Rumi's Metaphors Do Not Survive Translation

The most famous line of Rumi in English is not a line of Rumi.

It is a line of an English rendering, which is already an interpretation, and often a rendering of a rendering. It may be beautiful. It may even be faithful to the spirit. But a metaphor is not a decoration laid over a meaning; it is the meaning, and when it crosses a language it arrives changed, the way a coin arrives from abroad worth something else.

What follows is a small cabinet of images. Each one is checked against the Persian on ganjoor.net, and each is held up twice: once to the light it was made in, once to the light of English.

The reed#

بشنو این نی چون شکایت می‌کند از جدایی‌ها حکایت می‌کند

beshno in ney chon shekāyat mi-konad az jodāyi-hā hekāyat mi-konad

Listen to this reed, how it complains; it tells the story of separations.

In Persian, ney is one word for the plant and the flute made from it. The instrument that sings is a thing that has been cut; its sound is breath passing through a hollow. The Masnavi opens on this, and the opening is read word by word, with four draft translations, in Rumi and the Reed Flute.

In English, the translator must choose. "Reed" loses the flute. "Reed flute" keeps both but turns a single word into a compound, and the double life of the thing becomes a label on it.

The fire#

Eight couplets later, on the same ganjoor page:

آتش است این بانگ نای و نیست باد هر که این آتش ندارد نیست باد

ātash ast in bāng-e nāy o nist bād har ke in ātash nadārad nist bād

This cry of the flute is fire, not wind; whoever does not have this fire, may he be nothing.

In Persian, the rhyme is a single phrase heard twice. Nist bād in the first line is "is not wind": the flute's note is not air but burning. Nist bād in the second line is "may he not be," a curse, or a blessing in reverse: whoever lacks the fire, let him be erased. The same three syllables turn from physics to judgement while you are still listening.

In English, the pun cannot come along. "Not wind" and "be nothing" share no sound. A translator can rhyme the lines on other words, or footnote the joke, but the moment of the ear catching itself, hearing the same sound mean something worse, does not cross.

The wine#

The next couplet:

آتش عشق است کاندر نی فتاد جوشش عشق است کاندر می فتاد

ātash-e ʿeshq ast k-andar ney fetād jushesh-e ʿeshq ast k-andar mey fetād

It is the fire of love that fell into the reed; it is the ferment of love that fell into the wine.

In Persian, ney and mey, reed and wine, differ by a single consonant. The couplet sets them in matching positions and lets love fall into each: as fire into the reed, as ferment into the wine. Jushesh is boiling, seething, the bubbling of grape-must as it turns. Wine here is not a metaphor painted onto love. Love is what makes wine wine; fermentation is love working in matter.

That is the vocabulary the whole Persian tradition inherits. ʿEshq in Sufi usage is not only a feeling but a cosmic pull, the force that organises the soul toward its source. Sharāb and mey are wine, and also the drink that dissolves the self, and also wine. The tavern side of that vocabulary has its own cast of characters.

In English, "the ferment of love fell into the wine" is close and strange. "Love's passion is in the wine" is smoother and loses the chemistry. And English "wine" arrives with its own baggage: dinner parties, labels, vintages. The word that meant both a sin and a sacrament comes over meaning a beverage.

The mirror#

The same page, near the end of the opening section:

آینه‌ت دانی چرا غماز نیست؟ زآن که زنگار از رخش ممتاز نیست

āyenat dāni cherā ghammāz nist? z-ān ke zangār az rokhash momtāz nist

Do you know why your mirror tells nothing? Because the rust has not been cleared from its face.

In Persian, the mirror is metal. Classical mirrors were polished bronze or steel, and they rusted. Zangār is verdigris, the green corrosion that creeps over copper and bronze. A mirror that "tells nothing" (ghammāz, a tell-tale, a gossip, one who gives away secrets) is one whose face has gone green and dull. The cure is not to buy a new mirror but to polish: slow, physical, repeated work. Sufi writing returns to this constantly. The heart is a mirror; discipline is the polishing; what shows when the rust is gone is not your own face.

In English, mirrors are glass. Glass does not rust. A modern reader hears "your mirror has rust on it" and pictures a frame, or nothing. The verb of the spiritual life in this image, polish, does not attach to anything a reader owns. Translators reach for "dust" or "tarnish," and the mirror becomes something you wipe rather than something you labour over.

A couplet built as a mirror, each line reflecting the other, is a different idea again; it is taken up in Mirrors and the Couplet.

The guest house#

Book five of the Masnavi, on ganjoor.net:

هست مهمان‌خانه این تن ای جوان هر صباحی ضیف نو آید دوان

hast mehmān-khāne in tan ey javān har sabāhi zeyf-e now āyad davān

This body is a guest house, young man; every morning a new guest comes running.

هین مگو کین ماند اندر گردنم که هم اکنون باز پرد در عدم

hin ma-gu k-in mānad andar gardanam ke ham aknun bāz parad dar ʿadam

Careful: do not say, "This one will hang round my neck," for this very moment it flies back into nonbeing.

هرچه آید از جهان غیب‌وش در دلت ضیفست او را دار خوش

har-che āyad az jahān-e gheyb-vash dar delat zeyf ast u rā dār khosh

Whatever comes from the world of the unseen is a guest in your heart. Treat it well.

In Persian, the passage stands under a heading that does most of the framing. It likens the body to a guest house and thoughts of grief and joy to guests, and holds up Abraham, Khalil, the Friend of God, whose door in the stories was always open, to believer and unbeliever, honest and treacherous alike. Hospitality here is a prophetic virtue with a scriptural face. The guests come from gheyb, the unseen. They are on their way back to ʿadam, nonbeing. The host is not a therapist accepting his moods. He is Abraham at the tent door, receiving whatever God sends.

In English, this passage became one of the most loved "Rumi poems" in circulation, through Coleman Barks's free-verse version, which is worked from earlier English translations rather than from the Persian. It is a good poem. Abraham is gone from it, and so are the unseen and nonbeing; what remains is a gentle lesson in welcoming difficult feelings. The image survived. The household it belonged to did not.

The face#

One image is better discussed than quoted, because it is everywhere and nowhere in particular: the beloved's face. Rokh (which already appeared above as the mirror's "face"), ru, the tress (zolf), the mole (khāl). In the Persian lyric these are a code with a long tradition behind it. The face is the manifestation of the divine; the tress is the multiplicity of the world that veils and binds; the mole is a single point of unity on the cheek. A reader of Rumi's lyrics in Persian moves through that code without stopping, the way a reader of English moves through "heart" without picturing an organ.

In English, a poem about a beautiful face is a poem about a beautiful face. Nothing is wrong with that. It is simply a different poem.

Lines Rumi did not write#

Some of the most quoted "Rumi" in English cannot be traced to anything he wrote. Lines such as What you seek is seeking you circulate on cards, in books of daily meditations, under photographs of sunsets. No Persian source for them has been found in the Masnavi or the Divan-e Shams. Some are free paraphrases drifted so far from a real couplet that the couplet cannot be recovered; some appear to have been composed in English and signed with his name, because his name sells calm.

A plain test helps. A real Rumi quotation can be pointed to: a book of the Masnavi and a couplet number, or a numbered ghazal or quatrain of the Divan. Ganjoor will show it. If a line comes with no such address and no Persian, it is someone else's line, however lovely, wearing a borrowed coat.

Search engines and language models, trained mostly on what circulates in English, return the borrowed coats first.

The door#

A translation builds a new room and calls it the same house. Sometimes the room is beautiful. Sometimes it is the only room a reader will ever enter. Both facts matter, and neither cancels the other.

What is owed to the reader is not a pretence that the rooms are identical. It is honesty about the door: here is where the Persian ended and English began; here the mirror was bronze; here the guest was sent by God.