"I don't mean to claim a special relationship with Rumi...but a poet of such astonishing range and depth needs many translators and interpreters. Mystical poetry tries to reveal the apple orchard within the mist of language (Rumi's image). I hope these translations do not thicken that fog; I hope they burn it off!..." Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

Though he wrote his extraordinary poems over seven hundred years ago in culture far removed from our own, Persian Sufi Jelaluddin Rumi is today the most widely read poet in America. This is, of course, largely due to the fact that his poems and stories are simple and direct enough for their startling and passionate imagery to travel across such distances of culture and time, but it is also true that Rumi never would have reached such a wide American audience if his work hadn't found the perfect translator in Coleman Barks. With over ten books of Rumi translations, Barks has established himself as the foremost translator of Rumi into English. Rumi's poems in their original Persian reflect a dense musicality rarely if ever found in translation. Barks acknowledges the difference in language and uses American free verse to convey a sense of the work's simplicity. With the best of these translations beautifully collected in The Essential Rumi, in poems which are alternately ecstatic, wise, and hilarious, the prolific poet comes alive in the 20th century.

Jelaluddin Rumi was born in the year 1207 and until the age of thirty-seven was a brilliant scholar and popular teacher. But his life changed forever when he met the powerful wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, of whom Rumi said, ?What I had thought of before as God, I met today in a human being.? From this mysterious and esoteric friendship came a new height of spiritual enlightenment.

When Shams disappeared, Rumi began his transformation from scholar to artist, and his poetry began to fly.

Today, the ecstatic poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi is more popular than ever, and Coleman Barks, through his musical and magical translations, has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to devoted followers. Now, for the first time, Barks has gathered the essential poems of Rumi and put them together in this wonderful comprehensive collection that delights with playful energy and unequaled passion.

The Essential Rumi offers the most beautiful rendering of the primary poetry of Rumi to both devoted enthusiasts and novice readers. Poems about everything from bewilderment, emptiness, and silence to flirtation, elegance, and majesty are presented with love, humor, warmth, and tenderness.

Take in the words of Jelaluddin Rumi and feel yourself transported to the magical, mystical, places of a whirling, ecstatic poet.

Brings something of the spiritual fragrance of Rumi into the contemporary American poetic medium and can service as a foretaste of the inner paradise of mystical poetry produced by that colossal figure of Sufi literature, Jalal al-Din Rumi. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Washington University Professor of Islamic Studies

At the end of our wanderings there is only the soul's yearning to return to God. No one speaks that yearning better than Rumi. No one, these days, does Rumi better than Coleman Barks. Ram Dass

Though he wrote his extraordinary poems over seven hundred years ago in culture far removed from our own, Persian Sufi Jelaluddin Rumi is today the most widely read poet in America. This is, of course, largely due to the fact that his poems and stories are simple and direct enough for their startling and passionate imagery to travel across such distances of culture and time, but it is also true that Rumi never would have reached such a wide American audience if his work hadn't found the perfect translator in Coleman Barks. With over ten books of Rumi translations, Barks has established himself as the foremost translator of Rumi into English. With the best of these translations beautifully collected in The Essential Rumi, in poems which are alternately ecstatic, wise, and hilarious, the prolific poet comes alive in the 20th century.

A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, The Essential Rumi translates the estatic poetry of the famed twelfth-century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi".The gold of Rumi pours down through Coleman's words".--Jack Kornfield. "(A) delightful treasury".--Publishers Weekly.

The Tavern:

"Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home"

On the Tavern

"In the tavern are many wines-the wine of delight in color and form and taste, the wine of the intellect's agility, the fine port of stories, and the cabernet of soul singing. Being human means entering this place where entrancing varieties of desire are served. The grapeskin of ego breaks and a pouring begins. Fermentation is one of the oldest symbols for human transformation. When grapes combine their juice and are closed up together for a time in a dark place, the results are spectacular. This is what lets two drunks meet so that they don't know who is who. Pronouns no longer apply in the tavern's mud-world of excited confusion and half-articulated wantings.""

But after some time in the tavern, a point comes, a memory of elsewhere, a longing for the source, and the drunks must set off from the tavern and begin the return. The Qur'an says, -We are all returning." The tavern is a kind of glorious hell that human beings enjoy and suffer and then push off from in their search for truth. The tavern is a dangerous region where sometimes disguises are necessary, but never bide your heart, Rumi urges. Keep open there. A breaking apart, a crying out into the street, begins in the tavern, and the human soul turns to find its way home.""

It's 4 a.m. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. "Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?" "Sir," replies Nasruddin, "if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!""

Who Says Words with my Mouth?All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from,and what am I supposed to be doing? My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? If I could taste one sip of an answer, Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. When I'm outside the saying of it,
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That's fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.

They say there's no future for us. They're right.
Which is fine with us.

A Community of the SpiritThere is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and "being" the noise.
Drink "all" your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.
You moan, "She leftme."He left me."
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

There's a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love "everywhere?"

Drunks fear the police,
but the police are drunk too.
People in this town love them both
like different chess pieces.

A Children's GameListen to the poet Sanai,
who lived secluded: "Don't wander out on the road
in your ecstasy. Sleep in the tavern."
When a drunk strays out to the street,
children make fun of him.
He falls down in the mud.
He takes any and every road.
The children follow,
not knowing the taste of wine,
or how his drunkenness feels. All people on the planet
are children, except for a very few.
No one is grown up except those free of desire.
God said,
"The world is a play, a children's game,
and you are the children."
God speaks the truth.
If you haven't left the child's play,
how can you be an adult?
Without purity of spirit,
if you're still in the middle of lust and greed
and other wantings, you're like children
playing at sexual intercourse.
They wrestle
and rub together, but it's not sex!
The same with the fightings of mankind.
It's a squabble with play-swords.
No purpose, totally futile.
Like kids on hobby horses, soldiers claim to be riding
Boraq, Muhammad's night-horse, or Duldul, his mule.
Your actions mean nothing, the sex and war that you do.
You're holding part of your pants and prancing around,
"Dun-da-dun, dun-da-dun."
Don't wait till you die to see this.
Recognize that your imagination and your thinking
and your sense perception are reed canes
that children cut and pretend are horsies.
The knowing of mystic lovers is different.
The empirical, sensory, sciences
are like a donkey loaded with books,
or like the makeup woman's makeup.

Coleman Barks is a renowned poet and the bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, and The Drowned Book. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyers's PBS television series on poetry, The Language of Life and Fooling with Words. After having taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances.