SOURCE: Barber, David. “Rumi Nation.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 25, nos. 1 & 2 (2001): 176-209.

In the following essay, Barber reviews several contemporary translations of Rumi's works, including Coleman Barks's The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting, Coleman Barks and John Moyne's The Essential Rumi, Dick Davis's Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams, Andrew Harvey's The Teachings of Rumi, and Shahram T. Shiva's Rending the Veil: Literal and Poetic Translations of Rumi, in a wide-ranging discussion of translation across time and culture and the phenomenon of the popularized, simplified Rumi as a “New-Age Mystic” whose work only vaguely resembles the complex thirteenth-century Persian poetry.

Most everyone has heard some version of this parable. An Indian raja and his war entourage pitch camp near a village all of whose inhabitants are blind. Word spreads that there is, among the ranks, a fantastic creature of awesome dimensions, utterly unknown in these parts. The ruler grants an audience...