth destined for suicide
I am the rose and its fragrance astride
The garden breeze. I am the galaxy
The logic of the evolutionary
Drift. So Jalal ad-Din identify
Yourself as One who says that You are I.
THE SONG OF THE REED
This is the story of the reed that weeps
Tears of separation as it keeps
The memory of parting in lament
And cries for all the pain it underwent
Torn from its bed, O how its heart does yearn
And generates the dream of its return
The knowledge of love and of its caress
The shattered heart knows well and can express
Them better than the heart that’s never known
The pain of being in darkness, all alone.
Into the gatherings of men I went
None in those crowds could guess at the extent
Of suffering so hidden in my breast
Because I mingled, disguised like the rest.
No sign of inner turmoil did I send
To each who thought he was my bosom friend.
For though we see each other’s bodies whole
There is no sight that looks into the soul
The lament of the reed is breathed in fire
If you are cold and deaf to it—retire!
The flame of love comes burning through the flute
Those who cannot hear its song are mute
And cannot of intoxication sing
Though the bird of love be on the wing
I ask you friend, tell me, whoever saw
A thing that was the poison and the cure?
The reed sings of the blood red as the rose
It sings of Majnun’s heart which overflows.
And though the long road may be stained with blood
A fish will find its comfort in the flood.
The day is long for him who has no bread
So pass this day with wines of love instead.
To reach enlightenment though each must try,
This poem has to end—and so goodbye!
ON HIS DEATH
Bear my body to the grave my mortal friends
Knowing that the singing of my heart never ends
No time for your wailing, gnashing of teeth, and tears
The eternal sleep is not at all what it appears.
The grave is not the sum of a life complete
It is but the veil beyond which bride and groom
retreat.
You saw the body descending, now see it rise,
Think of me with Him as you shut your eyes
Locked in that coffin my soul is now set free
To join with my beloved in eternity.
Which seed fell in this earth and did not grow?
Your material shape is a drop in the heavenly flow
Of water which springs from That eternal source
Life, death, these illusions, must take their course.
Is not the sun as it sinks, elsewhere rising too?
My grave is but the last door, the entrance to the
new.
So save your wails and mourning hymns for another
place
This flood bears me beyond, where man sees face to
face.
APPENDICIES
Insights & Interview
Translating Rumi
A Personal Note
Q & A with Farrukh Dhondy
A Personal Note
My great grandfather, Jamshedji Saklatwala, was something of a Persian scholar. One of the few things I know about him is that he used to spend his days attending the funerals of Parsi acquaintances in Bombay and sitting, as is the custom for males, outside the funeral parlor where prayers would be in session, translating Persian poetry in a small notebook. He published in his lifetime a book of translations into English of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The family has the elaborately produced paperback, probably the only extant copy.
I read it years ago and found it very unexciting. In his preface, Jamshedji acknowledges the overbearing and irreplaceable presence of Edward Fitzgerald’s beautiful and enduring translation of Khayyam’s quatrains, but claims that he has set out to provide the reader with a more accurate translation.
The accuracy kills the poetry.
The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko remarked that “Translations are like women: if they are faithful, they are rarely beautiful; if they are beautiful, they are rarely faithful.” His perception may today be labeled sexist, but whether the comparison is valid or not, one gets his drift.
I am, in this random selection of a few of Rumi’s verses, setting out to do the opposite of what my great grandfather attempted to do with Khayyam. There is a craze in the United States for “Rumi” philosophy and verse, especially since Madonna (the American pop singer, not the Mother of Issah) reduced the medieval mystic to pop and recited his love songs. I have paid some attention to these lyrics and tried to read the translations on which they are based. My Persian is non-existent, but the verses in English, by several different translators, have succeeded in making Rumi’s work a very unattractive proposition.
Rumi wrote his great work, the Mathnawi, in couplets. Though none of the translations I have read reproduce this form, I have attempted it in most cases and tried to imitate the meter of the original. The metaphor that Rumi uses is drawn, as is that of most Sufi poetry, from the landscape and usage of the time—the mirrors, the cups of wine that stand for the essence of the beloved, the lover who stands for the divine; the Word, the Book, the Messenger—these indicate the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad.
The way Rumi uses metaphor very often defies translation. There are ideas and concepts in the Persian language that merge, and in that merger provide lyrical sense. When translated into English they become disjointed ideas and monstrous images.
1. Rumi Daylight, A Daybook of Spiritual Guidance, translated by Camille and Kabir Helminski (Shambhalla South Asia Editions).
Everything is perishing except His face
Unless you have that Face, don’t try to exist.1
These random lines from a huge outpouring of Rumi’s translations demonstrate some of the difficulties. The translation has none of the grace of verse. (“Poetry” is in the eye, ear and sensibility of the beholder.) It resembles, more closely, an instruction in the manual of some modern electronic gadget manufactured in China. The translators may have attempted to capture something of the prose sense of Rumi’s verse. “Everything perishing” becomes an abstraction in the translation. The argument about “having that Face” and the command to cease “trying to exist” if you don’t are incomprehensible outside the context of Sufi discourse.
Rumi did not intend his verse to be read as we read haiku in contempor
ary translation—a random evocation and an illogical juxtaposition of images that can startle and perhaps make music but doesn’t contain a sustained appeal to the eye, ear or any of the senses. In haiku, evocation is all, and none of the images in the translations I have read of Rumi are remotely evocative.
Take this, for instance:
There is some kiss we want with
Our whole lives, the touch of
Spirit on the body. Seawater
Begs the pearl to break its shell
And the lily, how passionately
It needs some wild darling!
(Tr. Coleman Barks)
The metaphor of the kiss is confused by the abstraction of wanting something with your “whole lives.” The “touch of the Spirit on body” is a further abstraction and the image of the kiss that we were first given gets lost. Can one want a kiss with a whole life? One may long for a particular sort of kiss throughout one’s life, or desire a kiss with one’s whole being, but the particular construction above makes little logical or lyrical sense. Again, seawater may erode the shell of the pearl, but can it really “beg” it? Water wets, flows, rubs, erodes pebbles, pushes, drowns, but can any of this appeal to our visual or tactile senses as “begging”? It evokes no sensual response. And what on earth is a “wild darling,” outside the invented private language of uninspired lovers who don’t speak any known English?
Another modern rendering distorts the meaning and, perhaps for the sake of brevity, banishes any poetic intent:
Let lovers be crazy, disgraceful and wild
Those who fret about such things
Aren’t in love.
(Tr. Deepak Chopra)
The contention that wild abandon is the essence of love comes across, but the Sufi meaning of love doesn’t. The translation is a fraud insofar as it pretends to be about adolescent romance and the “fretting” kills any lyrical flow.
There may be some virtue in translating poetry and seeking in the translation to convey the clumsiness and discomfort of reading a language that one doesn’t know, but I have tried in my transliterations to do the opposite. It inevitably means taking liberties with the structure of the verses and sometimes altering the metaphor to get at what I think is the intended meaning.
For my money, the translations and commentaries of R. A. Nicholson, who translated and commented on Rumi from 1898 through the 1920s and ’30s, remain the most faithful, erudite and comprehensively instructive. Professor A .J. Arberry of Pembroke College, Cambridge, translated the Diwan-e Shams-e in verse, attempting the rhyming couplets that are lyrically evocative and as faithful as translation can be. The fact that they are both British scholars of a particular age, “orientalists” in the contemptuous jargon of the more jargon-ridden modern academies, cannot detract from their achievement.
I confess that I am neither a Sufi nor a poet and, while working at these transliterations of Rumi, have used the texts of Nicholson and Arberry, the assistance and translating skills of friends who read Persian, and occasionally, the Urdu translations of Rumi by several scholars and commentators.
The liberties I have taken in trying to combine the intent of the original with an attempt at lyrical felicity are entirely mine and none other should beg forgiveness for them.
Q&A with Farrukh Dhondy
Today
Why did you decide to translate Rumi’s works?
I was on a flight to Australia and for the first time was given a book of Rumi’s verse in translation to read on the plane. I settled in to pass the hours in verse, having heard all my thinking life about Rumi but never having read anything. The verse was misnamed. All of it was prose, pretentiously broken into lines. It wasn’t poetry, and it certainly wasn’t Sufi in its content or conceit. On getting back to London, I looked for other versions. They all seemed to be written by New-Age spiritual freaks who took Rumi to be endorsing some mixed-metaphoric burden of wistful romance. All of them resembled either the fraudulent guides to happiness that are standard Californian fare, stumbling mis-understandings of simile and metaphor or very recondite and unintelligible constructions that refused to yield any meaning whatsoever.
Tomorrow is
a hope—the
dreamer’s way
The Sufi lives the moment,
rejoices in today!
HE KNOWS
Why “A New Translation”?
“I know not what
he knows, but
I know he knows”
I then discovered the earlier translations by Nicholson, which were in imitation eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English, but were meticulous and faithful to Rumi’s metaphors, meanings and narratives. I had someone read me a few verses of the original Persian and then read some Urdu renderings of the Mathnawi. I paid attention to the meter and rhyme patterns, and thought I could do reasonable renderings of some of the verse. Here it is.
Thus the pupil
fulfilled from the
Master goes.
Why “a New Translation”? popularity and momentum today? And why has the West taken to him?
Since I started the work, I have found that there are several westerners who are convinced that they have Sufi inclinations. We live in an age of cults and new sectarian allegiances. Perhaps all ages suffered the same personal quests. In the USA, Rumi’s following gathered momentum when some famous pop singers professed to be his followers. His popularity in other countries has certainly been given a boost by the growing curiosity towards non-violent Islam in the face of the outbreak of terrorist jihadism, which claims to be the true faith dedicated to secrecy and terror.
MATERIAL THE EARTH
What was the experience like, translating works of Rumi? What were the difficulties in rendering the translation contemporary?
Rumi and the poets of the Sufi tradition are bound to a certain universe of imagery and expression without, if possible, sacrificing their individuality. The images of wine, the tavern, the beloved, of animals and their noted characteristics, the style of the parable, the attack on ritualized religious practice, the negation of the material to penetrate to the spirit are all parts of the convention. Finding the contemporary language and imagery in which to express these without violating or stepping outside that universe of discourse was the challenge. Rendering the verses in rhyme and iambic pentameter are part of the craft without which the effect of verse, rather than discourse, cannot be sustained.
Material is the
earth and material
the stars
O Rumi, seek the
spirit—the water
not the vase!
BE STILL
Be still as stone
Refrain from
speech
And laughter
You shall be
given
A silken tongue
In the world,
hereafter.
Is Rumi still relevant today? Where does he stand in the political and social upheaval that the Islamic world is going through?
The vast majority of Muslims in the world follow non-juridical Islam. The fundamentalist Wahabi strain and the political Islam, represented by the Egyptian-initiated Muslim Brotherhood, are antithetical to the tradition which Rumi preached and partly founded. There is no strain of political persuasion in his work. He distinctly renders that which is Caesar’s which is his by ignoring it.
Ironically, the terrorist persuasion of those who claim to be evangelical Muslims has stimulated the quest for the lyrical, mystical, Sufi faith.
What is the importance of the sufiana stream in the shaping of Islamic identity?
I do not believe that there is one Islamic identity. That several peoples of the world are united by their belief in a faith by following its tenets doesn’t give the followers of the nation of Islam in America the same identity as the Muslim in Jakarta or Srebrenica. Each section of the Umma is influenced by the society of which it is a part. Sufiana, though it is as old and older than Islam, has the potent
ial to coexist without compromise with the modern world, unlike some strands of contemporary Islam.
Like Rumi, who are your other favorite poets?
I wouldn’t claim that Rumi is my favorite poet. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot are my lasting favorites, and some of my contemporaries, too many to mention, have alluring, individual and enlightening ways of putting the world to words.
THE PRISON
When God has
made the earth
for you to roam
Why have you
made a prison
cell your home?
A great spiritual master and poet, Jalal-ad-Din Rumi was born in Wakhsh (Tajikistan) in 1207 to a family of learned theologians. He founded the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. He was initiated into the mystical path by a wandering dervish, Shamsuddin of Tabriz. His love for and his bereavement at the death of Shams found their expression in a surge of music, dance and lyric poems, Divian-e Shams-e Tabrizi. He is also the author of the six-volume epic work, the Mathnawi, which has been referred to as the “Koran in Persian.”
Farrukh Dhondy was born in 1944 in Pune, India. After graduating in physics from Wadia College, he won a scholarship to Cambridge to train as a quantum physicist but ended up reading for a BA in English. He is the author of a number of books, including East End at Your Feet (1977), Poona Company (1980), Bombay Duck (1990), The Bikini Murders (2008), and Adultery and Other Stories (2011). He has also written screenplays for film and television, including Split Wide Open (1999) and The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey (2005). His opera based on the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling opened in London in 2012.
Rumi, The Essential Rumi
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