Translating Rumi: When Language Becomes Prayer

It is said that Rumi is the best-selling poet in the United States. It is a curious statistic, for the poet in question is called Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, lived in the 13th century, wrote in Persian and was a Muslim scholar in the Anatolian city of Konya. That his poems today sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies in English, often in highly free versions, says something both about Rumi himself and about our age's longing for mysticism.

But what actually happens on the way from the Persian original to Swedish or English? What is it we are reading when we read Rumi in translation? And who was he, beyond the proliferating Instagram quotes and the softened spirituality books?

The man, the meeting, the grief

Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, into a family of scholars and preachers. When the Mongols approached, the family fled westward, a long and eventful journey that finally brought them to Konya in Anatolia, then the cultural center of the Seljuk realm. There Rumi took over his father's position as teacher and theologian, and had reached the height of his career when everything changed.

He was a respected theologian and jurist when in 1244 he met the wandering dervish Shams-e Tabrizi. The meeting transformed him. The learned man became a poet, a lover, a Sufi mystic. When Shams disappeared – probably murdered by Rumi's jealous disciples – Rumi channeled the grief into tens of thousands of verses. The result was above all the ”Divan-e Shams” (a collection of lyric poems devoted to the Friend) and the enormous didactic epic ”Masnavi-ye Ma'navi”.

It is important to keep this in mind when reading him. Rumi is not a general spiritual wellness poet. He is a grieving lover seeking the divine Friend in every figure, every gust of wind, every wine flask. His ecstasy is not sentimental. It is worked through with loss.

The Persian musicality

“Listen to the reed flute, how it complains, / telling the pain of separation.”

The original Persian has a musicality that Swedish and English are forced to give up. Meter, rhyme, alliteration, the rhythmic breath in the lines' alternation between long and short syllables – all of this belongs in a linguistic body whose muscles we lack. An honest translator must choose: preserve the form and lose the life, or preserve the life and lose the form.

Most modern translators choose the latter. It is wise. For Rumi, form is never the point itself – it is a body meant to carry something else: a presence, a glow, a kind of religious concreteness. If that body is exchanged for English or Swedish prose verse, the glow can still come through, provided the translator knows what she is looking for.

The wine flask, the lover, the reed flute

Rumi's imagery is constant. Three symbols recur as chords throughout his work: the wine, the lover and the reed flute. The wine is not alcohol but ecstasy – the Sufi intoxication with the divine. The lover is not a woman or a man but the ”Friend” with a capital F, the divine from which we are separated and toward which we long to return. The reed flute is the soul itself: cut from its bed of roots, singing its song of separation.

When one reads Rumi without grasping these coded images, one can get stuck in a superficial reading. The image of intoxication can seem pagan; the image of the lover can sound romanticizing. But in the Persian, Islamic-mystical tradition, these are established ciphers that every contemporary reader understood at once. The translator therefore has a double task: preserve the image's body but let its inherent direction shine through.

Coleman Barks and the ethics of interpretation

The American Coleman Barks is the one who, more than anyone, has made Rumi popular in the West. He does not read Persian. He has worked from existing English translations – above all R.A. Nicholson's strictly scholarly version from the early 20th century – and made his own free renditions. The result is beautiful, but it is no longer quite Rumi. It is Rumi-as-Barks.

Much of the specifically Islamic context – the Quran, the Prophet, ritual practice – has been toned down in favor of a more universal spirituality. This is not necessarily wrong. Interpretations have always existed in the history of poetry. But it demands of the reader that she know what she is reading. Anyone who wants to meet Rumi himself should seek translations made directly from the Persian – in Swedish, for example, Ashk Dahlén's work, which carefully renders both the religious weight and the lyric flight.

Sufism as the frame

Rumi was not a freethinker who happened to use Islamic vocabulary. He was part of a high-medieval Sufi tradition with roots in Baghdad and Andalusia, and after his death – through his son and his disciples – he founded the Mevlevi order, the famous ”whirling dervishes”. The slow dance, with one hand toward the sky and the other toward the earth, is a bodily translation of the movement of his poems.

To remove that frame and sell Rumi as a general new-age poet is like selling Thomas Aquinas as a mindfulness coach. It can be done, but the essential is lost. The greatest gift a reader can give Rumi is to meet him as what he was: a Muslim mystic whose God is called Allah, whose Prophet is Muhammad, whose Qur'an pervades every verse.

What Swedish can give back

Swedish has its own gift to lay on Rumi's table: a stillness, a matter-of-factness that lets the fire of the images burn undisturbed. Where English often wants to embellish, Swedish can let the empty space around the words speak. It is a kind of Protestant frugality that suits Rumi surprisingly well, precisely because it does not compete with him.

The best translation, it is often said, is not the most faithful but the most alive. That is where Rumi wants to meet us – not as a preserved antiquity but as a contemporary voice that still has something urgent to say.

Three ways in

For the reader who wants to begin reading Rumi in Swedish, there are several ways in. Ashk Dahlén's selection and translations are the most philologically grounded option. Eric Hermelin's older renditions from the early 20th century – eccentric, sometimes idiosyncratic – are a historical but living door. And Eva Ström's freer versions have a lyric strength that makes room for the reader's own reading experience. In English, Jawid Mojaddedi's translations of the Masnavi for Oxford World's Classics are a comparable scholarly entry point.

None of them is Rumi. Each is a meeting with Rumi. That is how the ethics of translation works in poetry: we know we are reading a shadow, and we choose the shadow that most resembles the light we are seeking.

Why he strikes now

Rumi's return in our time is not just a matter of fashion. It has to do with a longing for a language that is not ironic. We have grown used to serious literature being distanced, skeptical, self-conscious. Rumi is none of these. He is grave without being heavy, believing without being dogmatic, bodily without being sentimental.

It is unfamiliar. And it is, for anyone who dares to let it in, liberating. To read Rumi is to allow oneself to speak of love without quotation marks. It is something our age's poetry seldom dares – and therefore perhaps something we need most of all.

That does not mean we should become quasi-Sufis or relinquish our critical edge. It means only that we can listen. And listening, as Rumi knew, is where every real love begins – between people, between languages, and between the soul and its own silenced source.