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You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

From Santa Monica, KCRW.

I'm Michael Silverblatt.

Today, my guest is Coleman Barks.

Coleman Barks has spent the last 25 years translating the ecstatic poet Rumi.

Now there has come a huge, magisterial dream of a book called The Soul of Rumi.

It's published by Harper, San Francisco.

It's a new collection of ecstatic poems.

And it covers every part of Rumi's career,

but in particular, for the first time,

it publishes book four of the Masnavi, which is the huge text encompassing stories and anecdotes, teachings and lyric poems.

And it's a pleasure to have some 150 pages sustained of the Maznavian translation by Coleman

Barks.

Coleman announces in the pages of the soul of Rumi that this will be for a while saying goodbye

to his Rumi translations and he's going to work on his own poems such as they are, he says.

And I wanted to begin, in a sense, at the beginning. I believe Robert Bly introduced you to

Rumi and told you to take these translations out of their cages and make them poems.

That's right. In 1976, at one of those conferences that Robert gives in early June, which are about mythology

and poetry and ritual, and mostly really about what Robert has been reading lately.

...