About Rumi

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Comments by Carol Zaleski from interview:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week632/carolphil.html

"Every culture and every generation has its great prayer poets. One aspect of our pluralistic experience right now is that we have unprecedented access to the great prayer poets of many traditions. You just walk to your corner bookstore or go online, and you can get the greatest prayer poems of all time from many traditions.

Right now, the prayer poems, you might call them, of Rumi, for example, are extremely popular. They embody some of the ecstatic quality of Rumi's Islamic mysticism -- Sufism. They are the verbal counterpart to the experience of the whirling dervishes, who enact the movements of the planets and the orbiting of the soul around the soul's beloved. Rumi captures that same experience in words, in prayers, in sounds that are actually quite difficult to translate well.

Many of the popular translations of Rumi's poetry are geared to a contemporary sensibility, and they don't give us Rumi himself; instead, they represent a dialogue between contemporary Western seekers and this great Islamic, mystical tradition. They're being translated into a contemporary idiom, so that what people take away from reading Rumi's poetry today is a free spirit that is ecstatic, intoxicated with love of the divine and a quest of the divine, a never-ending pilgrimage of love. That idea comes across in contemporary translations of Rumi's poetry. [They] evoke a sense of a seeker who is inflamed with love of the divine and is searching for the beloved in every aspect of life. That's an idea that appeals to people today, because many people do feel they are seeking and that they haven't arrived. They feel this great longing for communion with the divine and for ecstasy and freedom from all boundaries.

What many of the contemporary translations of Rumi don't capture so well is the original context of Rumi's Sufism, the extent to which it is embedded in orthodox Islamic thought and ascetic discipline, aspects of which are extremely demanding and wouldn't have great appeal to contemporary sensibility. We do tend to pick and choose, and we have our fads and fancies in prayer, just as in other aspects of culture. Very often, translation of works from other times and places is a way of making material available to us in a guise that is palatable. It isn't always the recreation of those other worlds.

Rumi is the best-selling poet in the United States today, which tells us a great deal about the extent to which poetry and religious longing and religious quest are linked in our contemporary experience.

It also raises questions as to the authenticity of the transmission of the prayer poetry and religious ideals of a figure from so long ago, from a tradition which may not be shared by most of the people who are buying his books. It raises some very interesting questions about that.

I think we're missing something when we read Rumi as a fantastic new Beat poet. He's not Gregory Corso; he's a teacher within orthodox Islam. To understand something of the tremendous sense of longing and the experience of annihilation in the presence of the Beloved, you would really have to learn and immerse yourself in the Islamic tradition. While mysticism is only one strand of Islamic thought, it is deeply rooted in the sense of the absolute majesty, the overpowering reality of God. My littleness in the face of that God is a strong affirmation of the whole Islamic tradition. Rumi's mysticism comes out of that tradition, and isn't just a free-floating love-mysticism, which is the way I think we are sometimes receiving him today."

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