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COLEMAN BARKS "I like both translating Rumi and writing my own poems. But in one, I have to disappear -- with Rumi. In the other, I have to get in the way -- get my personality and my delights and my shame into the poem." In 1976 Coleman Barks began translating the poems of Jelaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, a poet as famous in the Islamic world as Shakespeare is in the West. He has since become the primary translator bringing Rumi's poems into contemporary English. Born in Tennessee in 1937, he now lives in Athens, Georgia. "Where Everything Is Music" Don't worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music. The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere, and even if the whole world's harp should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing. So the candle flickers and goes out. We have a piece of flint, and a spark. This singing art is sea foam. The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor. Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can't see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out. by Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. by Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks "Jars of Springwater" Jars of springwater are not enough anymore. Take us down to the river! The face of peace, the sun itself. No more the slippery cloudlike moon. Give us one clear morning after another and the one whose work remains unfinished, who is our work as we diminish, idle, though occupied, empty, and open. by Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks "from New Year's Day Nap" Fiesta Bowl on low. My son lying here on the couch on the "Dad" pillow he made for me in the Seventh Grade. Now a sophomore at Georgia Southern, driving back later today, he sleeps with his white top hat over his face. I'm a dancin' fool. Twenty years ago, half the form he sleeps within came out of nowhere with a million micro-lemmings who all died but one piercer of membrane, specially picked to start a brainmaking, egg-drop soup, that stirred two sun and moon centers for a new-painted sky in the tiniest ballroom imaginable. Now he's rousing, six feet long, turning on his side. Now he's gone. How fully is the beauty you love what you do? Questions 1. What qualities of "Jars of Springwater" suggest that its translator was successful in disappearing? 2. What qualities of the passage from "New Year's Day Nap" suggest that Coleman Barks was successful in getting his personality, delights, and shame into the poem? 3. Why do we fall "into the place / where everything is music"? Why don't we climb up to that place? Activities 1. Translate something from another language or from another medium of expression and concentrate on trying to disappear from the process of translation. 2. Write something or make something -- a picture, a dance, a sculpture -- in which you deliberately let yourself "get in the way." 3. In the program Coleman Barks says, "When you're in a place where music is, you can say things over and over and over." With music as a background, say something over and over, as the music invites. With others, let each person repeat his or her own language to the same music. Discuss what you learn about the rhythm of words. 4. Research the life and work of Jelaluddin Rumi and Sufi spiritual traditions. Report on your research or create a display (visual or aural) that allows others to experience some part of what you learned. |
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