My great grandfather, Jamshedji Saklatwala, was something of a Persian scholar. One of the few things I know about him is that he used to spend his days attending the funerals of Parsi acquaintances in Bombay and sitting, as is the custom for males, outside the funeral parlor where prayers would be in session, translating Persian poetry in a small notebook. He published in his lifetime a book of translations into English of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The family has the elaborately produced paperback, probably the only extant copy.
I read it years ago and found it very unexciting. In his preface, Jamshedji acknowledges the overbearing and irreplaceable presence of Edward Fitzgerald’s beautiful and enduring translation of Khayyam’s quatrains, but claims that he has set out to provide the reader with a more accurate translation.
The accuracy kills the poetry.
The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko remarked that “Translations are like women: if they are faithful, they are rarely beautiful; if they are beautiful, they are rarely faithful.” His perception may today be labeled sexist, but whether the comparison is valid or not, one gets his drift.
I am, in this random selection of a few of Rumi’s verses, setting out to do the opposite of what my great grandfather attempted to do with Khayyam. There is a craze in the United States for “Rumi” philosophy and verse, especially since Madonna (the American pop singer, not the Mother of Issah) reduced the medieval mystic to pop and recited his love songs. I have paid some attention to these lyrics and tried to read the translations on which they are based. My Persian is non-existent, but the verses in English, by several different translators, have succeeded in making Rumi’s work a very unattractive proposition.
Rumi wrote his great work, the Mathnawi, in couplets. Though none of the translations I have read reproduce this form, I have attempted it in most cases and tried to imitate the meter of the original. The metaphor that Rumi uses is drawn, as is that of most Sufi poetry, from the landscape and usage of the time—the mirrors, the cups of wine that stand for the essence of the beloved, the lover who stands for the divine; the Word, the Book, the Messenger—these indicate the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad.
The way Rumi uses metaphor very often defies translation. There are ideas and concepts in the Persian language that merge, and in that merger provide lyrical sense. When translated into English they become disjointed ideas and monstrous images.
1. Rumi Daylight, A Daybook of Spiritual Guidance, translated by Camille and Kabir Helminski (Shambhalla South Asia Editions).
Everything is perishing except His face
Unless you have that Face, don’t try to exist.1
These random lines from a huge outpouring of Rumi’s translations demonstrate some of the difficulties. The translation has none of the grace of verse. (“Poetry” is in the eye, ear and sensibility of the beholder.) It resembles, more closely, an instruction in the manual of some modern electronic gadget manufactured in China. The translators may have attempted to capture something of the prose sense of Rumi’s verse. “Everything perishing” becomes an abstraction in the translation. The argument about “having that Face” and the command to cease “trying to exist” if you don’t are incomprehensible outside the context of Sufi discourse.
Rumi did not intend his verse to be read as we read haiku in contemporary translation—a random evocation and an illogical juxtaposition of images that can startle and perhaps make music but doesn’t contain a sustained appeal to the eye, ear or any of the senses. In haiku, evocation is all, and none of the images in the translations I have read of Rumi are remotely evocative.
Take this, for instance:
There is some kiss we want with
Our whole lives, the touch of
Spirit on the body. Seawater
Begs the pearl to break its shell
And the lily, how passionately
It needs some wild darling!
(Tr. Coleman Barks)
The metaphor of the kiss is confused by the abstraction of wanting something with your “whole lives.” The “touch of the Spirit on body” is a further abstraction and the image of the kiss that we were first given gets lost. Can one want a kiss with a whole life? One may long for a particular sort of kiss throughout one’s life, or desire a kiss with one’s whole being, but the particular construction above makes little logical or lyrical sense. Again, seawater may erode the shell of the pearl, but can it really “beg” it? Water wets, flows, rubs, erodes pebbles, pushes, drowns, but can any of this appeal to our visual or tactile senses as “begging”? It evokes no sensual response. And what on earth is a “wild darling,” outside the invented private language of uninspired lovers who don’t speak any known English?
Another modern rendering distorts the meaning and, perhaps for the sake of brevity, banishes any poetic intent:
Let lovers be crazy, disgraceful and wild
Those who fret about such things
Aren’t in love.
(Tr. Deepak Chopra)
The contention that wild abandon is the essence of love comes across, but the Sufi meaning of love doesn’t. The translation is a fraud insofar as it pretends to be about adolescent romance and the “fretting” kills any lyrical flow.
There may be some virtue in translating poetry and seeking in the translation to convey the clumsiness and discomfort of reading a language that one doesn’t know, but I have tried in my transliterations to do the opposite. It inevitably means taking liberties with the structure of the verses and sometimes altering the metaphor to get at what I think is the intended meaning.
For my money, the translations and commentaries of R. A. Nicholson, who translated and commented on Rumi from 1898 through the 1920s and ’30s, remain the most faithful, erudite and comprehensively instructive. Professor A .J. Arberry of Pembroke College, Cambridge, translated the Diwan-e Shams-e in verse, attempting the rhyming couplets that are lyrically evocative and as faithful as translation can be. The fact that they are both British scholars of a particular age, “orientalists” in the contemptuous jargon of the more jargon-ridden modern academies, cannot detract from their achievement.
I confess that I am neither a Sufi nor a poet and, while working at these transliterations of Rumi, have used the texts of Nicholson and Arberry, the assistance and translating skills of friends who read Persian, and occasionally, the Urdu translations of Rumi by several scholars and commentators.
The liberties I have taken in trying to combine the intent of the original with an attempt at lyrical felicity are entirely mine and none other should beg forgiveness for them.