Coleman Barks is Lost in Translation
This is part two of three in a series titled How Orientalism Has Shaped the Understanding of Sufism in the West. It will explore how notions of Sufism, Mysticism, Islam and Orientalism has been posited in the West through the lens of Rumi and his surviving collections.
In the last five or so years the poetry of Rumi has seen an immense resurgence amongst the Western readership. The translations of his work are available online, there is an abundance of Instagram pages dedicated to his poetry, and at one point there were even talks about having a Hollywood version of Rumi’s life (with Leonard di Caprio as a potential front runner). In fact, if you just search #Rumi on Instagram you’ll find the related hashtags include #spiritualawakening #meditatedaily #PauloCoelho and even #MayaAngelou. If you’re looking for any connection to Islam — you’ll have to look elsewhere. It’s official — the world is on a Rumi high. But how exactly did we end up with a Westernized version of an 800-year-old Persian manuscript?
In part two of this series, this article examines the issues behind Coleman Barks' translation of Rumi’s poetry and Orientalists overreliance on written documents.
