Coleman Barks and the American Rumi
Barks, who does not read Persian, recast the twentieth-century scholarly English translations of R. A. Nicholson and A. J. Arberry into American free verse; The Essential Rumi (1995) gathered these versions. A 2017 essay argued the recasting systematically dropped the Islamic vocabulary and content of the originals.
Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi (1995); R. A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí (1925–40); A. J. Arberry's Rumi translations; Rozina Ali, 'The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi', The New Yorker (2017)
The best-selling English-language versions of Rumi's poetry, made by a poet who did not read Persian, working from a Victorian scholar's translations.