Coleman Barks

And be...

They-- People tend to access Persian poetry primarily through Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi, which I respect.

They sound more like Coleman Barks than they do like they, in Persian by the author.

But I, I would just love for them to have access to poets writing today in the contemporary world, and to see how people writing in Persian imagine the world around them.

Mm.

Well, it's in, in that tradition, it's sung and not recited.

W- why he is popular in the West now is probably due to Coleman Barks, who was the first one to take his, his, uh, his words and take them out of scholarly translations and kind of put them in a Walt Whitman open American free verse.

Birdsong brings relief to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are, but with nothing to say.

We're talking with Michael Green, an illustrator who likes the title Illuminator, from his art studio and gallery in rural East Fallowfield, Pennsylvania.

He paints natural objects like a leaf or the sun or a pool of water with exquisite subtle colors and graceful ornate borders.

He has published many calendars, and his best-selling books with Coleman Barks include The Illuminated Rumi and The Illuminated Prayer.

He studied with the 20th century Sufi Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

So along the way, I encountered a wonderful Jewish therapist who was my first therapist, a very scholarly, beautiful, dignified woman.

And I learned a lot about Judaism from her and from a relationship I had with a a beloved Jewish man in my life and wandered away from the Christian and then wandered back in to do some healing with a Lutheran minister mentor of mine and was a Lutheran for 10 years and kind of re-befriended Jesus and that tradition and then In the meantime, my voice teacher gave me a cassette, remember those? Of Coleman Barks reciting Rumi.

And I thought, well, how did this guy who lived hundreds of years ago in a completely different world, expressed my soul.

I was dead, then alive, weeping, then laughing.

They're very Christian, obviously, and they're very stilted.

And so early on, you know, with the encouragement, not literally, but just by reading Stephen Mitchell and Coleman Barks and others, I realized that I could be faithful as a translator without being literal so that I could sort of break through to a language that was vibrant, alive, beautiful, and would land in the hearts of people of today who may or may not be Christian.

or academic.

There were a lot of academic translations of these texts.

In difficult times, is there a quote that you find yourself returning to because it gives you special comfort?

Oh.

Yes, this is from a Rumi poem translated by Coleman Barks.

And the line is, there is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they cannot hope.

You know I've practiced everything, right? I've tested everything.

I've tried everything, and what really drew me to Bawa was first what he told Coleman Barks in a dream, which was to take little sips of all of this, the new books, you know, the scriptures, the practices, like to take little sips.

He says we wanna be wise too quickly.

We wanna bite off more than we can chew.