Glenn Mott
CONVERSATION AT THE RUBIN MUSEUM
GM: So tell me, what was going on in Istanbul?
LS: My break-the-ice question was one I came up with in my own imaginative world, and it pertained to Rumi. I was curious about what contemporary Turkish intellectuals, writers, and poets make of Rumi. Rumi is a canonical figure—his shrine is in Konya, Turkey—therefore, he can’t be purged or closed down . . . which is what happens to intellectuals under Erdogan in Turkey, where people are fired or imprisoned for opposing his policies. You can’t possibly do that to Rumi, to Mevlana, as the Turks call him. He’s an important figure in the history of Islam. And therefore in contemporary Turkey, no? At the same time he is an unorthodox and offbeat kind of figure, with a very specific kind of relationship to the ecstatic in his poetry that isn’t always acceptable.
GM: Going back to his father . . .
LS: Bahā ud-Dīn.
GM: He comes from the periphery, born in what is now Afghanistan, to Syria as a boy, and then writing in Farsi.
LS: His appeal is that he seems to offer the possibility of what we might call liberal cosmopolitanism, an embrace of multiple national, linguistic and perspectival elements all in a single body of work, rather than something nationalistic, or something fundamentalist, something narrow.
But I found, talking with Turkish writers, poets, intellectuals, urban planners, and photographers, very little resonance there. He hasn’t been translated, I’m told, in a very long time. Why would you do new translations? I was asked. Well, obviously you always need to do new translations because the language changes. And I found that many of the people I was speaking to, associated with the left, associated with the secular Turkish ideal, associated with pro-European perspectives and so on, are so hostile to the religious element, to Islam as a burgeoning force in Turkey, that Rumi himself, although someone they may have read in high school, or had a certain sympathy with, was still appropriated by and part of a religious sensibility they had only contempt for. That took me aback, actually. I mean I understand that the larger political situation there is that the Erdogan administration is seen as having used Islam to close down elements of an open society in favor of a voting block that is religious. But I have to say, I heard comments coming from the secular left that reminded me of the things you hear from Trump, and Trump supporters here, things like “there are too many Arabs in the country now,” meaning either the refugees coming from Syria, or the wealthy and upper middle class tourists that are coming from Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. With various kinds of wardrobe for the women that secular Turks find suffocating. Of course you also get more sophisticated Turkish critiques, like: “this is a question of capitalism; money is coming in from the Saudi government; Erdogan is courting those currents, that’s why Turkey is tilting toward the Arab World; it’s not that we don’t like Arabs, it’s that we don’t like the way in which the economic system is being reshaped.”
GM: Was Turkey founded as a multi-cultural society? That’s not in their founding ethos. Ataturk established a secular government, but he wasn’t breaking down the multi-religious, multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire and religious hierarchy to establish an American-style multi-cultural foundation. Kemalism was a secular nationalist movement for the Turks. It was against fundamentalist Islamic tendencies that were already in the country. The reason it may sound like Trumpism to an American is that we may presume multiculturalism as a byproduct in secular societies. It makes sense to me to some extent. The other is that there is a reaction against Erdogan’s development of the country for the rich. And a lot of those riches are from an Islamic establishment in places like Saudi Arabia. That’s the complication.
LS: Two qualifiers on that though, yes, of course, I think you’re right, Ataturk’s was a nationalist movement, that’s why, for instance, his followers called the Kurds “mountain Turks,” and denied that they were anything but Turkish. But Istanbul as a city does have a cosmopolitan tradition. Obviously it was Byzantium, it was Constantinople, it had a strong Greek population, it had a strong Jewish population. That’s been significantly reduced over the years, but leaves traces. Meanwhile, compared to the Kemalist tradition, what if Erdogan’s actually more conducive to diversity? But that can’t be right.
Yet Sultanahmet Square looks like the absolute apogee of cosmopolitanism, with all the people, especially women, so different in the aesthetic choices they are making between a full abaya covering, all the way to half naked, and that seemed to me the ideal where you have all of these possibilities one next to the other. We weren’t in Saudi Arabia where everyone has to dress the same way, we weren’t in Chicago where a woman walking down the street in an abaya might be at risk from Islamaphobia. On the surface, and I realize this is just the surface, from a phenomenological perspective, I thought this is what a Muslim majority society can offer, this kind of diversity. If it closes down, as it might elsewhere . . . but what do I know?
GM: I wonder if international is de facto linked with cosmopolitanism? Maybe not. After all, if you look at a cosmopolitan Hassidic community here in New York, it may not be multicultural. Or an international city like Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong is that there is a multicultural, international, cosmopolitan metropolis. That doesn’t sit well with a Han majority, authoritarian government, in control of a command economy.
Cosmopolitanism is an interesting term. I think of Anthony Appiah’s fine book on the topic. One of the best I know. The cosmopolitans you met could be of a neoliberal persuasion, who might surprise you with their views. On the other hand, there’s another aspect I used to experience in China. I’d follow news of Antifa in Seattle, and I would wonder what would happen if members of the American far left lived in an actual authoritarian state, without rule of law. After living in China, what would their impulses be? Would more nuance be brought to tactical anarchism? One might be jailed overnight for breaking windows in Seattle, but where there is rule of law, these actions are protected.
LS: I, too, found myself using China as an example while I was in Istanbul. As bad as things may be in Turkey right now, it’ not China.
GM: If we’re taking this back . . . you were using Rumi, as the embodiment of a pluralism you hoped to find in Istanbul.
LS: In fact the two sides are at such loggerheads that my notion or fantasy that Rumi—who’s both profoundly Muslim and profoundly cosmopolitan, would be a meeting ground, a way out of existential impasse or dead end—was wrong.
Now, when I talked to Eda Yigit, oral historian and author of Gezi Protests May 27th through June 2013, she did talk about anti-Capitalist Muslims who participated in Gezi. And that secular people in Gezi, she documents, set up circumstances so Muslims could pray during the demonstration. She speaks of a kind of meeting of the minds in that moment in 2013 during the Gezi protests. But the utopian moment of Gezi seems to have passed.
Perhaps I’m open to the charge of Orientalist fantasy? I’m interested in Koranic recitations—though no expert—but obviously it’s a powerful form. I know within the tradition you can’t call it poetry or music, its Koranic recitation, which is not art. But when I listen to it as a form of art I find it profoundly moving. If I was there and I lived my whole life with it constantly in the background, being called to prayer five times a day, might it become oppressive as the majoritarian view? I can’t say. Personally I find it thrilling. On a side note it is funny to see Turks and Arabs interacting, they have to speak in English with one another because the Turks don’t speak Arabic and the Arabs don’t speak Turkish. One of those post-Colonial ironies. In any case, I was there in a certain frame of mind—my father had just passed away—and the grandeur of Islamic architecture, Koranic recitation, elements of that religious tradition, were profoundly moving to me. Meanwhile I’m talking to Turkish writers and intellectuals who find all of that oppressive. I was leading a double life!
GM: So you went to a mosque at prayer?
LS: I went to several mosques at prayer.
GM: Did you go through the stations?
No, it was pretty informal. One of the things that impressed me about these Turkish mosques was the informality. As a man who looks like I could be Turkish or Arabic I could pass. No one questioned me. I didn’t pray, I’m not religious, but I did find the space of the mosque—I’ve always found the space of the mosque—attractive. My father had just passed away. I thought about him a lot.
GM: Do you feel that way about Catholic churches in Europe?
LS: Not at all. I don’t feel that way about churches; I don’t feel that way about synagogues. I feel very uncomfortable in them.
GM: Why is that? You mentioned Orientalism earlier . . .
LS: It’s either an Orientalist fantasy or something that is in fact more tolerant and all embracing than people usually give Islam credit for that makes me very comfortable in that space. I’ve written poems about the experience, certain feelings I get, inside of mosques.
GM: Myself, I like the patterned repetition and the austerity.
LS: The abstraction.
GM: The lack of representational effigies. I also find the azaan to be beautiful, and I never tired of waking up to the call to prayer at sunrise when I’ve been in that part of the world.
Let’s turn to what else you know about Rumi. Have you ever made a study? Your interest would seem to be more than average . . .
LS: I don’t know . . . I’m certainly no expert, but I’ve read the Coleman Barks translations. I also have a friend, a poet here in New York, Haleh Liza , who’s done her own set of translations. I think they are strong. They will be a book soon.
GM: What do you think of Coleman Barks’ translations?
LS: I find Barks’ translations to be worthwhile, as one translation, if they’re one in a bouquet of other translations.
GM: They’re probably the best known and best selling.
LS: They’re the best selling book of poetry in American culture the last 10-15 years.
GM: Probably outselling Mary Oliver . . .
LS: By a long shot. The criticism of Coleman Barks offered by Rozina Ali in her New Yorker article “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” and by others, is that there’s a de-Islamafication of his translations of Rumi, that he’s taking Islam out, and/or playing into a paradigm that we have in this country of good Islam, bad Islam. That the Sufi’s are good Islam and all the rest is bad Islam that leads to 9/11 and so on. And that that’s falsifying Islam or setting up the tokenizing of Rumi to be the kind of Muslim we want to have in the world . . . there is that framing. For me, Barks took up the essential task of the translation; which is, if he’s going to translate Rumi with all the Islamic proper nouns, reference, and embouchure, none of that is going to have the ecstatic resonance or reverberations for an American reader, even if they’ll have all of this in the footnotes. The responsibility is to find some equivalent ecstasy in a contemporary English. And if Barks finds that in the Chattanooga river, which is the river he grew up next to, that’s fine. I don’t see that as some kind of cleansing of Islam from the poetry, at least not necessarily. I see that as the task of the translator: to come up with equivalencies. Not the final word. There never is in translation.
GM: There are those, as you point out, who would disagree, and those who would see the task of the translator differently.
Isn’t something akin to a Coleman Barks Rumi something that you would wish for the Turks, isn’t that what you had hoped to find there?
LS: It was my projection, yes.
GM: How much of that was predicated on your understanding of Rumi from Barks and your perspective on translation? Talk to me about that, because it would seem to me that what we were talking about earlier, as a Rumi that would bring together the pro-Islamic and the cosmopolitan-international left in Istanbul, would be exactly what Coleman Barks has extracted. The Essential Rumi for everyone.
LS: That, plus one other piece if it is that Sufism seems to be a tourist commodity at this point in Turkey…
GM: Whirling dervishes . . .
LS: You can buy tickets to go see the whirling dervishes do their thing.
GM: The ecstatic theater can be enjoyable. Arguably as enjoyable as craning a neck beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, whatever the price. What’s your interest in Sufism?
LS: Personally I’m trying to think about the possibilities of what I’m calling a spiral poem. We know what a serial poem is, from Jack Spicer and others, and in some way shape or form I think I’ve been following that tradition, and practicing a notion of serial poem. But lately I’ve been thinking what a spiral poem might be, influenced by Barks’ Rumi, and Haleh Liza’s, and other readings in Sufi poetry and Sufi poetics. So what is a spiral poem as opposed to a serial poem and just how much can you contain in a spiral and how could that be a form of cosmopolitanism?
GM: It depends on how many pages are in your spiral notebook.
LS: Exactly! [laughs]. . . so I feel like I do have a stake in it . . .
GM: “Turning turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart, the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .” How is your self-accused Orientalism different from Yeats, or is there a kinship?
LS: I don’t know, Glenn. I do know Borges’s statement "I think that we must not renounce the word Orient, a word so beautiful, for within it, by happy chance, is the word oro" has always reverberated for me.
GM: Let’s stay with Rumi, I’m curious about this question of a “Rumi for all.”
LS: Well, my colleague Dr. Sarah Eltantawi, someone I deeply respect, a professor of religion and author of a book on Sharia law in Nigeria, or the simulacrum of Sharia law in Nigeria, I think she rejects Barks’ translations, or seems to, for the fact that he doesn’t know Farsi, that he’s Englishizing someone else’s translations, and for the sucking out of a certain Islamic content. And that is an important perspective to keep in mind. To remind us that Barks is a particular take at a particular moment on Rumi. I also happen to think his translations read better than anything else we have beforehand. And now I’m looking at Haleh Liza’s translations, which also read well, and she’s of Persian ancestry. Do I think Turks should be reading Coleman Barks in English in order to remedy their own culture’s conflict? . . . No. That would be ridiculous on my part . . . huge cultural configurations would need to be translated there.
GM: Thinking about it . . . what you were saying earlier, and how it leads to this. Arabs and Turks communicate in English. You’re saying Erdogan leads to the Arabification of Turkish culture. You say that on the left you have a rejection of the Arab, and an embrace of either nationalism or pro-European feelings. This is the thing about cosmopolitanism, it goes against the grain of the politics of identity.
LS: That’s right.
GM: That’s the tragedy for US academics. Of which, you are one who can tell the tale. They’re up against the wall now, in identity politics and factionalism.
Weirdly, here we are at Coleman Barks and Rumi.
LS: With Coleman Barks we’ve got a Deep South gentleman who probably I might not be that attracted to as a poet—just in terms of his own poetry or aesthetic—and yet, because of his work with Rumi, a certain accessibility of that work, a certain commitment he’s made, he comes up with a body of work which now I’m finding to be poetically and politically relevant in a surprising way.
Of course I’ve been tracing in the influence of Sufi poetry on contemporary American poetry. Not just Rumi, but poets of Eda, Michael Sells’s Ib’n Arabi translations and their influence on the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey . . .
GM: Hambonistas . . .
LS: . . . and Fanny Howe and Joseph Donahue, none of whom with Mackey are Muslim, but who are drawing off certain things in the Sufi tradition as aesthetically and politically relevant.
GM: Why do you believe they are drawing on the Sufi tradition as a source? What’s their truck with Sufism?
LS: As a poetic possibility and source. I think it’s partly to be able to respond to American culture at large, which is Islamophobic, by pointing to things within the Sufi tradition that can save us from drowning in our own toxins. There is something so active so lively about Islam that it shouldn’t be surprising that those poets remain active and lively, and energetic, the way poets coming from other the religious traditions can often feel exhausted.
GM: If you demonize appropriation, then there is no more American cosmopolitan art. What allows an American poet to adopt Sufi aesthetics is a cosmopolitan practice.
LS: Right.
GM: We are a culture of miscegenation, that is Jazz, that is our poetry, and that is the quilters of Gee’s Bend Alabama, which come from the same source. Anyone who doesn’t understand cultural miscegenation in the United States doesn’t understand American culture. I don’t think you can point to an American writer worth reading that hasn’t allowed their mind to be free enough to absorb and appropriate American culture. The opposite tendency is penury.
LS: We can criticize liberal cosmopolitanism as potentially Cambodian food Wednesdays, Brazilian food Thursdays, Friday night Ethiopian. It can be dilettantish. But liberal cosmopolitanism when practiced with some kind of intelligence is the best we’re going to do. Because it doesn’t commit us to a melting pot, it doesn’t commit us to some sort of essentialism either, it allows for the possibilities of these contiguous, juxtaposed, jostling interactions between multiple kinds of thinking and acting and being from different ethnic, religious and ideological sources. At this point we’re not going to have a revolution that anyone would find desirable. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to settle into any kind of tribalism or identitarianism, or nationalism. The best we can do in 2019 and 2020 in order to produce an imaginatively rich and politically tolerant environment is to promote a poetry of liberal cosmopolitanism.
GM: We can’t do that if we’re not fact based, tending to doubt science and moving away from facts or any kind of scientific method. In favor of a kind of . . . what’s the word . . . I don’t know, a more creative (creationist?) endeavor.
LS: As Haleh Liza has it in her translation of Rumi’s “Found”:
I am stunned and in awe today.
No need to think, hear, or speak.
The source of thought and word found me.
Poetry can sometimes bring us to that condition of receptivity, don’t you think?
GM: I do.
Poem by Leonard Schwartz
Banned In Iran
I intuit the brilliance of the moon
in this room without windows or sense of time.
After all the most archaic unit is the moon
and language is lit with its reflected fire.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it’s barracudas at low tide circling the mirror.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it's a single mother falling asleep next to her child
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it's a woman upbraiding the dawn's indifference
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a mindful wraith, a rattling mystical June.
Room service, please send up six units of moon.
In solitude waking and dreaming are more easily one
As is impossible with others, unless you happen
to be in love or on the phone with the moon.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
what will not transform is the will to transform.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
rolling a carriage through hutongs in the rain.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
wild dogs, gypsies, desperate men
Camping out in the ruins of Byzantium's walls.
Inside the mosque I think about moons.
Low slung chandeliers and bowed believers
populate the interior of the moon room eclipsed.
Scatter moon dust over the menhir
if you can find moon dust and menhirs.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a peal of thunder and a rain of pearls
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a great imam whose eyes ban idiocy
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its the ghost of a wolf haunting the Luberon
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its those wild dogs tearing up a crescent flag
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its the moon I'm after
Its the wound in the moon, the woo
in the moon, that womb in the moon
The screw in the moon, the spitting cobra
in the closet, the V imprint on the spitting cobra
It's the moon I'm after,
It's the moon I'm after, etc.
- Leonard Schwartz
LS: My break-the-ice question was one I came up with in my own imaginative world, and it pertained to Rumi. I was curious about what contemporary Turkish intellectuals, writers, and poets make of Rumi. Rumi is a canonical figure—his shrine is in Konya, Turkey—therefore, he can’t be purged or closed down . . . which is what happens to intellectuals under Erdogan in Turkey, where people are fired or imprisoned for opposing his policies. You can’t possibly do that to Rumi, to Mevlana, as the Turks call him. He’s an important figure in the history of Islam. And therefore in contemporary Turkey, no? At the same time he is an unorthodox and offbeat kind of figure, with a very specific kind of relationship to the ecstatic in his poetry that isn’t always acceptable.
GM: Going back to his father . . .
LS: Bahā ud-Dīn.
GM: He comes from the periphery, born in what is now Afghanistan, to Syria as a boy, and then writing in Farsi.
LS: His appeal is that he seems to offer the possibility of what we might call liberal cosmopolitanism, an embrace of multiple national, linguistic and perspectival elements all in a single body of work, rather than something nationalistic, or something fundamentalist, something narrow.
But I found, talking with Turkish writers, poets, intellectuals, urban planners, and photographers, very little resonance there. He hasn’t been translated, I’m told, in a very long time. Why would you do new translations? I was asked. Well, obviously you always need to do new translations because the language changes. And I found that many of the people I was speaking to, associated with the left, associated with the secular Turkish ideal, associated with pro-European perspectives and so on, are so hostile to the religious element, to Islam as a burgeoning force in Turkey, that Rumi himself, although someone they may have read in high school, or had a certain sympathy with, was still appropriated by and part of a religious sensibility they had only contempt for. That took me aback, actually. I mean I understand that the larger political situation there is that the Erdogan administration is seen as having used Islam to close down elements of an open society in favor of a voting block that is religious. But I have to say, I heard comments coming from the secular left that reminded me of the things you hear from Trump, and Trump supporters here, things like “there are too many Arabs in the country now,” meaning either the refugees coming from Syria, or the wealthy and upper middle class tourists that are coming from Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. With various kinds of wardrobe for the women that secular Turks find suffocating. Of course you also get more sophisticated Turkish critiques, like: “this is a question of capitalism; money is coming in from the Saudi government; Erdogan is courting those currents, that’s why Turkey is tilting toward the Arab World; it’s not that we don’t like Arabs, it’s that we don’t like the way in which the economic system is being reshaped.”
GM: Was Turkey founded as a multi-cultural society? That’s not in their founding ethos. Ataturk established a secular government, but he wasn’t breaking down the multi-religious, multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire and religious hierarchy to establish an American-style multi-cultural foundation. Kemalism was a secular nationalist movement for the Turks. It was against fundamentalist Islamic tendencies that were already in the country. The reason it may sound like Trumpism to an American is that we may presume multiculturalism as a byproduct in secular societies. It makes sense to me to some extent. The other is that there is a reaction against Erdogan’s development of the country for the rich. And a lot of those riches are from an Islamic establishment in places like Saudi Arabia. That’s the complication.
LS: Two qualifiers on that though, yes, of course, I think you’re right, Ataturk’s was a nationalist movement, that’s why, for instance, his followers called the Kurds “mountain Turks,” and denied that they were anything but Turkish. But Istanbul as a city does have a cosmopolitan tradition. Obviously it was Byzantium, it was Constantinople, it had a strong Greek population, it had a strong Jewish population. That’s been significantly reduced over the years, but leaves traces. Meanwhile, compared to the Kemalist tradition, what if Erdogan’s actually more conducive to diversity? But that can’t be right.
Yet Sultanahmet Square looks like the absolute apogee of cosmopolitanism, with all the people, especially women, so different in the aesthetic choices they are making between a full abaya covering, all the way to half naked, and that seemed to me the ideal where you have all of these possibilities one next to the other. We weren’t in Saudi Arabia where everyone has to dress the same way, we weren’t in Chicago where a woman walking down the street in an abaya might be at risk from Islamaphobia. On the surface, and I realize this is just the surface, from a phenomenological perspective, I thought this is what a Muslim majority society can offer, this kind of diversity. If it closes down, as it might elsewhere . . . but what do I know?
GM: I wonder if international is de facto linked with cosmopolitanism? Maybe not. After all, if you look at a cosmopolitan Hassidic community here in New York, it may not be multicultural. Or an international city like Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong is that there is a multicultural, international, cosmopolitan metropolis. That doesn’t sit well with a Han majority, authoritarian government, in control of a command economy.
Cosmopolitanism is an interesting term. I think of Anthony Appiah’s fine book on the topic. One of the best I know. The cosmopolitans you met could be of a neoliberal persuasion, who might surprise you with their views. On the other hand, there’s another aspect I used to experience in China. I’d follow news of Antifa in Seattle, and I would wonder what would happen if members of the American far left lived in an actual authoritarian state, without rule of law. After living in China, what would their impulses be? Would more nuance be brought to tactical anarchism? One might be jailed overnight for breaking windows in Seattle, but where there is rule of law, these actions are protected.
LS: I, too, found myself using China as an example while I was in Istanbul. As bad as things may be in Turkey right now, it’ not China.
GM: If we’re taking this back . . . you were using Rumi, as the embodiment of a pluralism you hoped to find in Istanbul.
LS: In fact the two sides are at such loggerheads that my notion or fantasy that Rumi—who’s both profoundly Muslim and profoundly cosmopolitan, would be a meeting ground, a way out of existential impasse or dead end—was wrong.
Now, when I talked to Eda Yigit, oral historian and author of Gezi Protests May 27th through June 2013, she did talk about anti-Capitalist Muslims who participated in Gezi. And that secular people in Gezi, she documents, set up circumstances so Muslims could pray during the demonstration. She speaks of a kind of meeting of the minds in that moment in 2013 during the Gezi protests. But the utopian moment of Gezi seems to have passed.
Perhaps I’m open to the charge of Orientalist fantasy? I’m interested in Koranic recitations—though no expert—but obviously it’s a powerful form. I know within the tradition you can’t call it poetry or music, its Koranic recitation, which is not art. But when I listen to it as a form of art I find it profoundly moving. If I was there and I lived my whole life with it constantly in the background, being called to prayer five times a day, might it become oppressive as the majoritarian view? I can’t say. Personally I find it thrilling. On a side note it is funny to see Turks and Arabs interacting, they have to speak in English with one another because the Turks don’t speak Arabic and the Arabs don’t speak Turkish. One of those post-Colonial ironies. In any case, I was there in a certain frame of mind—my father had just passed away—and the grandeur of Islamic architecture, Koranic recitation, elements of that religious tradition, were profoundly moving to me. Meanwhile I’m talking to Turkish writers and intellectuals who find all of that oppressive. I was leading a double life!
GM: So you went to a mosque at prayer?
LS: I went to several mosques at prayer.
GM: Did you go through the stations?
No, it was pretty informal. One of the things that impressed me about these Turkish mosques was the informality. As a man who looks like I could be Turkish or Arabic I could pass. No one questioned me. I didn’t pray, I’m not religious, but I did find the space of the mosque—I’ve always found the space of the mosque—attractive. My father had just passed away. I thought about him a lot.
GM: Do you feel that way about Catholic churches in Europe?
LS: Not at all. I don’t feel that way about churches; I don’t feel that way about synagogues. I feel very uncomfortable in them.
GM: Why is that? You mentioned Orientalism earlier . . .
LS: It’s either an Orientalist fantasy or something that is in fact more tolerant and all embracing than people usually give Islam credit for that makes me very comfortable in that space. I’ve written poems about the experience, certain feelings I get, inside of mosques.
GM: Myself, I like the patterned repetition and the austerity.
LS: The abstraction.
GM: The lack of representational effigies. I also find the azaan to be beautiful, and I never tired of waking up to the call to prayer at sunrise when I’ve been in that part of the world.
Let’s turn to what else you know about Rumi. Have you ever made a study? Your interest would seem to be more than average . . .
LS: I don’t know . . . I’m certainly no expert, but I’ve read the Coleman Barks translations. I also have a friend, a poet here in New York, Haleh Liza , who’s done her own set of translations. I think they are strong. They will be a book soon.
GM: What do you think of Coleman Barks’ translations?
LS: I find Barks’ translations to be worthwhile, as one translation, if they’re one in a bouquet of other translations.
GM: They’re probably the best known and best selling.
LS: They’re the best selling book of poetry in American culture the last 10-15 years.
GM: Probably outselling Mary Oliver . . .
LS: By a long shot. The criticism of Coleman Barks offered by Rozina Ali in her New Yorker article “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” and by others, is that there’s a de-Islamafication of his translations of Rumi, that he’s taking Islam out, and/or playing into a paradigm that we have in this country of good Islam, bad Islam. That the Sufi’s are good Islam and all the rest is bad Islam that leads to 9/11 and so on. And that that’s falsifying Islam or setting up the tokenizing of Rumi to be the kind of Muslim we want to have in the world . . . there is that framing. For me, Barks took up the essential task of the translation; which is, if he’s going to translate Rumi with all the Islamic proper nouns, reference, and embouchure, none of that is going to have the ecstatic resonance or reverberations for an American reader, even if they’ll have all of this in the footnotes. The responsibility is to find some equivalent ecstasy in a contemporary English. And if Barks finds that in the Chattanooga river, which is the river he grew up next to, that’s fine. I don’t see that as some kind of cleansing of Islam from the poetry, at least not necessarily. I see that as the task of the translator: to come up with equivalencies. Not the final word. There never is in translation.
GM: There are those, as you point out, who would disagree, and those who would see the task of the translator differently.
Isn’t something akin to a Coleman Barks Rumi something that you would wish for the Turks, isn’t that what you had hoped to find there?
LS: It was my projection, yes.
GM: How much of that was predicated on your understanding of Rumi from Barks and your perspective on translation? Talk to me about that, because it would seem to me that what we were talking about earlier, as a Rumi that would bring together the pro-Islamic and the cosmopolitan-international left in Istanbul, would be exactly what Coleman Barks has extracted. The Essential Rumi for everyone.
LS: That, plus one other piece if it is that Sufism seems to be a tourist commodity at this point in Turkey…
GM: Whirling dervishes . . .
LS: You can buy tickets to go see the whirling dervishes do their thing.
GM: The ecstatic theater can be enjoyable. Arguably as enjoyable as craning a neck beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, whatever the price. What’s your interest in Sufism?
LS: Personally I’m trying to think about the possibilities of what I’m calling a spiral poem. We know what a serial poem is, from Jack Spicer and others, and in some way shape or form I think I’ve been following that tradition, and practicing a notion of serial poem. But lately I’ve been thinking what a spiral poem might be, influenced by Barks’ Rumi, and Haleh Liza’s, and other readings in Sufi poetry and Sufi poetics. So what is a spiral poem as opposed to a serial poem and just how much can you contain in a spiral and how could that be a form of cosmopolitanism?
GM: It depends on how many pages are in your spiral notebook.
LS: Exactly! [laughs]. . . so I feel like I do have a stake in it . . .
GM: “Turning turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart, the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .” How is your self-accused Orientalism different from Yeats, or is there a kinship?
LS: I don’t know, Glenn. I do know Borges’s statement "I think that we must not renounce the word Orient, a word so beautiful, for within it, by happy chance, is the word oro" has always reverberated for me.
GM: Let’s stay with Rumi, I’m curious about this question of a “Rumi for all.”
LS: Well, my colleague Dr. Sarah Eltantawi, someone I deeply respect, a professor of religion and author of a book on Sharia law in Nigeria, or the simulacrum of Sharia law in Nigeria, I think she rejects Barks’ translations, or seems to, for the fact that he doesn’t know Farsi, that he’s Englishizing someone else’s translations, and for the sucking out of a certain Islamic content. And that is an important perspective to keep in mind. To remind us that Barks is a particular take at a particular moment on Rumi. I also happen to think his translations read better than anything else we have beforehand. And now I’m looking at Haleh Liza’s translations, which also read well, and she’s of Persian ancestry. Do I think Turks should be reading Coleman Barks in English in order to remedy their own culture’s conflict? . . . No. That would be ridiculous on my part . . . huge cultural configurations would need to be translated there.
GM: Thinking about it . . . what you were saying earlier, and how it leads to this. Arabs and Turks communicate in English. You’re saying Erdogan leads to the Arabification of Turkish culture. You say that on the left you have a rejection of the Arab, and an embrace of either nationalism or pro-European feelings. This is the thing about cosmopolitanism, it goes against the grain of the politics of identity.
LS: That’s right.
GM: That’s the tragedy for US academics. Of which, you are one who can tell the tale. They’re up against the wall now, in identity politics and factionalism.
Weirdly, here we are at Coleman Barks and Rumi.
LS: With Coleman Barks we’ve got a Deep South gentleman who probably I might not be that attracted to as a poet—just in terms of his own poetry or aesthetic—and yet, because of his work with Rumi, a certain accessibility of that work, a certain commitment he’s made, he comes up with a body of work which now I’m finding to be poetically and politically relevant in a surprising way.
Of course I’ve been tracing in the influence of Sufi poetry on contemporary American poetry. Not just Rumi, but poets of Eda, Michael Sells’s Ib’n Arabi translations and their influence on the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey . . .
GM: Hambonistas . . .
LS: . . . and Fanny Howe and Joseph Donahue, none of whom with Mackey are Muslim, but who are drawing off certain things in the Sufi tradition as aesthetically and politically relevant.
GM: Why do you believe they are drawing on the Sufi tradition as a source? What’s their truck with Sufism?
LS: As a poetic possibility and source. I think it’s partly to be able to respond to American culture at large, which is Islamophobic, by pointing to things within the Sufi tradition that can save us from drowning in our own toxins. There is something so active so lively about Islam that it shouldn’t be surprising that those poets remain active and lively, and energetic, the way poets coming from other the religious traditions can often feel exhausted.
GM: If you demonize appropriation, then there is no more American cosmopolitan art. What allows an American poet to adopt Sufi aesthetics is a cosmopolitan practice.
LS: Right.
GM: We are a culture of miscegenation, that is Jazz, that is our poetry, and that is the quilters of Gee’s Bend Alabama, which come from the same source. Anyone who doesn’t understand cultural miscegenation in the United States doesn’t understand American culture. I don’t think you can point to an American writer worth reading that hasn’t allowed their mind to be free enough to absorb and appropriate American culture. The opposite tendency is penury.
LS: We can criticize liberal cosmopolitanism as potentially Cambodian food Wednesdays, Brazilian food Thursdays, Friday night Ethiopian. It can be dilettantish. But liberal cosmopolitanism when practiced with some kind of intelligence is the best we’re going to do. Because it doesn’t commit us to a melting pot, it doesn’t commit us to some sort of essentialism either, it allows for the possibilities of these contiguous, juxtaposed, jostling interactions between multiple kinds of thinking and acting and being from different ethnic, religious and ideological sources. At this point we’re not going to have a revolution that anyone would find desirable. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to settle into any kind of tribalism or identitarianism, or nationalism. The best we can do in 2019 and 2020 in order to produce an imaginatively rich and politically tolerant environment is to promote a poetry of liberal cosmopolitanism.
GM: We can’t do that if we’re not fact based, tending to doubt science and moving away from facts or any kind of scientific method. In favor of a kind of . . . what’s the word . . . I don’t know, a more creative (creationist?) endeavor.
LS: As Haleh Liza has it in her translation of Rumi’s “Found”:
I am stunned and in awe today.
No need to think, hear, or speak.
The source of thought and word found me.
Poetry can sometimes bring us to that condition of receptivity, don’t you think?
GM: I do.
Poem by Leonard Schwartz
Banned In Iran
I intuit the brilliance of the moon
in this room without windows or sense of time.
After all the most archaic unit is the moon
and language is lit with its reflected fire.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it’s barracudas at low tide circling the mirror.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it's a single mother falling asleep next to her child
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it's a woman upbraiding the dawn's indifference
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a mindful wraith, a rattling mystical June.
Room service, please send up six units of moon.
In solitude waking and dreaming are more easily one
As is impossible with others, unless you happen
to be in love or on the phone with the moon.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
what will not transform is the will to transform.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
rolling a carriage through hutongs in the rain.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
wild dogs, gypsies, desperate men
Camping out in the ruins of Byzantium's walls.
Inside the mosque I think about moons.
Low slung chandeliers and bowed believers
populate the interior of the moon room eclipsed.
Scatter moon dust over the menhir
if you can find moon dust and menhirs.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a peal of thunder and a rain of pearls
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a great imam whose eyes ban idiocy
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its the ghost of a wolf haunting the Luberon
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its those wild dogs tearing up a crescent flag
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its the moon I'm after
Its the wound in the moon, the woo
in the moon, that womb in the moon
The screw in the moon, the spitting cobra
in the closet, the V imprint on the spitting cobra
It's the moon I'm after,
It's the moon I'm after, etc.
- Leonard Schwartz
