default header
22 April 2005
Rumi's American Popularizer Tours Afghan Poet's Homeland
Poet Coleman Barks makes first U.S.-Afghan academic exchange in 25 years
The American scholar who has made Afghanistan's most revered poet, Rumi, one of the most widely read poets in the United States has toured Rumi's homeland.
Coleman Barks, a professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, whose translations of the 13th century Persian poet have sold over a half-million copies in the United States, visited Afghanistan for 11 days in March of this year.
His trip was the first in 25 years -- since the Soviet invasion and the Taliban rule that followed -- by an American scholar participating in an exchange program with Afghanistan.
The visit, by official accounts, was well received by both younger and older Afghan academics throughout the country. The State Department is hoping Barks' trip will be the first of many such purely academic exchanges between U.S. and Afghan scholars.
The choice of Professor Barks as the initial exchange scholar has turned out to be an inspired one. Perhaps no single literary figure is more revered in Afghanistan than Rumi. He was born in 1207 in Balkh (then in ancient Persia, now in present-day Afghanistan) into a family of Islamic theologians and poets. In 1219, his family fled from Genghis Khan’s invading hordes to what is now Turkey.
Rumi’s father became the head of a madrassah (religious school), and, when he died, his son succeeded him at the age of 25. It was his meeting with Sufi master Shams Tabriz , however, that proved to be the seminal event in Rumi’s life and was the inspiration of his masterpiece, the Masnavi -- a six-volume poem considered by many Sufis as second in importance only to the Koran.
Sufism is considered to be the inner-directed, psycho-spiritual dimension of Islam. Sufis believe that their teachings are the essence of every religion, and indeed of the spiritual evolution of humanity as a whole. They believe that everything is a reflection of God; the school of Sufism practices to see the beauty inside the apparently ugly, and to open arms to what they believe as even the most evil one.
This religious tolerance is expressed most profoundly by Rumi:
Come, Come whoever your are.
Worshiper, Wanderer, Lover of Leaving;
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Though you have broken your vows a thousand times…
Come, come again, come
In a case of the master becoming the student that Rumi might have appreciated, exchange scholar Barks came away from his visit with a “most startling observation … the vital role” that Rumi’s poetry plays in the life of Afghan men. Doctors, lawyers, government officials, even warlords are passionately committed to his poetry. The warlords were initially “suspicious” of an American’s immersion in their beloved poet, Barks recalled.
Rumi’s place in the collective consciousness of his birthplace is perhaps best explained by Afghanistan’s own religious history. According to author Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning recent history of Afghanistan, Ghost Wars, “As conquerors riding east from Persia and south from Central Asia’s steppes gradually established Islam as the dominant faith, and as they returned from stints of occupation in Hindu India, they brought with them eclectic strains of mysticism and saint worship that blended comfortably with Afghan tribalism and clan politics.”
“These are my people, and I told them so," said Barks of the audience at one of his readings there, both his and their immersion in the subject as much spiritually as academically driven.
“Most of my presentations involved reading a translated poem, followed by [a translator] reciting the original, which often everyone knew by heart, followed then by discussion of the soul-growth teachings present in the imagery. Then on to another poem. A fine, and tremendously mature, way to spend the afternoon. It felt both ancient and familiar,” he explained.
The “most treasured experience” for Barks was a private meeting with “Omani Chisti, a 95-year-old man who has taught Rumi’s Masnavi for 75 years. That hour-long meeting was reason enough for me to have gone to Afghanistan.”
Barks’s itinerary took him to Kabul, Herat, Maza-i-Sharif, and to Rumi’s boyhood home, Balkh. For Barks, it was a journey that had come full-circle since his fellow American poet Robert Bly handed him a copy of the Persian poet’s verse in 1976, proclaiming, “These poems need to be released from their cages.”
Given Afghan’s violent, tumultuous history up to the present day, Barks says, it is no wonder that his countrymen down through the ages have found solace in Rumi, who could look within his own grief and find a source of regeneration:
The tomb Looks like a prison, but it’s really
Release into union. The human seed goes Down into the ground like a bucket into
The Well where Joseph is. It grows and Comes up full of some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here and immediately Opens with a shout of joy there.
Following is an account by Coleman Barks of his tour of Afghanistan:
(begin text)
Coleman Barks - Notes on the State Department Speaker Program Visit to Kabul, Mazar, Balkh, and Herat, Afghanistan, March 16-26, 2005
The most startling observation that comes to me, as a practicing American poet, involves the vital role that poetry plays in the lives of Afghan men. One afternoon in Herat I met at a long table with members of the Herat Literary Association, thirty men who meet every week to read their own poetry to each other. Doctors, lawyers, professors, businessmen, and government officials, strong, active, men-in-the-world who are passionately committed to poetry. They were intensely interested in how I had brought their national poet, Moulana Balkhi (Rumi), over into American English. They listened as I read my translation line by line with my translator following my English with the Dari (the Afghan dialect of Farsi) of the original. A tough audience, but they seemed mostly to approve. Then they wanted to check to see what kind of a poet I was on my own. I read a poem from my book, Tentmakinq, and Ruhollah Amin, the 26-year-old translator who traveled with me, rendered my words into Persian. I passed muster, though I do wonder, how Ruhollah translated "inboard motorboat." Musicians then joined the group, among them a most amazing man named Bulbul, which means nightingale, who emitted flawless nightingale sounds without moving his lips, all the while looking around as though searching for the source of such music. Bulbul could, effortlessly, take over any American late night talkshow. He is one of the true natural comedians, on the level of Chaplin, Peter Sellars, Jonathan Winters, or Groucho.
Another instance of the place that poetry occupies in the Afghan soul: on my first night of public appearances I found myself under a banner in the Afghan Ministry of Culture in Kabul. Next to a huge picture of Hamid Karzai, the banner read, DEAR COLEMAN BORKS, WELCOME TO KABUL. As I was reading the first poem in English, I realized that everyone in the room was silently saying the poem with me in Persian. Afterward there was animated discussion. I asked Ruhollah what was going on. He said it was a fierce debate about the metaphor of drunkenness (ecstatic love) in this poem of Rumi as compared with the references to wine in the poetry of Hafez. Here were cabinet level men and women arguing poetry, from their deep, and varying, experiences of it. The minister of culture himself, Mr. Raheem, carried the day with a vivid metaphor. "Inside this Balkhi poem there are 16 little drunken Hafezes running around!" His point being that Hafez was engaged in a narrow argument with the imams about Sharia rules of conduct, whereas Rumi's vision of love was wider and more embracing.
These are my people, and I told them so. In radio and television interviews, on the Voice of America, wherever I was asked my impression of Afghan culture, I brought up this enthusiasm for poetry. I had not known that there existed in the world such a poetry culture.
This discovery, of course, is part of a blindness I have, that we have in this country, and in the West in general, to things Islamic. It is a long-standing and pervasive condition. Wherever possible I confessed our ignorance, my personal variety, and our general American species. And yet, it must be stressed, there I was, and for a reason. Their Afghan poet has been the most-read poet in the United States during the last ten years! My translations alone have sold over half a million copies. These facts astonished audiences, who inevitably asked why. No one knows, I said, but it feels like to me that a presence comes through the poetry, even in my American versions, the sense of an enlightened, compassionate, hilarious, very clear and sane, and deeply kind, human being. We have been lonely, I told them, in the United States, for what the Sufis call a true human being. In Rumi and his friend Shams Tabriz we have found two of them.
Most of my presentations involved reading a translated poem, followed by Ruhollah reciting the original, which often everyone knew by heart, followed then by discussion of the soul-growth teachings present in the imagery. Then on to another poem. A fine, and tremendously mature, way to spend an afternoon. It felt both ancient and familiar.
Because I was there during the long Nowruz holiday, corresponding to our Christmas-New Year holiday, there were very few students on the university campuses I visited, but I was able to meet in more intimate settings with the literature faculties of Kabul and Herat universities. The professors, were receptive, but with some typical academic dubiousness for my enterprise. The collaboration of scholar with poet is not much valued in university communities all over the world, especially if the poet is of a mystical bent, as I am. I was not given credit at my own University of Georgia for the Rumi work until those collaborative translations were chosen for the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, the academic equivalent of canonization.
The rest of my time in Afghanistan was spent at various Nowruz events, a buskashi match (that incredible melee in which three or four hundred riders on stallions try to keep the one who has the dead goat across his pommel from dropping it into a four-foot circle, every man for himself in the damnedest frenzy of danger and courage and chaos I ever saw), and visiting magnificent ruins and the tombs of Sufi saints. I gathered quite a crowd at Jami's mazaar as I intoned my translation of The Camel Driver's Song and my translator supplied the interlinear Persian.
My most treasured experience of the whole Afghan time, though, was not at all public. It was a private meeting, arranged by Mr. Bahra, minister of culture in Herat. Down several turns of a narrow alleyway we entered the home of Omarii Chisti, a 95-year-old man who has taught Rumi's Masnavi for 75 years. When Jami in the 14th Century said, "Rumi was not a prophet, but he has a book," he was speaking of the Masnavi. It was pure grace to look into Omanii's eyes and ask my question, Who is Shams? Not waiting for the translation, he shot back, Shams is the doctor who comes when you hurt enough. No one hurts enough now. That's why he hasn't come. Rumi's longing was sharp enough to bring the doctor.
The hour-long meeting with that man was reason enough, for me, to have gone to Afghanistan. I hope my going also served the wider purposes of the State Department in acknowledging, and celebrating, this unique, and real, connection between the Afghan and American cultures, their shared love of the great mystical poet, Jalaluddin of Balkh, known in the West as Rumi. Rumi means the Roman one, Rum being that area of the Anatolian peninsula (Turkey) that was long under Roman influence. Konya, a central city of that area, is where Rumi's family ended up when they left Balkh in 1219, just ahead of the advancing Mongol armies. Rumi was twelve then. He lived most of his life in Konya and is buried there with his father, Bahauddin, under the famous green dome, which is visited by pilgrims from every religion and culture. Whatever you call the great poet born in Afghanistan, Rumi or Balkhi, he is the only truly planetary poet we have.
Coleman Barks
(end text)
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
