Exchanging Helminski's Free Verse Rumi

The great thing about true Rumi that a good translation reveals is not just the spirit of love, and the language of truth and beauty, but also the delicate paradox hinted at therein. So far, I have found this paradox in Helminski's translations only. (It makes me want to try my hand at Arberry's technical stuff, like Barks and Bly and others.)

But Helminski insists on using free verse in the weirdest ways with the formal lines of Rumi. The poetic form Rumi often uses is called a ghazal. The rhyming couplet is called a bayt. There are other metrical patterns which are discussed here. So here's Helminki's free verse version.


Buy Me From My Words 

Before now I wanted
to be paid for what I said,
but now I need you
to buy me from my words.
The idols I used to carve
charmed everyone. Now I'm drunk
on Abraham and tired of idols.
An idol with no color or scent
ended my whole career.
Find someone else for the job.
A happy madman without a thought,
I have swept the shop clean.
If something enters my mind,
I say, "Leave. You're a distraction."
Whatever is coarse and heavy, I destroy.
Who should be with Layla?
Someone who can be Majnun.
The man holding up this waving flag
actually belongs to the other side.


I love this translation but why the weird line breaks? I can understand not rhyming the lines within the couplet based on the lack of common rhyme in English. but why break the structure of the couplet itself?

So here’s my reformation of Helsinki’s translation returning the poem to the ghazal it is. I’m guessing at the line breaks here, but I think it’s an educated guess. And I like the results.


Buy Me From My Words 

Before now I wanted to be paid for what I said,
but now I need you to buy me from my words.

The idols I used to carve charmed everyone.
Now I'm drunk on Abraham and tired of idols.

An idol with no color or scent ended my whole career.
Find someone else for the job.

A happy madman without a thought, I have swept the shop clean.
If something enters my mind, I say, "Leave. You're a distraction."

Whatever is coarse and heavy, I destroy.
Who should be with Layla? Someone who can be Majnun.

The man holding up this waving flag
actually belongs to the other side.


~Rumi (tr-Helminski) [tx-SR)





footnote, found this Franklin Lewis quote after writing the above, on paradox in transcreations of Bly and Barks
"On the other hand, Bly and Barks tend to present Rumi as a guru rather calmly dispensing words of wisdom capable of resolving, panacea-like, all our ontological ailments. This effect is created in their writing not only by simple diction and plain sentences, but by the tendency to resolve paradoxes, and in the breathy knowing pauses and placid demeanors of their recitation style. In reality, Rumi, especially in the Divân, is a poet of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his acute and shattering sense of loss – loss of Shams and alienation in the material world from the spiritual source - to achieve catharsis, usually in some kind of silent, sagacious suffering. Rumi's Persian ghazals, spontaneous, excited, full of sonorous, urgent sound play and rhythm, constantly toy with unresolved paradoxes, and do not impress the reader with a sense of serene wisdom calmly dispensed, but with frenetic search and longing to understand. Bly and Barks's view of Rumi corresponds more closely to the tenor of the narrator of the Masnavi than to the poet of the ghazals."





(exactly!! lewis hits the sufi on the dervish. i was feeling this last night. helminski's translations are the first ones i've read to show that frenetic rumi of the unresolved paradox rather than the the guru rumi of barks and bly resolving paradoxes for their gentle readers.)