The Politics of Translating Rumi

The Politics of Translating Rumi

a public lecture by

Dr. Amir Sedaghat

Ph.D. in Translation and Transcultural Communication Studies Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Jalāleddin Mohammad Rumi is a Persian mystical (sufi) poet and thinker of 13th century, among the most renowned in the West. His poetry corpus is comprised of Masnavi-e ma’navi (mystical didactic poetry) and Divān e Šams e Tabrizi (mystical and lyric poetry). His fame is both due to the immense size of his work and a relatively recent popular demand in English-speaking North America for his poetry with a spiritual undertone. Translating Rumi cannot be without political implications given the topical character of transcultural relations between Western societies and the Islamic world as well as the complexity of his eclectic thought, subject to controversy within the orthodox paradigm of Islam. As a result, multiple examples can be cited of the interference between poetic and political instances in the process of transferring Rumi’s message to European languages. This article intends to show how ideology interferes with the operation of translation in light of ethical, sociolinguistic and hermeneutic theories of Translation, presenting three notable occurrences of this intervention. One of the examples evokes the suspicions of antisemitism concerning the English translation of an allegorical story of Masnavi. The intervention of political institutions by funding an immense translation project of translation of Divân to English with the intention of annexing the Persian mystic to the Turkish civilizational spheres another instance of such political issues. Finally, it is hard not to notice the good intentions of certain translators and specialist of Rumi who endeavor to use his thought to create a progressist humanist image of Islam, compatible with Western modern societies. Although the reconciliatory attempt of these scholars can be deemed praiseworthy, from an ethical standpoint, characteristic of Antoine Berman, the deforming impact of their action on the translations of the Persian Sufi calls up