A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

"A Year with Rumi" is an excellent collection of the mystic poet's work, translated by renowned Rumi expert Coleman Barks. It is arranged as a series of daily readings, and I've found it to be a great source of inspiration each new day.

Honoring the great Sufi tradition, Coleman Barks translates Rumi in a way that anyone with a spiritual side can appreciate. I particularly appreciate this edition for Barks' editorial comments and for the volume of poetry. A great introduction to Rumi and Sufism.

Each day's reading has multiple levels to try to comprehend. Lots of fodder for thought and discussion. It would be fun to sit down at dinner each night and have a family discussion about that day's poem.

I love this book - Coleman Barks does a wonderful job of translating Rumi's poems. I am enjoying working my way through the year!

Coleman Barks is a poet, and his treatments of Rumi bring that poetry into a contemporary context. Like everything that is not pure science, these things are, of course, matters of taste. I am not a Farsi scholar or speaker, but as I understand it - and this is fairly often discussed/hotly debated - the complexities of Sufi poetry in the original languages make it pretty much untranslatable. Here is part of Robet Bly's excellent review of Barks' work, he expresses it so well: "Rumi has, to the recent amazement of many people in the Western culture as well as the Islamic culture, been able to speak directly to contemporary readers. One of the greatest pieces of good luck that has happened recently in American poetry is Coleman Barks's agreement to translate poem after poem of Rumi. Rumi, like Kabir, is able to contain and continue intricate theological arguments and at the same time speak directly from the heart or to the heart. Coleman's exquisite sensitivity to the flavor and turns of ordinary American speech has produced marvelous lines, full of flavor and Sufi humor, as well as the intimacy that is carried inside American speech at its best." --Robert Bly If the Barks translations speak to you, you'll likely love having a daily meditation book, which this is.