Different Ways of Laughing

The February edition of Guernica magazine features an interview with Coleman Barks- the translator of "The Essential Rumi"- the Sufi poetry that has been speaking so clearly to me these past months.

Guernica: Rumi’s poems constantly loop back to emptiness and silence, “that disciplined silence,” he calls it. Do you have to cultivate that silence in order to translate his work?

Coleman Barks: If I'm not in the receptive place, [it won't work], but it seems like a place I want to go. It's like going to sleep when you're tired, you just do it. You fall into it. It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with.

Guernica: How might he [Rumi] respond to the many kinds of religious fundamentalism which are rampant all over the world?

Coleman Barks: He didn't like there to be religious boundaries. He said if you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world. That was such a wild and extreme thing to say in the 13th century with the Crusades coming across that peninsula. It's pretty wild to say even now. We're all the same species. We all have children. We fall in love. We all have an impulse to praise and to worship. He says it's all "thing," it's all one song that we're singing...

"Another Place" by Antony Gormley.