The Arberry rebroadcast
Coleman Barks does not read Persian. The Rūmī he produced — and that has carried the thirteenth-century Sufi poet into broad American letters — is built on the literal English cribs of the Cambridge Persianist A. J. Arberry (1905–1969), supplemented by the renderings of Reynold Nicholson (1868–1945) and the consultation of John Moyne, an Iranian-born linguist who collaborated on most of the early volumes. Barks's working method, by his own published account, was to take Arberry's prose translation, identify the poetic centre the literal English buried, and produce a free-verse American line that recovered what he understood Rūmī to be doing rhetorically rather than what the Persian said line by line. The first volume of this work appeared in 1976; *The Essential Rumi*, published by HarperOne in 1995 and still in print, is the book through which the version reached the audience that made Rūmī the bestselling poet in the United States.
What the renderings produced
The Barks Rūmī is a particular literary artefact, related to but not identical with the *Masnavi*. The translations are stripped of the quranic citation that anchors almost every parable in the Persian original; the technical Sufi vocabulary — *fanāʾ*, baqāʾ, ʿishq, the doctrinal apparatus inherited from Ibn ʿArabī and the Khurasanian tradition — is dissolved into ordinary American English; the Arabic and Persian invocations that frame the verses are removed. The result is a Rūmī more lyrical than philosophical, more universalist than Islamic, more accessible than dense. The free-verse line is American, owing as much to William Carlos Williams and Robert Bly as to anything in the Persian prosody; the diction is conversational; the parables are reassembled in thematic clusters that the original does not have. The text reads as devotional poetry written by a contemporary American who happens to be reporting from inside a thirteenth-century Persian sensibility. That is not what it is.
Where the renderings surface in the index
*The Essential Rumi* is the popular doorway and the version most English-language readers will already have encountered if they have read Rūmī at all. The scholarly counterpart in the index is Jawid Mojaddedi's Oxford World's Classics translation of book one of the *Masnavī* — the more honest doorway into the Persian text Barks's selection draws from at several removes. The broader Sufi context the Barks Rūmī largely strips out is covered, in the index, by Idries Shah's *The Sufis* — itself an English-language popularisation of the Persianate tradition that the academic field has been ambivalent about for similar reasons; the framing of Sufism as a non-sectarian wisdom tradition rather than as an Islamic mystical movement is the move Barks's reception extended. Daniel Ladinsky's *The Gift*, the renderings of Hafiz, is the closest direct analogue Barks has: Ladinsky's working method, distance from the Persian, and reception trajectory parallel Barks's almost line for line, a generation later and on a poet a century younger than Rūmī.
What the work isn't
The Barks Rūmī is not a translation in the sense the academic field uses the word. Persian scholars have made the point for thirty years; Franklin Lewis's Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (2000) is the most thorough single critique, and the field has not changed its view since. The renderings are also not what the Mevlevi order would recognise as a faithful presentation of the text the order has been reciting in samāʿ for seven centuries — the quranic exegesis the Barks selections strip out is the operative substance of the Masnavi in the Sufi liturgical use to which the order continues to put it. And they are not what Rūmī's love poetry actually says. The love the Persian text describes is ʿishq, the technical term for the soul's structural orientation toward God, and the human relationships the poem describes are read in the tradition as mediated love rather than as its object; the Barks lines tend to read more naturally as poems about ordinary human romantic love than the Persian supports. None of this has stopped the books selling. The case for the renderings as poetry on their own terms — separable from the question of whether they are Rūmī — is the case Barks himself has consistently made, and it is the case the publishing record bears out. The case against treating them as a faithful transmission of the Persian text is the case the academic field has consistently made, and it has been bypassed entirely by the audience the books actually reach.
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