Article found on All American Patriots web site
Posted by Patriot on 2005/4/26 8:19:16
from the article "Rumi's American Popularizer Tours Afghan Poet's Homeland
Poet Coleman Barks makes first U.S.-Afghan academic exchange in 25 years"

Coleman Barks - Notes on the State Department Speaker Program
Visit to Kabul, Mazar, Balkh, and Herat, Afghanistan,
March 16-26, 2005


The most startling observation that comes to me, as a
practicing American poet, involves the vital role that poetry
plays in the lives of Afghan men. One afternoon in Herat I met
at a long table with members of the Herat Literary
Association, thirty men who meet every week to read their own
poetry to each other. Doctors, lawyers, professors,
businessmen, and government officials, strong, active,
men-in-the-world who are passionately committed to poetry.
They were intensely interested in how I had brought their
national poet, Moulana Balkhi (Rumi), over into American
English. They listened as I read my translation line by line
with my translator following my English with the Dari (the
Afghan dialect of Farsi) of the original. A tough audience,
but they seemed mostly to approve. Then they wanted to check
to see what kind of a poet I was on my own. I read a poem from
my book, Tentmakinq, and Ruhollah Amin, the 26-year-old
translator who traveled with me, rendered my words into
Persian. I passed muster, though I do wonder, how Ruhollah
translated "inboard motorboat." Musicians then joined the
group, among them a most amazing man named Bulbul, which means
nightingale, who emitted flawless nightingale sounds without
moving his lips, all the while looking around as though
searching for the source of such music. Bulbul could,
effortlessly, take over any American late night talkshow. He
is one of the true natural comedians, on the level of Chaplin,
Peter Sellars, Jonathan Winters, or Groucho.


Another instance of the place that poetry occupies in the
Afghan soul: on my first night of public appearances I found
myself under a banner in the Afghan Ministry of Culture in
Kabul. Next to a huge picture of Hamid Karzai, the banner
read, DEAR COLEMAN BORKS, WELCOME TO KABUL. As I was reading
the first poem in English, I realized that everyone in the
room was silently saying the poem with me in Persian.
Afterward there was animated discussion. I asked Ruhollah what
was going on. He said it was a fierce debate about the
metaphor of drunkenness (ecstatic love) in this poem of Rumi
as compared with the references to wine in the poetry of
Hafez. Here were cabinet level men and women arguing poetry,
from their deep, and varying, experiences of it. The minister
of culture himself, Mr. Raheem, carried the day with a vivid
metaphor. "Inside this Balkhi poem there are 16 little drunken
Hafezes running around!" His point being that Hafez was
engaged in a narrow argument with the imams about Sharia rules
of conduct, whereas Rumi's vision of love was wider and more
embracing.


These are my people, and I told them so. In radio and
television interviews, on the Voice of America, wherever I was
asked my impression of Afghan culture, I brought up this
enthusiasm for poetry. I had not known that there existed in
the world such a poetry culture.


This discovery, of course, is part of a blindness I have, that
we have in this country, and in the West in general, to things
Islamic. It is a long-standing and pervasive condition.
Wherever possible I confessed our ignorance, my personal
variety, and our general American species. And yet, it must be
stressed, there I was, and for a reason. Their Afghan poet has
been the most-read poet in the United States during the last
ten years! My translations alone have sold over half a million
copies. These facts astonished audiences, who inevitably asked
why. No one knows, I said, but it feels like to me that a
presence comes through the poetry, even in my American
versions, the sense of an enlightened, compassionate,
hilarious, very clear and sane, and deeply kind, human being.
We have been lonely, I told them, in the United States, for
what the Sufis call a true human being. In Rumi and his friend
Shams Tabriz we have found two of them.


Most of my presentations involved reading a translated poem,
followed by Ruhollah reciting the original, which often
everyone knew by heart, followed then by discussion of the
soul-growth teachings present in the imagery. Then on to
another poem. A fine, and tremendously mature, way to spend an
afternoon. It felt both ancient and familiar.


Because I was there during the long Nowruz holiday,
corresponding to our Christmas-New Year holiday, there were
very few students on the university campuses I visited, but I
was able to meet in more intimate settings with the literature
faculties of Kabul and Herat universities. The professors,
were receptive, but with some typical academic dubiousness for
my enterprise. The collaboration of scholar with poet is not
much valued in university communities all over the world,
especially if the poet is of a mystical bent, as I am. I was
not given credit at my own University of Georgia for the Rumi
work until those collaborative translations were chosen for
the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, the academic
equivalent of canonization.


The rest of my time in Afghanistan was spent at various Nowruz
events, a buskashi match (that incredible melee in which three
or four hundred riders on stallions try to keep the one who
has the dead goat across his pommel from dropping it into a
four-foot circle, every man for himself in the damnedest
frenzy of danger and courage and chaos I ever saw), and
visiting magnificent ruins and the tombs of Sufi saints.
I gathered quite a crowd at Jami's mazaar as I intoned my
translation of The Camel Driver's Song and my translator
supplied the interlinear Persian.


My most treasured experience of the whole Afghan time, though,
was not at all public. It was a private meeting, arranged by
Mr. Bahra, minister of culture in Herat. Down several turns of
a narrow alleyway we entered the home of Omarii Chisti, a
95-year-old man who has taught Rumi's Masnavi for 75 years.
When Jami in the 14th Century said, "Rumi was not a prophet,
but he has a book," he was speaking of the Masnavi. It was
pure grace to look into Omanii's eyes and ask my question, Who
is Shams? Not waiting for the translation, he shot back, Shams
is the doctor who comes when you hurt enough. No one hurts
enough now. That's why he hasn't come. Rumi's longing was
sharp enough to bring the doctor.


The hour-long meeting with that man was reason enough, for me,
to have gone to Afghanistan. I hope my going also served the
wider purposes of the State Department in acknowledging, and
celebrating, this unique, and real, connection between the
Afghan and American cultures, their shared love of the great
mystical poet, Jalaluddin of Balkh, known in the West as Rumi.
Rumi means the Roman one, Rum being that area of the Anatolian
peninsula (Turkey) that was long under Roman influence. Konya,
a central city of that area, is where Rumi's family ended up
when they left Balkh in 1219, just ahead of the advancing
Mongol armies. Rumi was twelve then. He lived most of his life
in Konya and is buried there with his father, Bahauddin, under
the famous green dome, which is visited by pilgrims from every
religion and culture. Whatever you call the great poet born in
Afghanistan, Rumi or Balkhi, he is the only truly planetary
poet we have.





Coleman Barks