Overwhelming. That’s my one-word review of this work.

Coleman Barks has given us Rumi: he has translated Rumi, he has transformed Rumi, he has rewritten Rumi – for all practical purposes he has become Rumi. He has made a bestseller of Rumi, right up there along with Homer and Dante, ahead of his contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, ahead of Wordsorth, Blake, Keats, Whitman and Robert Frost, well ahead of any living contemporary poet. For his efforts, Banks received an honorary doctorate from Teheran University (2006). He has brought Rumi to the attention of the English-speaking world; he has brought him back to life, along with his beloved Shams Tabriz. He has let us, while reading his works, become Sufis of the thirteenth century.

Coleman Banks has translated hundreds and hundreds of Jalaladin Rumi’s poems, though he speaks nor reads not a word of Persian. As Wikipedia explains, he “bases his translations entirely on other English translations of Rumi.”

This includes translations by John Moyne. In addition, while the original Persian poetry of Rumi is heavily rhymed and metered, Barks has used primarily free verse. In some instances, he will also mix lines and metaphors from different poems into one 'translation'.

Of course, I neither read nor speak Persian, nor its modern ounterpart Farsi, so I have no way of knowing how close to the original Rumi Banks’ “translations” are. I can only be grateful to him for letting me listen in on something akin to Rumi’s thoughts, his visions, his mysticism, or – as Banks would say – his “heart.” I wish he had called his works transformations or adaptations, or some such, but then he might not have achieved the readership for his work nor the attention to Rumi, so I should not complain.

His Rumi: The Big Red Book (HarperOne, 2010) has numerous subtitles, or other appositives, on the title page: The Great Masterpieces Celebrating Mystical Love and Friendship, “Odes and Quatrains from The Shams, “Collected Translations . . . Based on the work of John Moyne, Nevit Ergin, A.J. Arberry, and Reynold Nicholson.” In a note on his translations (p489), Banks says, “Since New Year’s Day 1977 until the mid-1990s, the Persian scholar John Moyne sent me literal translations of Rumi’s poems from The Shams.” He goes on, giving credit also to the other translators.

This is, indeed, a BIG red book: some 460 pages of short poems, some 450 odes (ghazals) and about 500 quatrains (rubai), usually two to four lines in English.

Rumi met Shams on November 29, 1244. “What I had thought of before as God,” he said, “I met today in a human being.” The dust jacket of this edition gives an accurate description of its contents:

Out of their friendship, Rumi wrote thousands of lyric poems and short quatrains in honor of his friend Shams Tabriz. They are poems of divine epiphany, spiritual awakening, friendship, and love. For centuries, Rumi’s collection of these verses has traditionally been bound in a red cover, hence the title of his inspired classic of spiritual literature.

Banks’ version, however, is modern American poetry. It is written in free verse (no regular rhythm, meter, or rhyme); it speaks to the New Age; it is characterized by the quick cuts, the nervy juxtapositions, the indirections and ambiguities of much modern poetry. Though it is generally accessible to the common reader, far more so than the academic poetry of the contemporary USAmerican poetry Establishment, it is also sometimes enigmatic and inscrutable. Here are just two examples:

The rider has passed,
but his dust hangs in the air.

Do not stare at these particles.
The rider’s direction is there. (p388)

The light you give off did not come from a pelvis.
Your features did not begin in semen.

Do not try to hide inside anger,
radiance that cannot be hidden. (p381)

Banks’ collection, unlike Rumi’s, has provided titles for individual lyric poems and has divided both the odes and the quatrains into thematic categories. For the odes, he uses eighteen of the Sufi Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of Allah; for example, Al-Fattah, the Opener, As-Salaam, Peace, Al-Latif, the Subtle, the Intricate. To these Banks adds two of his own teachers, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Osho; two great Indian saints, Shams Tabriz himself and Ramana Mharshi; and several of Banks’ own devising (for example, “Tenderness Toward Existence,” “Everything and Everyone Else,” and “The Name That Cannot Be Spoken or Written.” These Persian phrases, in beautiful calligraphy, head up each section. A brief, one-paragraph passage also introduces each of these sections.

For the last one, “The Name That Cannot Be Spoken or Written,” Banks says, “As creekwater animates the landscape it moves through, so the absolute, the unknowable appears . . . . the more subtle essence is present, but also absent.” He quotes his respected teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen: “God has no form, no shape, no color, no differences, no race, no religion, no country, no place, no name, neither beginning nor end. God is the grace that lives within all lives.” (p342f)

One of the poems in this section captures this theme eloquently; it begins

The sound of hoofbeats leaving a monastery where all
is timed and measured: you are that rider: someone
who does not care very much about things and results,
illness or loss: you are the soul inside the soul
that is always traveling.

Mind gathers bait. The personality carries a grudge.
You weave cloth like the moon leaving no trace in the road.

There is a learning community where the names of God
are talked about and memorized,
and there is another residence where meanings live. (p343)

I think this example represents well the thoughtfulness of the poetry itself. Phrases halt the mind and send it spinning into widening circles, reflections on one’s own experience of a spiritual essence: “mind gathers bait”; “personality carries a grudge”; “another residence where meanings live.”

To match the first section, the quatrains are also divided into twenty-seven groupings. (“This is purely arbitrary,” Banks admits.) Each section is named for a constellation or celestial body; for example, “Taurus: The Bull,” “Ursa Major The Great Bear, the Big Dipper,” “Corona Borealis,” “Orion: The Hunter,” “The Milky Way: Our Home Address Seen from the Side,” “Bijou: The Black Hole,” “Pegasus: The Winged Horse,” and the like. The images of these constellations, heading each section, are taken from a 1730 manuscript of The Book of Fixed Stars by the tenth-century astronomer al-Sufi. The assignment of particular quatrains to each division is sometimes thematically appropriate, but just as often arbitrary.

“Virgo” is associated in Babylonian mythology with wheat, and by the Greeks with Demeter, the goddess of wheat and the virgin mother of Persephone. In the Middle Ages, she became the Virgin Mary. Images of inside and outside, inner and outer planes of reality dominate this section; for example,

Do not forget the nut,
being so proud of its shell.

The body has its inward ways, the five senses.
They break open, and the friend is revealed.

Break open the friend,
you become the all-one, alone. (p391)

The English word play in the last line, “all-one, alone,” obviously belongs to Banks. To know how it reflects Rumi, one would have to go back to the original, or at least to one of the literal translations. That’s always the case: as readers we cannot know how much of the message is Rumi, how much Banks. We assume that the vision is Rumi’s, that Banks’ own personal vision is, in large measure, derived from Rumi. But we cannot know.

Somehow one’s of the Virgo quatrains seems to speak to my speculation

The rose laughs at my long-looking,
my constantly wondering what a rose means,
and who owns the rose, whatever it means.

That’s Rumi speaking, isn’t it? It’s also Coleman Banks. It’s also the goddess Demeter. It’s my mind circling my mind. It’s the Infinite in the finite, the nut in its shell, my Friend in me, the all-One. So be it.