{"id":439,"date":"2007-09-30T05:17:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-30T13:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=439"},"modified":"2007-09-30T05:17:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-30T13:17:00","slug":"800th-b-day-of-most-read-poet-in-america-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/800th-b-day-of-most-read-poet-in-america-today\/","title":{"rendered":"800th B-day of "Most read poet in America today""},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Today is the 800th birthday of Jal\u0101l-ad-D\u012bn Muhammad R\u016bm\u012b<\/span>, the great 13th century Persian poet, scholar, writer and sufi mystic (his students founded the still-going Mevlevi order of the Whirling Dervishes). According to the BBC he is the \u201cmost read poet in American today,\u201d something due, unhappily, to a long line of newage (rhymes with sewage, as Nathaniel Tarn says) soporific translations that have turned Rumi\u2019s work into Hallmark card tidbits of wishy washy pseudo-poesy and pseudo-wisdom. There is way more to the man and his work than our available English translations show. As Ulrich Holbein points out<\/a> in a recent piece in the Frankfurter Rundschau:<\/p>\n

Eurocentric literary history has no clue that the essay and digression, for whose invention Montaigne and Lawrence Sterne are celebrated, were already practiced audaciously by Rumi in his Masnavi<\/span> [information on various abridged English versions \u2013 many dating back to the late 19th C \u2013 can be found here<\/a> and online extracts here<\/a>]: a mycelium- and mangrove-network of interwoven, laterally free-associating narrative threads\u2026 Rumi parables, rather than limping along like those of other metaphor creators, take off by tacking donkey tails to angel wings, and don\u2019t dodge a crash: \u201cA donkey, even if you fit it out with a hundred angel wings, will only ever fly back to its stable.\u201d Which explains sufficiently why the reptilian brain will again and again outwit the cerebral cortex and it it not only today\u2019s Sunnis, Shiites, Shahs and Imams who look totally unsublime, dogmatic, medieval, and archaic in comparison to Rumi\u2026 Even Maulana Eckhart looks narrow, dry, and conceptually confined next to Rumi, Angelus Silesius a bit chaste, naive, monochrome, x Nobel prize -winners and -minds deeply untalented, 365 catholic saints hopelessly unoriginal and 21 Christian heretics painfully orthodox. Here one of Rumi\u2019s 1001 messages-in-a-bottle: \u201cYour mind is small and you can lose even that little. A head without mind turns into a tail.\u201d\u2026 Sufi-softie Rumi also polemics against the macho-society: \u201cIf this is supposed to constitute sexual intercourse, then the donkeys are winners; our spousal gang only relieves nature\u2019s needs deep in our vulvas.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This last quote is verse 3393 of volume 5 of the Masvani \u2013 rarely, if ever, found in our blighted, prude Victorian translations. Today, at a moment when Islamic intolerance and totalitarianism and its mirror image, Christian fundamentalist fascism, are locked in lethal combat, we are more than ever in need of an accurate, complete and unexpurgated translation of the works of Rumi.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the 800th birthday of Jal\u0101l-ad-D\u012bn Muhammad R\u016bm\u012b, the great 13th century Persian poet, scholar, writer and sufi mystic (his students founded the still-going Mevlevi order of the Whirling Dervishes). According to the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}