Product Description

Coleman Barks has played a central role in making the Sufi mystic Rumi the most popular poet in the world. A Year with Rumi brings together 365 of Barks's elegant and beautiful translations of Rumi's greatest poems, including fifteen never-before-published poems.

Barks includes an Introduction that sets Rumi in his context and an Afterword musing on poetry of the mysterious and the sacred. Join Coleman Barks and Rumi for a year-long journey into the mystical and sacred within and without. Join them in recognizing and embracing the divine in the sublime, in the ordinary, and in us all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26944 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-01
• Released on: 2006-10-31
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Customer Reviews

A Year With Rumi: Daily Readings
I love this book - Coleman Barks does a wonderful job of translating Rumi's poems. I am enjoying working my way through the year!

Speaking across many centuries
Coleman Barks is a poet, and his treatments of Rumi bring that poetry into a contemporary context. Like everything that is not pure science, these things are, of course, matters of taste. I am not a Farsi scholar or speaker, but as I understand it - and this is fairly often discussed/hotly debated - the complexities of Sufi poetry in the original languages make it pretty much untranslatable. Here is part of Robet Bly's excellent review of Barks' work, he expresses it so well:

"Rumi has, to the recent amazement of many people in the Western culture as well as the Islamic culture, been able to speak directly to contemporary readers. One of the greatest pieces of good luck that has happened recently in American poetry is Coleman Barks's agreement to translate poem after poem of Rumi. Rumi, like Kabir, is able to contain and continue intricate theological arguments and at the same time speak directly from the heart or to the heart. Coleman's exquisite sensitivity to the flavor and turns of ordinary American speech has produced marvelous lines, full of flavor and Sufi humor, as well as the intimacy that is carried inside American speech at its best."
--Robert Bly

If the Barks translations speak to you, you'll likely love having a daily meditation book, which this is.

Mediocre
While Coleman Barks is to be commended for introducing many people to Rumi, his renditions of Rumi's poems scarcely reflect the original Persian. Barks, who does not speak Persian (another word for Farsi), took much better translations for AJ Arberry, and rephrased them for his books. In the process, he lost much of the accuracy and most of the character of the original poetry. Those interested in better translations of Rumi should get a hold of Reynold Nicholson's or AJ Arberry's translations.