Those who know me know that Rumi would be a little too sappy for my tastes. But his love poems were influential, and it felt important to include him this month.
I also went to a Rumi poetry reading that evening, with music and rather surreal video projected across a giant IMAX dome. This particular poem was not read, but it still felt like the right day to choose Rumi.
English Rumi can be a slippery thing. Some versions are translations and others are closer to poems inspired by translations. So I began with a traceable Persian text, a pronunciation guide and a deliberately naive translation.
The poem
Persian text: Ganjoor
من عاشق عشق و عشق هم عاشق من
تن عاشق جان آمد و جان عاشق تن
گه من آرم دو دست در گردن او
گه او کشدم چو دلربایان گردن
Working transliteration
Man asheq-e eshq-am o eshq ham asheq-e man
Tan asheq-e jan amad o jan asheq-e tan
Gah man aram do dast dar gardan-e u
Gah u keshadam cho delrobayan gardan
This was only meant to help me sound out the Persian. It is not an attempt to reconstruct thirteenth-century pronunciation.
A simple, naive translation
I am in love with Love, and Love is in love with me.
The body loves the soul, and the soul loves the body.
Sometimes I put both arms around Love’s neck;
sometimes Love pulls me by the neck, as beloveds do.
This is deliberately clumsy. It is there to show me what the words are doing before I read a better translation.
Before I read a polished translation
I barely got past the final line. Everything before it seemed as sweet as I had expected from Rumi, and then came: “Sometimes Love pulls me by the neck, as beloveds do.”
The neck feels like a very vulnerable part of the body to be pulled by. I found the image so jarring that I could not think about much else in the poem.
Two translations
I needed help with that last line. The Persian really does contain the word “neck,” but the movement continues the embrace begun in the previous line. The two lovers are taking turns drawing each other close.
Here is a close translation that keeps the repeated words and the physical image:
I am in love with Love, and Love is in love with me.
Body has fallen in love with soul, and soul with body.
Sometimes I place both arms around Love’s neck;
sometimes Love, as beloveds do, draws my neck close.
And here is a smoother rendering:
I love Love, and Love loves me.
Body and soul are lovers of one another.
Sometimes I throw my arms around Love;
sometimes Love pulls me into an embrace.
Shahram Shiva also keeps the neck but makes it clear that Love is pulling the speaker close. Nader Khalili drops the physical detail and has them take turns loving and being loved. Neither feels remotely as alarming as my naive translation.
After reading the translations
This is yet another example of how much can disappear in translation. Being pulled by the neck feels threatening. Being pulled into an embrace is much gentler and far more consistent with the rest of the poem.
Once I understood the gesture as reciprocal, I could appreciate the tenderness in these lines much more than I could in the naive word-for-word version.
What I learned
A rubai is a Persian quatrain made from two couplets, usually with an AABA rhyme. This one ends its lines with man, tan, u and gardan. The third line steps away from the rhyme and the fourth brings it back with gardan, “neck.”
So the word that bothered me is also the word that holds the form together. The first two lines talk about reciprocal love. The third turns that idea into a physical gesture. The fourth completes both the gesture and the rhyme.
The poem comes from the Divan-e Shams, Rumi’s collection of lyric poetry associated with Shams of Tabriz, rather than the Masnavi. Rumi met Shams in Konya around 1244. Their friendship transformed his life and, after Shams disappeared, separation and the desire for union ran through Rumi’s poetry. The collection is named for Shams and sometimes even speaks in his voice.
It is difficult to separate romantic love from divine love in these poems. Persian mystical poetry often uses the language of one to talk about the other. Here the roles keep swapping. The speaker loves Love. Love loves the speaker. The body loves the soul and the soul loves the body. Finally, each takes a turn drawing the other close.
That body and soul line is more interesting to me now. Rumi often uses the body as outward form and the soul as inward meaning, but he does not discard either one here. Their love is mutual, and the physical embrace belongs in the poem.
The last line also explains why English versions of Rumi can differ so wildly. Persian can pack the pronouns, action and body into a line that English has to unpack. A translator must choose whether to keep the neck, explain the movement, or simply give us the embrace. That one choice changed almost everything about how I read the poem.
The line or image I kept thinking about
Unfortunately, the mistranslated line “Love pulls me by the neck, as beloveds do” remains indelibly ingrained in me. Even though it is not a good translation, I keep wondering what that love would look like.
The mistranslation has become part of my strange and unsettling encounter with the poem. I suppose that is how it is with poetry. What a reader finds in the words is not always what the poet intended.