Martin Bidney

The Rumi Interview Project Martin Bidney

This book is like no other presentation of Rumi you have ever seen: a diversely representative 99-part translation set up as a talk show of conversations in artisanal lyrical verse, where every Rumi selection stimulates a carefully crafted sonnet as a modern-day comment-reply to a medieval Persian poet of world stature. The appealing poet Maulana (or Mevlana) Jalalaldin Muhammad Rumi(1207-1273) gave the impetus for the order of Whirling Dervishes, who emblemize, in their solemn, graceful circling dances with mystically symbolic gestures, the nature of the universe itself. The created world is a gigantic circle of fire that dances forever in amorous adoration around the Throne of God. This God is beyond all concepts: His 99 "names" are only rubrics of qualities or attributes. Closely allied with medieval mystic teacher Ibn Arabi, to whom Rumi is often compared, the Persian lyrical dancer-visionary sees us in God's likeness. God, Ultimate Being, is unknowable; the created world reflects him (or her, or it, or them) only obliquely and incompletely. We, too, are unmanifest, hidden even from ourselves, in our essential Being; and, as with the unmanifest nature of God, we can be known to ourselves only in fragmentary flashes. What does this mean for us? It means we must each be a poet, using metaphor to imagine whatever in ourselves cannot, because of its depth, be known by intellect. God is the First Poet, and we, created in His likeness, must be the creative artists of our imagined worlds as we seek, in our pilgrimage-lives, to imagine the two Great Unknowns, the unmanifest Ultimate Being in our Source and within us. In the book you are holding, I allow myself the privilege to converse with Rumi by means of "dialogic translation"-a newly conceived genre of literature. It's like a series of YouTube or podcast interviews I set up here with my medieval friend, the engaging Sufi mystic who unfailingly invigorates the hearer in many countries of the world today