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Title: The Soul of Rumi : A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems by Coleman Barks ISBN: 0-06-060452-2 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Best introduction to Rumi available
Comment: If there is only one book of Rumi you purchase, this should be it. But warning, the purchase may send you into a frenzy to learn and read more.
Barks' works as a translator here make poetry come alive, leap off the page and fly circles around your mind. A single poem can bring a person to great thoughts.
The book begins with a great introduction to Rumi's life, work, culture, spirituality, but Barks also includes some history of Sufi poetry. Then Barks divides the poetry into logical sections. Some involve community, others involve love, some love of God, peace between religions, inner life, work, home, playing... The range of catagories Barks creates represent human life in a wholeistic manner. They make Rumi's poetry easier to grasp, much more enjoyable, and center on the needs of all human beings. Barks also introduces each section (usually no more than a page). Barks' intros are concise, clear, and point toward key ideas in the most notable poems of each section.
This large collection of poetry is worth reading for a lifetime. Not to mention as Robert Bly asked of Barks years ago, Barks follows through in "releasing these translations from their cages."
Rating: 5
Summary: Nice...
Comment: When I first began to read this book, I didn't like it nearly as much as the essential rumi, some of the poems just didn't speak to me in quite the same way. But this last winter break, I read through the whole masnavi at the end of the book, and it gave me a very different feeling from anything I've ever read before. It was like there was a deeper message, or an understanding which is difficult to say other then just a deeper understanding of everything.
Rating: 2
Summary: Love's Embodiment
Comment: Although I own and have read most of Coleman Bark's Rumi books, never until today did I suspect that he so profoundly misunderstood the relationship of Shams and Rumi. He writes, "Their meeting in the heart is beyond form and touch and time." (p.188) Of course their relationship was spiritual even mystical, but where does the spiritual start but in "form and touch and time"? Barks seems to be denying that Rumi's poems describe an embodied connection with Shams. This is gnostic, erotophobia and perhaps homophobia.
Barks arrogantly writes: "The question is often asked if Rumi and Shams were lovers in the sexual sense. No." (p.188) How can Barks write that sentence with such dogmatic certainty, especially after reading hundreds of Rumi's love poems to Shams? How does he know that this love is merely spiritual ("beyond touch")? I am glad that Barks has finally shown us his ideological position. I worry how this "spiritual disembodied viewpoint:" has shaped his translations of Rumi.
I think it is impossible to know the exact details of the physical relationship of Rumi and Shams but the love poems express an incredibly embodied physicality. So I personally imagine that they did have one of the great sexual relationships of all time. But my evidence is in the poetry. The poetry describes a profoundly embodied relationship between two mystical men.
In the future, I will seek other translators of Rumi so as not to be influenced by this disembodiment?
Rumi and Shams were two physical men who met in a physical place in November of 1244. This meeting was within 'form', with 'touch' and within 'time.' Coleman Barks is wrong.
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Title: The Essential Rumi - reissue : New Expanded Edition by Coleman Barks ISBN: 0062509594 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 14 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Rumi: The Book of Love : Poems of Ecstasy and Longing by Coleman Barks ISBN: 0060523166 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Love Poems of Rumi by Deepak Chopra ISBN: 0609602438 Publisher: Harmony Books Pub. Date: 12 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Illuminated Rumi by Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Coleman Barks, Michael Green ISBN: 0767900022 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 13 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: I Want Burning: The Ecstatic World of Rumi, Hafiz, and Lalla by Coleman Barks ISBN: 1564558304 Publisher: Sounds True Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.98 |
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