Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing
Persian Desert, American Field
Version by Coleman Barks, 1984, after Furūzānfar quatrain 395Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field. I'll meet you there.
- First attested
- 1984The English first appears in Open Secret: Versions of Rumi (Threshold Books, Putney, Vermont, 1984), page 8, made from a literal translation by John Moyne, and is reprinted in The Essential Rumi (1995), page 36 and The Illuminated Rumi (1997), page 98 — printings and pages recorded in Ibrahim Gamard's concordance of February 2008. The Persian it renders is far older: quatrain 395 in volume eight of Furūzānfar's edition of 1963, collated from the earliest manuscripts, and carrying none of the concordance's markers for quatrains absent from those manuscripts or composed by earlier poets.
- Claimed
- 13th centuryasserted by Publishers, anthologists and the poem's public placements, which present the lines as Rumi's own words. The Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion card for MTA New York Transit credits them 'Translated from Persian by Coleman Barks and John Moyne', though Barks did not read Persian and his own 1984 subtitle called the book versions.
The claim runs about 700 years ahead of the evidence.
The famous four lines are Coleman Barks's English of 1984, not Rumi's wording: Furūzānfar's quatrain 395 says that beyond Islam and unbelief there is a desert plain, and Barks told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002, 'I took the Islam out of it.'
Coleman Barks's 1984 version of a Rumi quatrain, read as release from judgement; the field is Barks's own.
Coleman Barks printed these lines in Open Secret in 1984, working from a literal translation by John Moyne; The Essential Rumi reprinted them in 1995 and they have circulated as Rumi's ever since. The Persian is quatrain 395 in Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar's edition of 1963, and Ibrahim Gamard's concordance, which marks the quatrains composed by earlier poets or absent from the earliest manuscripts, marks nothing against it — where four of its neighbours on the same three pages of Open Secret are marked. Gamard and Rawan Farhadi translate it in 2008: beyond Islam and unbelief there is a desert plain, and the knower of God who reaches it prostrates in prayer. Arberry wrote desert in 1949, and so did Barks when he versioned the same quatrain from Arberry for Birdsong in 1993. The field is his, and the grass.
Light
Ibrahim Gamard, who corrects Barks poem by poem, allows that his versions communicate far more successfully than literal translations, and says Barks created one of the most memorised 'Rumi poems' in the United States; Poetry in Motion put it into New York's transit system.
Shadow
Gamard's verdict on the same four lines is that Barks divested the poem of its Islamic content and substituted a dichotomy suggestive of going beyond good and evil. Barks told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002: 'I took the Islam out of it.'
