Poetry are revered in Afghanistan...makes me think...

Date:   9/27/2005 12:11:20 PM ( 19 y ago)

Received this from Kabbalist
Mark-Joseph Cohen of the Tree of Life
School

I enjoyed reading it very much.

It is an interesting Juxttoposition (sp?)
to read the reverence the Affgan people
have for people vs. the 1 dimentional
way we can size the up as people
who maybe hide people like Osama
and really do not matter too much
so it is O.k. to throw a bomb here and there.
Collateral damage I think they call it--
a few innocent lives lost to get the goal fulfilled.

I wonder if one of the dead ones was a poet.

your eg

on 9/27/05 6:36 AM, joseph-mark cohen at jm_cohen@hotmail.com wrote:


Coleman Barks --- Notes on the State Department
Speaker Program Visit to Kabul, Mazar, Balkh, and
Herat, Afghanistan March 16--26, 2005

The most startling observation that comes to me, as a
practicing American poet, involves the vital role that
poetry plays in the lives of Afghan men. One afternoon
in Herat I met at a long table with members of the
Herat Literary Association, thirty men who meet every
week to read their own poetry to each other. Doctors,
lawyers, professors, businessmen, and government
officials, strong, active, men-in-the-world who are
passionately committed to poetry. They were intensely
interested in how I had brought their national poet,
Moulana Balkhi (Rumi), over into American English.

They listened as I read my translation line by line
with my translator following my English with the Dari
(the Afghan dialect of Farsi) of the original. A tough
audience, but they seemed mostly to approve. Then they
wanted to check to see what kind of a poet I was on my
own. I read a poem from my book, Tentmakinq, and
Ruhollah Amin, the 26-year-old translator who traveled
with me, rendered my words into Persian. I passed
muster, though I do wonder, how Ruhollah translated
"inboard motorboat."

Musicians then joined the group, among them a most
amazing man named Bulbul, which means nightingale, who
emitted flawless nightingale sounds without moving his
lips, all the while looking around as though searching
for the source of such music. Bulbul could,
effortlessly, take over any American late night
talkshow. He is one of the true natural comedians, on
the level of Chaplin, Peter Sellers, Jonathan Winters,
or Groucho.

Another instance of the place that poetry occupies in
the Afghan soul: on my first night of public
appearances I found myself under a banner in the
Afghan Ministry of Culture in Kabul. Next to a huge
picture of Hamid Karzai, the banner read, DEAR COLEMAN
BORKS, WELCOME TO KABUL. As I was reading the first
poem in English, I realized that everyone in the room
was silently saying the poem with me in Persian.

Afterward there was animated discussion. I asked
Ruhollah what was going on. He said it was a fierce
debate about the metaphor of
drunkenness (ecstatic
love) in this poem of Rumi as compared with thereferences to wine in the poetry of Hafez. Here were
cabinet level men and women arguing poetry, from their
deep, and varying, experiences of it.

The minister of culture himself, Mr. Raheem, carried
the day with a vivid metaphor. "Inside this Balkhi
poem there are 16 little drunken Hafezes running
around!" His point being that Hafez was engaged in a
narrow argument with the imams about Sharia rules of
conduct, whereas Rumi's vision of love was wider and
more embracing.

These are my people, and I told them so. In radio and
television interviews, on the Voice of America,
wherever I was asked my impression of Afghan culture,
I brought up this enthusiasm for poetry. I had not
known tht there existed in the world such a poetry
culture.

This discovery, of course, is part of a blindness I
have, that we have in this country, and in the West in
general, to things Islamic. It is a long-standing and
pervasive condition. Wherever possible I confessed our
ignorance, my personal variety, and our general
American species.

And yet, it must be stressed, there I was, and for a
reason. Their Afghan poet has been the most-read poet
in the United States during the last ten years!
My translations alone have sold over half a million
copies. These facts astonished audiences, who
inevitably asked why. No one knows, I said, but it
feels like to me that a presence comes through the
poetry, even in my American versions, the sense of an
enlightened, compassionate, hilarious, very clear and
sane, and deeply kind, human being. We have been
lonely, I told them, in the United States, for what
the Sufis call a true human being. In Rumi and his
friend Shams Tabriz we have found two of them.

Most of my presentations involved reading a translated
poem, followed by Ruhollah reciting the original,
which often everyone knew by heart, followed then by
discussion of the soul-growth teachings present in the
imagery. Then on to another poem. A fine, and
tremendously mature, way to spend an afternoon. It
felt both ancient and familiar.

Because I was there during the long Nowruz holiday,
corresponding to our Christmas-New Year holiday, there
were very few students on the university campuses I
visited, but I was able to meet in more intimate
settings with the literature faculties of Kabul and
Herat universities. The professors, were receptive,but with some typical academic dubiousness for my
enterprise.

The collaboration of scholar with poet is not much
valued in university communities all over the world,
especially if the poet is of a mystical bent, as I am.
I was not given credit at my own University of Georgia
for the Rumi work until those collaborative
translations were chosen for the Norton Anthology of
World Masterpieces, the academic equivalent of
canonization.

The rest of my time in Afghanistan was spent at
various Nowruz events, a buskashi match (that
incredible melee in which three or four hundred riders
on stallions try to keep the one who has the dead goat
across his pommel from dropping it into a four-foot
circle, every man for himself in the damnedest frenzy
of danger and courage and chaos I ever saw), and
visiting magnificent ruins and the tombs of Sufi
saints. I gathered quite a crowd at Jami's mazaar as I
intoned my translation of The Camel Driver's Song and
my translator supplied the interlinear Persian.

My most treasured experience of the whole Afghan time,
though, was not at all public. It was a private
meeting, arranged by Mr. Bahra, minister of culture in
Herat. Down several turns of a narrow alleyway we
entered the home of Omarii Chisti, a 95-year-old man
who has taught Rumi's Masnavi for 75 years. When Jami
in the 14th Century said, "Rumi was not a prophet, but
he has a book," he was speaking of the Masnavi.

It was pure grace to look into Omanii's eyes and ask
my question, Who is Shams? Not waiting for the
translation, he shot back, Shams is the doctor who
comes when you hurt enough. No one hurts enough now.
That's why he hasn't come. Rumi's longing was sharp
enough to bring the doctor.

The hour-long meeting with that man was reason enough,
for me, to have gone to Afghanistan. I hope my going
also served the wider purposes of the State Department
in acknowledging, and celebrating, this unique, and
real, connection between the Afghan and American
cultures, their shared love of the great mystical
poet, Jalaluddin of Balkh, known in the West as Rumi.

Rumi means the Roman one, Rum being that area of the
Anatolian peninsula
(Turkey) that was long under Roman influence. Konya, a
central city of that area, is where Rumi's family
ended up when they left Balkh in 1219, just ahead of
the advancing Mongol armies. Rumi was twelve then. Helived most of his life in Konya and is buried there
with his father, Bahauddin, under the famous green
dome, which is visited by pilgrims from every religion
and culture. Whatever you call the great poet born in
Afghanistan, Rumi or Balkhi, he is the only truly
planetary poet we have.



Coleman Barks



 

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