Coleman Barks on Rumi

Rumi: The Big Red Book, versions by Coleman Barks.

Coleman Barks on Rumi, Islam & Sufism: "Rumi: The Big Red Book collects all the work that I have done on The Shams (Rumi's Divani Shamsi Tabriz, The Works of Shams Tabriz) over the last 34 years. As I put this book together, I felt drawn to revise slightly almost every poem, to relineate and reword. So I hope this is a refreshed collection.
I sent a copy to my friend, Robert Bly. He describes in a letter what I have done with these poems: "You have given them pats on the shirt, set them on some local horse, and given the horse a clap on the rear, and the poems are gone, well almost gone." He should know. He got me started on this path, when in June of 1976, he handed me a copy of Arberry's translation of Rumi and said, "These poems need to be released from their cages," by which he meant they needed to be translated out of their scholarly idiom into the lively American free verse tradition of Whitman. Hence this book. It is not all that I have done the last three decades, but I did spend some time, almost every day, with Rumi's poetry. I do not regret it. Something about the practice keeps unfolding."  READ THE FULL ARTICLE