Discovering Rumi on a jet plane

“The sky is dripping clouds of blood
The flowers are laughing at me
That postman is my girlfriend’s stud
I wasn’t born, God spat me...”
From Paranoia-hi-noia by Bachchoo
My publishers (I write books too — I swear this is not an advert) HarperCollins ask the authors featured in a particular series why they wrote the about-to-be-published book. The obvious answer, but one that wouldn’t be reproduced in the Q&A appendices, or even be countenanced by the (gorgeous, pouting) editors is “to get hold of the money you are foolishly offering me, of course!”

One has to invent some other fiction.
For my latest offering, a translation of 123 pages (plus introduction and apologia) of the poetry of the 13th century Sufi mystic Jalaludin Rumi, (apologies for the plug) I was asked the same question. “Why are you doing this?”
Several answers occurred: I’m saving the world, saving literature, paving the way to becoming contemporary India’s Shakespeare... but I ultimately settled on telling the truth:
On the way to Australia to meet a gentleman who had graciously paid for my flight to consider having a screen biography of his life written by me, I was given a compilation of Rumi’s verse translated into English by various hands, to pass the long hours in the dark skies.
I had of course heard of Rumi and heard Qawwali renderings of his verse for very many years of my short and happy life. I was also aware that the publication that I opened on the plane ride was one possibly fleeting result of Rumi’s sudden popularity in the US.
I was also aware that very many of my friends in India and London, most of them subcontinentals, professed an affection and even devotion to the works of Rumi. A few of these — not just one or two, but a real handful — were either Sufi Muslims who could read medieval Persian, fluently read Urdu translations or had experienced the power of the verse and the parables in
some form other than English.
The others who professed a love of Rumi had read him and could read him only in the English translations. Until I took that plane ride and opened that book, I wasn’t aware which translations these devotees of Jalaludin had read or even why they had read them.
Suddenly all was clear, and all was despair. As I asked the air hostess for a Bloody Mary in response to her offer of a drink, I had begun to read the most awful “translations” of verse that I had ever encountered. In saying that I am acutely aware that there are millions of people spanning three generations who share this earth for a time with me and fervently believe that any irrational nonsense chopped into lines that don’t end at the right margin of the page can go under the name of “poetry”. Yes, they believe it.
O tempora! O mores! I am the graduate of a university whose radical professor F.R. Leavis who for 30 years before and even in my time was arguing, living, fighting for the idea that literature has replaced religion as the expression of the possibilities of life. Asked by a sweet Indian journalist what was the one thing I could say I had learnt at that university, I said I now knew that one poem was better than another. I should have said “demonstrably better”.
What I read of Rumi in translation on that plane could have put me off him forever. Let me not indulge in diatribe, a couple of examples will serve:
“Let lovers be crazy, disgraceful and wild
Those who fret about such things
Aren’t in love”
This is a “translation” of Rumi by someone called Deepak Chopra. It is neither poetry, nor does it convey anything more than the idea that wanton idiots can behave disgracefully. It is, as Sufi thought, to
put it politely, fraudulent.
Then another from an American person called Coleman Barks:
“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.”
I am sure there are women readers who wouldn’t mind labelling themselves “wild darlings”, but do they want to be needed passionately by a lily?
Does seawater really beg? It swirls, eddies, erodes — yes. But beg? And does anyone want “some kiss with their whole lives?” Are we in Pidgin land?
“Oh, but this is poetry it doesn’t have to make sense,” you say. I’ll tell you a secret. If this is poetry, I am Mao Zedong returned to earth as an Elvis Presley impersonator.
Yes, poetry has to make sense. It is the appeal the intellect in its metaphorical avatar makes to the senses. Try Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats. No! Try Rumi! He doesn’t mix metaphors and writes in perfect couplets and at times in flowing iambic pentameter (400 years before Shakespeare).
I did try Rumi. On getting back from an abortive encounter with the film-biography petitioner, a Mr Mahalingam (I am a translator, not a pornographer!) I returned to London and looked up the older translations of Rumi by late 19th century to early 20th century scholars such as Nicholson and Arberry. They convinced me there was work to do and I contacted my Persian-literate friends. I started
writing.
Why then do normally sensitive people continue to read these impostures? Here’s another:
“Everything is perishing except His face
Unless you have that Face, don’t try to exist.”
What the hell does that mean? Why do people I respect for other reasons read this stuff and pretend they know something about Rumi? Why are concatenations of words acceptable as “poetry?”
Is it because their generation has been brought up on lyrics such as
“Hey Jude
Don’t be afraid”
The movement you need is on your shoulder...”
Is that a parrot fluttering in the throes of excretion on Jude’s shoulder?