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Saturday, September 02, 2006

Translator of Rumi's poetry among most popular Americans in Iran

DORIE TURNER writes about Coleman Barks, an American who is honored in Iran at a time when relations between the United States and Iran are strained. Banks has carved out a name for himself by way of his widely accepted translations of Rumi.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My wife and I were just talking about Barks tonight. She's trying her hand for the first time at translating some French poems she likes. We were discussing how Barks has been criticized for very loose translations of Rumi, yet how important his work has been. The story goes that Robert Bly came to him with some very bad literal translations and told Barkes, "you have to let these poems out of their cages." So he has.

Michael A. Wells said...

Bly seems often to be at the center of stories about translation. I am rather fond of Bly’s work myself.

My youngest daughter (a senior this year) is quite fluent in French. All her schooling up to high school was in a French emersion school. Past two years she has split class time between her high school and a college where she is taking French because she was already well advanced beyond anything the high school language dept could offer her.

I would like to at some tome set down with her and have her translate some of my own work to French just for grins.

The challenges presented by translation are fascinating to me