In the Tavern of the Heart: On Translating the Rumi of Islam

In the Tavern of the Heart:On Translating the Rumi of Islam Fatima Haidari (bio) I grew up in Kabul and came to the United States for higher education. It was in college, in the height of my desperation for a cultural identity, that I sought Farsi Poetry. The daily imitation of an alien culture, without understanding the reason, took a heavy toll on me. As my mother used to say: "Your hands don't grasp the sky, your feet don't touch the ground." I felt forgotten and irrelevant, chained to an idea of a future that my present was not contributing to. My struggles as an Afghan girl in American society boiled down to "well, you've had a really hard life" and occasionally a result of my own complexity of personality and mind. I felt my internal existence was constantly at the mercy of my external lifestyle; my wit was a source of intimidation for those who were only looking to sympathize with my struggles. In the absence of a robust identity, an internal self-defense, I conformed. I worked on my accent, validated the dread of the Afghan patriarchal society, criticized the Afghan culture, and exposed my community's intimate struggles without judging my audience's capacity for analytical thinking. I was reducing myself to avoid bumping heads with the ignorance, limits, and insecurities that were standing between me and assimilation. The pleasures of giving, what I believe to be the best power move, were lost on me. I found myself in a position of taking more than I felt able and safe to give back. Rumi's Poetry became one of my very few equal grounds with American society, a relationship that has been muddled with mainstream propaganda and political agendas. Rumi's poetry complicated that flat surface and by extension helped me realize the troubles I had gotten myself into compared to the troubles I could be making, offering a gift that in this political and social climate was lifesaving, making the United States and its narrative irrelevant. As Afghans, we learn to respect loss and death early on, but few of us can tactfully articulate it into spoken or written wisdom. I told my friend over Iftar: "Mawlana az delet meyaya." Rumi comes from your heart. He is the poet of the heartbroken whose suffering has outgrown words. He teaches the untangling of the knots you may be too proud and scared to acknowledge. Reading him is like pulling the hair out of the drain, letting the water flow, and the tears drop. The more I was immersed in Rumi's world, the more I hoped for my own to fall apart. Rumi, like many Afghans, is a creature of conflict. His ghazals use the language of confrontation and struggle. As if without those, his gatekeeping won't extend favors. "Seek treasure in the wreckage, No one hides anything of value in a popular place." The ghazals bring a game plan, a vital authority, and a glimpse of new possibilities without advice from a superior position. He does not push you towards kindness or stretch you thin over forgiveness. It is a privilege to look through the lens of Rumi's ghazals, 'tearing' through layers of performance, mostly of your own. The ghazals are fundamental in capturing his essence; establishing the mood; they are alive, a reminder of priorities, revealing the stakes. The music, the rhythms, and the boundaries of End Page 28 ghazal as a format are proof of his genius and therefore his agitation to move beyond intelligence. The humor, his habit of letting the pain pass through, instead of finding refuge in caution; greeting it like a 'guest' is his commitment to presence. Rumi knots intoxication and Islam by standing in the middle of two opposites and uniting them on the same page. Reading his poetry resembles attending the wedding of contraries, the wit, the journey, and the humility all wrapped around the lines of his poetry. This selection, like many other works of translation, is a form of curation. For coherency, fluidity, and meaning, I have chosen and translated four or five couplets from one ghazal. In Farsi, some...