Happy Birthday Rumi!

Thank you to the soul who informed me that today, September 30, is Rumi’s birthday. Rumi the poet, not the K-Pop demon hunter.

Was he really born on this day? His soul transcends time and borders.

In honor of his existence, here is one of his classic ruba’i. The one about the Field. The one that resonates so much in our ever polarizing world:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

There’s a good chance you are familiar with this poem, and with this particular translation by Coleman Barks.

What I love about Coleman is that he embellished at will. Some things are lost in his translations, other things are found.

Take the line: “I’ll meet you there.” That’s not in the poem as such. What an assertion of will! What a bold arrangement for an actual meeting! The original feels to me more like a hypothetical, like a “there’s something in that place…if we were to go there…”

Then again, “I’ll meet you there” sounds a lot like “I’ll take you there” - which is an awesome song and fits the spirit of “The Field”.

Rumi’s poems can be spare, economical. Each word and their arrangements potent with meaning. Some people try to pin down the meaning. The poems laugh at them.

از کفر و ز اسلام برون صحرائی است
ما را به میان آن فضا سودائی است
عارف چو بدان رسید سر را بنهد
نه کفر و نه اسلام و نه آنجا جائی است

If you already know this poem, and read Persian, congratulations!

If not…Would you like to read it? In Persian?

Because you can!

First, here’s what the whole poem sounds like:

And for perspective, here’s someone else reading the poem.

And now, so that you can get the hang of reading, I’ll break it down for you, line by line, using #textingfArsi for the transliteration.

Note that you read Persian right to left. Here I’ve made a picture of the first line to illustrate this, and color coded some words to anchor the reading in the transliteration and translation. Alas, Substack does not allow coloring text so I can’t keep that color coding going.

“Transliteration” is when you write a word from one language in the alphabet of another. In this case we’re writing Persian words in English. We could use the official International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or whatever it is the scholars use to do this, but…yikes. I look at that and feel overwhelmed.

“#textingfArsi” is my shortcut to transliteration of Persian, which makes it easy to sound out the words.

The key to #textingfArsi is the six simple vowel sounds in Persian.

• Lower case “a” is the a in “cat”

• upper case “A” is the a in father

• “e” is the e in “elephant”

• “i” is the i in “ski”

• “o” is the o in “old” but…crisper

• “u” is the ue in “blue”

And of course, roll your r’s. Rrrrrrroll ‘em!

OK, I’m going to try it like this.

• First line Persian

• Second line transliteration

• Third line word for word translation, in original word order

• Fourth line is translation with word order changed for English grammar

And now…the poem:

از کفر و ز اسلام برون صحرائی است
az kofr o ze eslAm borun sahrA-ist
of atheism and of Islam, outside, a desert is
Out beyond atheism and Islam, there is a field

ما را به میان آن فضا سودائی است
mA rA be miAn-e An fazA sowdA-ist
we (rA) to midst-of that space trade-some-is
for us, within that space, there is trade

عارف چو بدان رسید سر را بنهد
Aref cho bedAn resid, sar rA benahad
Mystic, when to it reached, head (rA) lays
The Mystic, upon reaching it, bows their head

نه کفر و نه اسلام و نه آنجا جائی است
na kofr o na eslAm o na AnjA jA’ist
not atheism and not Islam and not there there-a-is
Neither atheism, nor Islam, nor “a there” is there. 

One of these days, I will break it down further, word by word.

For now, it’s time to just be in The Field.

Happy Birthday Rumi!

Thank you to my nephew for tracking down the original Persian of the poem via this article by Cyrus.

Thank you to گنجور - ganjoor for this poem plus commentary, and so much more poetry!

Thank you to the algorithms for serving up K-Pop Demon Hunter music videos when I typed in “Rumi’s Birthday”

Thank you Staple Sisters for the awesome “I’ll take you there” song!

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