This article accompanies
Alice's Mirrors



Rumi

The best-selling poet in America today, many say, is… er, a Muslim.  Not Whitman or Dickinson or Frost, but Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet and theologian, who lived most of his life in Konya, now Central Turkey.  But the versions that sell so well bear little resemblance to the original Persian (Dari).  Instead they read like bad New Age cliches.  Literal translations are much better, but they are harder to find.

Messageboards these days don’t care about that.  They prefer to speculate about Rumi’s relationship with the much older Shams of Tabriz.  For gay translators and many gay readers, including Persian-fluent ones, the relationship wasn’t just inspirational, it was absolutely sexual.

I can’t see it myself.  Both Rumi and Shams were devout Muslims whose love was a passionate, spiritual love for the greater glory of Allah and Shams was his muse.  It will make sense to you only if you have an intuitive understanding of religious faith and its ecstatic nature.  This ecstasy was put into practice by the Whirling Dervishes (Mevlevi), a Sufi order founded by Rumi’s followers after his death in 1273 (as in the image below which shows Rumi’s tomb in Konya in the background).

Another of Rumi’s earliest fans, also working from poor translations, was Goethe, who admired Persian literature and Islam’s spirituality and who helped introduce them to European Romantic poets.  He was always on the lookout for better translations of Rumi, Hafez, the Qur’an and so on.

Even today, Persians rely on Rumi and Hafez as fortune-tellers – reading a poem (ghazal) and relating it to life - the meanings always vary.  Key metaphors in floral Persian poetry include wine and roses, nightingales and jasmine, just as in Keats, Shelley and T.S. Eliot…