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Coleman Barks is an American poet and translator whose translations brought Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th-Century Persian mystic, to mass contemporary audiences, turning him into one of the most popular poets in the modern English-speaking world. Barks’ free verse interpretations of Rumi have at times been the top-selling poetry books in America. Now 86 years old, Barks joins AR to talk about how he was given a mission to bring Rumi’s words to the masses, which turned into a lifelong pursuit. He also talks about how his interest lately has shifted from Rumi to Rumi’s teacher, Shams Tabrizi.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Welcome to This Being Human. I’m your host Abdul Rehman-Malik. On this podcast, I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world whose life, ideas and art are shaped by Muslim culture.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I felt the power of these words, of the language that I was working on. But it felt like something that was very familiar. And very new at the same time.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Today, the man who brought Rumi to the masses… Coleman Barks.
It still surprises me that in 2023, one of the most famous poets in the world is a Sufi mystic and religious scholar who lived in the 13th century. As I’ve discussed on this show before, Jalaluddin Rumi’s poetry is everywhere – not just in books, but on coffee mugs, bumper stickers, Coldplay songs, and all over Instagram. It’s even in the title of this podcast.
The spiritual power of Rumi’s words speaks directly to the human condition. It’s universal because it’s concerned with us - our joys and our hurts, our beauty and our ugliness. Rumi isn’t afraid to leap into our contradictions. But Rumi was writing in Farsi. Somehow his words had to make their way into a language that makes sense to us.
Enter Coleman Barks. He wasn’t the first to translate, or interpret, Rumi into English, but there was something about his Rumi that ignited the imagination of readers all over the world. Coleman is in some ways an unlikely candidate for the job. He’s from Tennessee and he doesn’t even speak Farsi.
And yet, growing up, we had multiple copies of Coleman Bark’s Essential Rumi around our house, because all the members of my family were all invariably reaching for it. The interpretations in those pages spoke to me. My faith. My search for a thread that tied ritual, theology and my sense of being Muslim together.
Coleman Barks brought Rumi alive for me. He was the gate through which I entered Rumi’s universe and for that I am forever grateful.
Coleman is 86 years old now. His speech is a bit shaky and slurred, at times hard to understand. But his mind remains sharp, and as you’ll hear, when he reads a passage of poetry, his language becomes focused.
He joined me from his home in Athens, Georgia for a long overdue conversation.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Now, should I call you AR?
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Absolutely. That’s totally good. Friends call me AR and I’d be honoured to be considered your friend.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Okay. Well, we’ll give it a try.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Coleman Barks was surrounded by ideas from a young age.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I grew up on a prep school campus. And so, every meal was with 400 people. And my father's headmaster. So you understand. When you’re the headmaster's son, to have any credibility with your friends, you know, you have to have a criminal side.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
He began to write around the age of 13.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Free verse flowing poems. There were these journal entries really. The first subject was catching lightning bugs. In a little jar, you know. We put it in a little jar, and then as everybody knows that there’s lightning bugs in the jar, they’re sort of synchronizing and they all light up together, and then they all turn black and die. You know? They smell bad. You know? And that’s how they go. It’s a little metaphor for the folly of collecting things. Perhaps.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Over the years, he became more involved in poetry and the poetry scene. He won some prizes, first at school, then nationally. He’s not exactly humble about his talents.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I have a kind of an inflated sense of self-worth. I've been told by psychologists, you know, that I won my mother too easily from my father. I was the favourite child, you know. And I was her favorite. And acknowledged so by the whole family. [laughs].
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
The celebrated American poet Robert Bly was a friend of Coleman’s and someone he admired intensely. One fateful day, Bly handed him a book of Rumi translations. He told Coleman that these poems needed to be released from their cages.
COLEMAN BARKS:
He handed me these translations by AJ Arberry. He handed me this stack of books, you know. And he says, these need to be released. So I've spent 40 years trying to do that assignment.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
What cages were those poems in that they needed to be released?
COLEMAN BARKS:
The language of the Cambridge Islamicists, AJ Arberry and Bruno Nicholson, who were brilliant guys, but they weren't poets in the free verse tradition that was America's gift to the world, from Walt Whitman to many others. We’ve given the world this idiom that can say this spiritual searching in terms that it never has been put before.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Did you notice sort of as you were reading Rumi and releasing Rumi from those cages of sort of stultifying language, did you feel you were channeling poets like Whitman? Did you feel Whitman there in Rumi's meaning and message?
COLEMAN BARKS:
Oh, I don't know about channeling. But I certainly used my knowledge of American free verse and the idiom there and the language, and the lack of any rhyme scheme. Rumi will rhyme in Persian, rhyme eight, twelve lines in row, you know. But if you do that in English, the third line becomes a limerick. It becomes a joke. The third rhyme is a joke in English. Yeah. That's an extreme way to put it, but I think it's almost true.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
After that meeting with Robert Bly, Coleman went to a coffee shop in Athens, Georgia… and got to work. Immediately felt natural.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I didn't even have any paper with me. I had a pen, but I didn't have paper. So maybe I used a napkin, but I think I used the bill. But it felt like something that was very familiar. And very new at the same time. It felt very good. Like this is gonna be what I do with my life. As I was doing it, I felt the power of these words, of the language that I was working on, you know.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
I was always intrigued to know more about Coleman’s process. How did a non-Persian speaker do what he did? Coleman explained that a Persian scholar and collaborator would send him new verses in the mail. He could barely wait to get his hands on them.
COLEMAN BARKS:
My favourite thing was to go to the mailbox, you know? And get the new quatrains and open them and I used to work on them immediately, you know. So yeah, it was a great privilege and excitement for me.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
His translations took off in a way that was almost unfathomable. Before long, books attributed to a 13th Century Persian poet were among the most popular poetry books in America. When I ask Coleman what it is about Rumi that makes him resonate so much, he doesn’t overcomplicate it. It’s about Rumi’s mastery of language.
COLEMAN BARKS:
He is able to make it fresh, like each day is fresh.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
I'm sure you've been asked this many times before because the process by which you are engaging with Rumi's words is so fascinating. You don't speak Farsi and you're getting these scholarly translations, and then you're working this incredible alchemy and working them into this powerful free verse. You're engaging with Rumi and what results out of it, I think to myself, you know, how much did Coleman Barks feel that he left there in those interpretations of Rumi's words? I'm sure in some ways it's an alchemy that can never be separated. You can't separate Coleman Barks from Rumi. And we shouldn't separate Coleman Barks from Rumi, but I imagine you've thought about that a lot.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Well, not so much. I don't understand about word choices and why certain simple phrases are powerful and work in that way and others don't quite work as well. That's just inherent in the beauty and the magic of the American idiom. We've been given that lively field to play in, you know. American free verse is just loved the world over. And it's translated in every language.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
As you saw Rumi's popularity in a way take off and you must have begun to see your interpretations, your translations appear in all kinds of strange and interesting places, you know, in Coldplay songs, on coffee mugs, on bumper stickers. What was it like to watch that happen? And did it ever kind of bother you?
COLEMAN BARKS:
It didn't feel like it was ever in danger of becoming a… you know made meaningless by currency. So, it doesn't bother me. I accepted it. Madonna loves Rumi. A lot of people, famous people just love him. A lot of people are helping sales [laughs]. So, I accept that. I cash the royalty checks, you know.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
[laughs] You know, it's so interesting that you say that because I -- and this is what I'm feeling as I'm hearing you Coleman, that the passage of Rumi into our time and into our lives needs to happen according to our time and our lives. And I think the power and the enduring power of Rumi is Rumi's ability to find itself onto the bumper stickers and onto the Instagram pages and be a way of just nurturing people.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Yeah, they say that that's the way he functions. And, you know, in India, you know, he's like a friend.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
I think it’s important to pause and address something here. In recent years there’s been a lot of discussion about whether Coleman Barks’s interpretations of Rumi strip Mevlana of the religious faith that anchored him. A 2017 New Yorker article called it “the erasure of Islam from the poetry of Rumi”. I’ve loved Coleman Barks’s Rumi for most of my adult life. And I also get what the critics are saying.
When I asked Coleman about whether he ever dreamed of Rumi, he answered with something else. And it helped me understand how he was engaging with Rumi’s essential Muslimness. Here is the dream he told me about.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Dreams have been very, very important to me in my life. And I had an important dream. May 2nd, 1977. I grew up right by the Tennessee River on a bluff above the river. And in the dream, I was sleeping out on the bluff. I've never slept out on the bluff, but I was doing that in a sleeping bag. And I looked across the river down to Williams Island. Beautiful place. And a ball of light rose off the island. And there was someone sitting inside the ball of light. He had his head bowed. Then he raised his head. And he looked straight at me, and he said, “I love you.” And I said, “I love you, too.” And I'm so glad I said that. But the whole atmosphere filled with a kind of moisture. It was the time of night when the dew was forming and the exchange between us seemed to be part of the dew. And the dew was love. So, all the wetness in the world was love. And then a year and a half later, I met the man in the ball of light, in Philadelphia. A room upstairs. He's sitting there on his bed. I started telling him the dream and he said, finally, he said, “You don't need to tell me the dream. I was there.”
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
The man he’s speaking about is his spiritual teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sri Lankan sufi guide and Islamic scholar who lived outside Philadelphia. It was to Bawa that he often turned to gauge whether his interpretations of Rumi were in keeping with the spirit of the original text.
COLEMAN BARKS:
He kept telling me, you know. This is all about love, you know? And he would tell me if I thought I was doing things that I shouldn't do.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
If you didn’t catch that, Coleman is saying he would take his interpretations to Bawa. Bawa would help him understand Rumi, and sometimes would tell him when he wasn’t getting it right.
COLEMAN BARKS:
One of the last things he told me is, he says, “You know, I know Rumi and Shams Tabrizi not like people in a book.” He looked at me, he said, "I know them like I know you." Most outrageous compliment I ever received in my life.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
I interviewed Coleman remotely. Behind him I could see books piled high, shelves overflowing, loose pages scattered over the desks. Coleman admits that he gets tired. That he’s creaky and a bit absentminded. And yet, he still works on Rumi every day. Some gravitational pull brings him back. So, it was almost fitting that while I came to speak to him about Rumi, Coleman kept bringing the conversation back to someone else: Shams Tabriz.
The enigmatic Shams was Rumi’s teacher, friend and mentor. But above all, Shams was a theological disruptor. Shams was the one who pushed Rumi towards deeper, more provocative spiritual exploration. He questioned Rumi’s assumptions, challenged his religious knowledge and poked fun at this piety. Shams wanted Rumi to not just speak about things divine, but to really know the Divine.
COLEMAN BARKS:
His friendship with Shams of course is uh... He's called one of his books, Works of Shams Tabrizi, implying that without Shams's presence, the poetry wouldn't exist.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
The beginning of Coleman’s deep engagement with Shams starts – once again – with a dream. In his dream, he’s visited by a friend: the late American poet Galway Kinnell.
COLEMAN BARKS:
The dream I had with Galway, he was directing me with his arm in the air and directing me to the mouth of a cave. Above the cave in the letters and fire, it says [foreign language] Shams Tabrizi. The essence of Shams Tabrizi. And so, I went up there into the cave mouth, and there was a little chair on the floor there. It was like sort of a framework of a chair. But he's sitting there and somebody was to sit on the left and some on the right. And evidently Shams chose to sit in the chair itself. And all around the cave there were little niches and people were very beautiful. Elderly people were sitting there in deep stages of meditation. So it felt like the most holiest place I've ever been in - in dream or out. And I felt very privileged to be shown that by Galway and to be led into that place. And just be shown the chair of Shams.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Coleman took this as a sign. After the dream, he began to work on new interpretations of the sayings of Shams Tabrizi.
COLEMAN BARKS:
It's called Soul Fury, which is his word for a kind of intensity that must find expression. A soul fury is something that has to come out in a human being. Maybe I should read you some of the passages from Shams's sayings.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
I would love that, Coleman. I would love it.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Just a second.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Take your time, Coleman.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Okay. Thank you. I'm like an absentminded professor just fumbling through his text. Yeah. Here's one:
“I swear to God, I am not able to really know Rumi. There is no false modesty or deception in my saying this. Every day I learn things about his state and his actions that were not there yesterday. He is so alive and in motion that I cannot know him. He has a beautiful face and presence, and he speaks eloquent words, but do not be satisfied with those. There is something beyond the form and the words, beyond his face and the poetry. Try to seek that something from him.”
He never says what that something is, but...
“Those who yearn to be in his presence, to sit with him, many of those are saints, but they are wanting to hear the public self, that which I am calling his hypocrisy.”
Strong word for your best friend to say about you [laughs].
“That which I am calling his hypocrisy, but not the core truth of his being. I am unable to know Rumi because his words are like a blindfold. I cannot see through them to his eyes and know who he is.”
Shams is saying this.
“His poetry is like that, a great joke really, hilarious, a mask. A new kind of conjuring. Let me say this clearly: Hypocrisy makes you ecstatic”
Good gracious.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Wow. Wow.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I think he's saying there's something in ecstasy that is a little bit fake.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Yes.
COLEMAN BARKS:
“Let me say this clearly: Hypocrisy makes you ecstatic, drunken with the presence you feel. Truth makes you sad, discouraged, empty.”
Isn't that beautiful?
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Those are remarkable lines, Coleman.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Yeah, those should be put in stone somewhere. I'll read you just a little bit more here.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Please.
COLEMAN BARKS:
“Rumi has said many times that he is more compassionate, more sympathetic with people than I am. He is so happy in his ecstatic state that when someone falls in deep water or into a fire, or into hell, Rumi holds his chin in his hand and gazes at the situation with kind eyes. He does not jump into the water or the fire. He does not go down into hell. He gazes with kindness. I have that gaze too, but I also grab the one in danger by the seat of his pants and pull him out. Come on out, brother. You too should be gazing this way.”
What I are--- Don't you feel the freshness of the man? You know. He's something new in mysticism.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Shams feels undeniably current. It seems to be Coleman's gift. He crafts the meanings into words that speak to us - in our messy, present conditions. Coleman hasn’t moved on from Rumi. The translations remain his life’s work.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I still try to work on it every day.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Like Ahab pursuing the Whale, Coleman Barks still has his eyes set on Rumi’s Masnavi, an epic mystical text made of 50,000 lines of poetry spread over six books. It’s one of the fundamental texts of Sufism and a daunting project.
COLEMAN BARKS:
I think that will eventually kill me. I'll die doing the Masnavi… but happily.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
How would the world be different today without the work of Rumi?
COLEMAN BARKS:
Less fun. He said just being in a body, and conscious, is cause for rapture. That has always seemed true to me. As a child, you know. I would lay on the floor, hugging myself. And I'd say Mother, Mom, I got this full feeling again. He says, I know you do, honey. Yeah. That's the kind of family I grew up in, ya know.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
That's beautiful.
COLEMAN BARKS:
Yeah.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
We owe you a great debt. I owe you a great debt. I can't speak for anyone else. And I wonder, what does it mean to be a poet in this moment of human history and civilization we're facing? Climate catastrophe in our nations is riven with fault lines. There seems to be so much more misunderstanding at times. And yet those pernicious, you know, aspects of the human condition continue to ravage us. What does it mean to be a poet in a time like, like today?
COLEMAN BARKS:
It feels healing to me. It's like being a doctor in an emergency situation, ya know. That's maybe a little extreme, but it does feel like that.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
That's not extreme at all, Coleman, that is that is powerful.
COLEMAN BARKS:
It's a little self aggrandizement. [laughs].
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Coleman Barks, can you tell me about a joy or a meanness that has come to you recently as an unexpected visitor?
COLEMAN BARKS:
That's a visitor that came today, was my actually going to this Soul Fury book that I hadn't looked at in a while. And loving it again. And just finding all those passages. But anyway thank you AR.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Thank you so much, Coleman. It has been such an honour to have you on This Being Human.
COLEMAN BARKS:
It was a lot of fun. Thank you.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Thank you for listening to This Being Human. Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi are widely available. If you haven’t read any of them before, I’d suggest you start with The Essential Rumi or Delicious Laughter.
In this episode, Coleman Barks read from his collection Soul Fury: Rumi and Shams Tabriz on Friendship. Later this week, the Aga Khan Museum will be launching a major exhibit on the life and legacy of Rumi. It opens on May 13th and runs until October 1st.
This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our Senior Producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hailey Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriele. Stuart Coxe is the president of Antica Productions.
Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound.
Shaghayegh Tajvidi is TVO’s Managing Editor of Digital Video and Podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO.
This Being Human is generously supported by the Aga Khan Museum. Through the arts, the Aga Khan Museum sparks wonder, curiosity, and understanding of Muslim cultures and their connection with other cultures. For more information about the museum go to www.agakhanmuseum.org
The Museum wishes to thank The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation for their generous support of This Being Human.
Coleman Barks is an American poet and translator whose translations brought Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th-Century Persian mystic, to mass contemporary audiences, turning him into one of the most popular poets in the modern English-speaking world.
Barks’ free verse interpretations of Rumi have at times been the top-selling poetry books in America. Now 86 years old, Barks joins AR to talk about how he was given a mission to bring Rumi’s words to the masses, which turned into a lifelong pursuit. He also talks about how his interest lately has shifted from Rumi to Rumi’s teacher, Shams Tabrizi.
In this episode, Coleman talks about:
Quotes:
A soul fury… is a kind of intensity that must find expression, something that has to come out in a human being
Rumi said just being in a body, and conscious, is cause for rapture. That has always seemed true to me.
I felt the power of these words, of the language that I was working on. But it felt like something that was very familiar. And very new at the same time.
This is all about love, you know?
To be a poet in a time like today It feels healing to me. It's like being a doctor in an emergency situation
Learn more about Coleman Barks:
New York Times: How Did Rumi Become One of Our Bestselling Poets?
New Yorker: The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi
Further resources:
In this episode, Coleman reads from Soul Fury: Rumi and Shams Tabriz on Friendship
We also recommend The Essential Rumi and Delicious Laughter, both Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi’s work.
