“Love is the religion and the universe is the book.” The line is by 13th century mystic poet Rumi, but translated by Coleman Barks, a former literature professor at the University of Georgia who neither speaks nor reads Persian. He rewrites the poems based on other English translations, and, as you can imagine, the resulting translations are controversial. Rumi experts consider Barks works fraudulent, but from bumper stickers to colorful coffee shop volumes, Coleman Barks is the most published translator of the works of Rumi in English.
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