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.)

talking this ouroboric universe

Disidentifying with its tool, consciousness is free to use the mind for some divine imagination.

As consciousness is the expression of the godhead, mythic imagination is the expression of consciousness.

Thus, personal deconstruction, mythic imagination, and spontaneous revelation is the trinity of self-awareness.

Any form of nihilism is self-awareness interruptus. Like fundamentalist religion, scientific materialism, or being stuck in deconstruction.

The trinity of mythic imagination is loving, paradoxical, and poetic.

just because i'd misidentified myself
with this tool of mind for a spell
doesn't mean the tool itself is bad
or useless

and revelation
is expression
of divine
imagination

the rise and fall of empires,
lucid dreaming,
and the backwards big bang black hole

myth devolves into belief
and not vice versa.
atlantis is drowned by religion.
it's a mythic metaphor.

no division. no logic. no users manual; just pointing.

talking bhakta

In this 21st century schizoid culture, scientific materialism is the last grand concept to be deconstructed and almost never is.

On the one side of this razor's edge is fundamentalist religion and on the other side, big science, the two great nihilisms of the world today.

And nondual materialism is the ninth circle of scientific nihilism. I'll take my Tao with Sufi, thank you very much. And jnana is to deconstruction as bkakta is to bodhicitta.

In a world of science, one must double-down on love, my love. Love is nothing personal, to say it in a scientific way. Belief is nothing but.

Wisdom is Lao Tzu. Love, Chuang Tzu. Laozi is Zhuangzi. Look, my granddaughter is the latest guru in my collection. And if it wasn't for my daughter, I'd be dead.

another name
for the force is love
starry love
if religion is the fall, big science is the dead cat bounce
believing
nonduality is
the greatest koan
postmodern deconstruction is easy. love is hard.
my greatest karmic
guru has been
fatherhood
i can't imagine
a more efficient way
your life may vary




all politics
is local;
division is
the function
of mind.
love is the universal heart,
my love!

talking peaks and sea

The mind is a creature of time. Reality is not; in fact, many people say that truth is timeless. And consciousness is measureless and bliss is thoughtless.

Many people call this trinity satcitananda. Expressing reality in ways other than negative capability is the point of all authentic myth. But it's a razor's edge that walks between the heaven of religion and abyss of nihilism.

Many people say that mystery is not a logical word for describing truth. But myth is not a scientific field: it's paradoxical at its essence. Also universal and poetical. But scientific materialism hates love, denies true myth, and is fundamentally unsound to ears that hear.

Many people say there are two ways that go by many names. Call them deconstruction and love. Like two sides of a coin, miss one, miss both. It's rivers and mountains, not rivers or mountains. Form is transformation and vice versa. Peaks. Sea.

talking being healing number one

if i identify with a body, who is the i identifying, why does one identify with something in the past, and how does one identify with transformation? can a concept conceptualize conception? being sees through every thought, see? as the great edward g. robinson says.

if spirit, being, consciousness is the one identifying with the body-mind, then why not skip the middleman and identify with consciousness instead? the mind is made for deconstruction. consciousness is all about self-inquiry. only i can ask who am i. this is the heart of the paradox called non-duality.

consciousness is the nondual expression of the great unknown, noumenon, absolute godhead. self-awareness is god's poetry. and how crazy is it that the flame doesn't know it's the flame but thinks it's the wood instead on fire? truth is beauty and love is the first law of self-awareness.

the mind just hates the fact that love knows more than it does. emphasis on mind as hate and love as knowledge, beauty, fact, truth. not division. does deconstruction come before love or does love deconstruct? got moon. intuition is real memory.

never forget intuition. consciousness is self-healing. deconstruction is anti-bacterial. social conditioning is the original virus. your myth may vary. pain is a message from the body to the mind for attention. suffering is the mind keeping the message to itself. only consciousness heals. your medicine may vary.

Kabir Helminski on Translating Rumi

"Although Rúmí was one of the first of the major Persian poets to receive the attention of the West and numerous translations have been completed, it has been about seventy years since the publication of the English translations on which we depend. With all respect for James Redhouse, the great R.A. Nicholson, and his student, A.J. Arberry, what they gave us in English were accurate word for word versions in Victorian prose. Even Arberry, the most recent of the three has confessed: "These versions, being in the vast majority the first renderings into a Western language, and intended primarily for nonspecialists, have been made as literal as possible, with a minimum concession to readability."

We have also seen "versions" of Rumi's work, i.e. renderings that use a literal translation of the text as a starting point for a poet to recreate a poem based on the original. Coleman Barks and Robert Bly, among others, have worked in this way, not only with Rúmí, but with other spiritual writers as well. Some of these versions have been very successful as poetry and have been helpful in introducing Rúmí to the modern world. It deserves to be mentioned, however, that versions, whatever their value, grant more license to the personal voice and imagination of the writer creating the versions.

The problem of translating Rúmí has two aspects that I would like to mention. First, the translator must not only acquaint himself with the cultural background of the work but should have some affinity or experience with the esoteric traditions out of which the poetry grew. Secondly, he must find or create equivalent terms for experiences that might themselves be almost anachronistic to the modern mentality. I agree wth the poet and critic Kathleen Raine who has said that the work of any serious artist our time is "to recreate a common language for the communication of knowledge of spiritual realities, and of the invisible order of the psyche.”"

~Kabir Helminski

On Unicorns

The mind just hates the fact that love knows more than it does.

Love is the original unicorn—first to be made extinct by the mind.

Deconstruction is gradual, love sudden. Like Thor and lightning!

The Way of Consciousness

Love is the groove in the heart of consciousness.

Love is like the core of unconditioned consciousness

shining through the ashes of conditioned consciousness.

Love is selfless, love is headless, love is the yawp of ouroboros.


Everything appears in consciousness including all dimensions and their mathematics.

The astrology of all emotion is universal consciousness veiled by a planetary thought.

As form is childish, belief is adolescent. As personal deconstruction is psychological maturity, self-awareness is the mystic.

While on the way, be on the lookout for political opportunists, spiritual nihilists, and other forms of western science.

Personal Deconstruction 101

A person is a thought wrapped in a thought inside a thought.

The conceptual replacement of experiential being is called one's belief system.

An emotion is the light of being filtered by a thought believed.


Shadows appear in consciousness. First the mind believes them,

then measures out their story. Into the well of mind, memory, time, shadows dive

like frogs—suddenly the world is written on the walls in a splash of color!

enlightenment 101

consciousness is experiential only.

after experience, memory.

memory. belief. deconstruction. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva.


experience is 200 proof.

self-awareness necessitates watering down.

light, cameras, deconstruction.


now is where i footnote Jimi Hendrix.

like clambering the western slope of Mount Champlain:
a long moving close-up of pink cadillac mountain granite suddenly vanishes into the two close blues of open sea and crystal sky.

like looking in a mirror and suddenly identifying with the infinite space in-between is enlightenment 101.