translated by Coleman Barks

Jelaluddin Rumi was a sufi mystic who lived in Persia and Anatolia in the thirteenth century. I’ve read not only that his works have been hugely influential on Middle Eastern literature, but also that translations of these poems remain extremely popular in the West––as I feel they should be after experiencing this collection, though I’d honestly be unable to name anyone I’d spoke to who had heard of him while in the midst of it. (Likely more a product of me living in the middle of nowhere than anything related to his fame.) Barks’ exceptional translations touched me deeply, and it’s experiences like this that make me believe that exposure to such beauty and thoughtfully captured ideas is making me more religious. This somehow seemed discordant to me, as, I believe, the Christian side of my upbringing taught a marrying of faith with ignorance, but what brittle faith is that, that needs to cower from knowledge to remain?

Anyway, I’m liable to get far off-track if I maintain such a line of discussion. With The Essential Rumi’s content, I’m reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, another book of poetry that stuck with me strongly during and after our time together. I originally felt that The Prophet was almost like an abridged, accessible version of Rumi, as both deal with similar topics filtered through a spiritual lens and Gibran took a much more explicit approach with his teachings. Rumi takes more of a wandering approach, diverging, often digressing mid-poem, employing so many differing techniques––metaphors, illustrations, even lewd jokes––to bring his teachings across. While it at first came across denser than Gibran’s work, meanings begin to readily present themselves by building and providing greater context for specific representations of otherworldly concepts through a gentle repetition throughout.

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is probably a great comparator to the actual lessons within The Essential Rumi, in that I feel both authors had a gift for expressing the seemingly inexpressible, and I think that’s a big part of what makes both feel significant to me. Interestingly, as with Pirsig’s writing, I didn’t always agree with Rumi’s lessons as I considered them, but the actual considering still made me think harder about lofty or complex ideas and develop some sort of understanding by the end. As such, the power of this collection doesn’t lay in its ability to teach you something to blindly follow, but as an aid in your own path toward clarity. From the words of the master: “There are guides who can show you the way. Use them. But they will not satisfy your longing.”