A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings [Hardcover]

Coleman Barks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2006

Coleman Barks has played a central role in making the Sufi mystic Rumi the most popular poet in the world. A Year with Rumi brings together 365 of Barks's elegant and beautiful translations of Rumi's greatest poems, including fifteen never-before-published poems.

Barks includes an Introduction that sets Rumi in his context and an Afterword musing on poetry of the mysterious and the sacred. Join Coleman Barks and Rumi for a year-long journey into the mystical and sacred within and without. Join them in recognizing and embracing the divine in the sublime, in the ordinary, and in us all.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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. He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances. This book is the culmination of over thirty years of Barks's work on Rumi's seminal classic.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006084597X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060845971
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Sufism
  • #35 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Meditations

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Speaking across many centuries, July 15, 2007

By 

Patrice "Moonstone" (Tacoma, WA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (Hardcover)

Coleman Barks is a poet, and his treatments of Rumi bring that poetry into a contemporary context. Like everything that is not pure science, these things are, of course, matters of taste. I am not a Farsi scholar or speaker, but as I understand it - and this is fairly often discussed/hotly debated - the complexities of Sufi poetry in the original languages make it pretty much untranslatable. Here is part of Robet Bly's excellent review of Barks' work, he expresses it so well:

"Rumi has, to the recent amazement of many people in the Western culture as well as the Islamic culture, been able to speak directly to contemporary readers. One of the greatest pieces of good luck that has happened recently in American poetry is Coleman Barks's agreement to translate poem after poem of Rumi. Rumi, like Kabir, is able to contain and continue intricate theological arguments and at the same time speak directly from the heart or to the heart. Coleman's exquisite sensitivity to the flavor and turns of ordinary American speech has produced marvelous lines, full of flavor and Sufi humor, as well as the intimacy that is carried inside American speech at its best."
--Robert Bly

If the Barks translations speak to you, you'll likely love having a daily meditation book, which this is.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Daily Rumi Readings, July 26, 2008

By 

Barry S. Nickelsberg (Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (Hardcover)

Each day's reading has multiple levels to try to comprehend. Lots of fodder for thought and discussion. It would be fun to sit down at dinner each night and have a family discussion about that day's poem.

65 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre, January 29, 2007

By 

Iran Man (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (Hardcover)

While Coleman Barks is to be commended for introducing many people to Rumi, his renditions of Rumi's poems scarcely reflect the original Persian. Barks, who does not speak Persian (another word for Farsi), took much better translations for AJ Arberry, and rephrased them for his books. In the process, he lost much of the accuracy and most of the character of the original poetry. Those interested in better translations of Rumi should get a hold of Reynold Nicholson's or AJ Arberry's translations.