Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing

Persian Desert, American Field

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field. I'll meet you there.
Version by Coleman Barks, 1984, after Furūzānfar quatrain 395

Earliest record: 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.
Said to date from: 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 lines are Barks's English of 1984; Furūzānfar's quatrain 395 has a desert beyond Islam and unbelief. Barks told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002, 'I took the Islam out of it.'

Ibrahim W. Gamard and A. G. Rawan Farhadi, The Quatrains of Rumi: Complete Translation with Persian Text, Islamic Mystical Commentary, Manual of Terms, and Concordance (2008); John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi (1984); Ibrahim Gamard, Corrections of Popular Versions of Rumi's Poetry.

Coleman Barks's 1984 version of a Rumi quatrain; the field is Barks's own.

More context

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. Ibrahim Gamard's concordance marks the quatrains composed by earlier poets or absent from the earliest manuscripts, and it marks nothing against this one. 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 allows that Barks's versions 'communicate far more successfully than literal translations'.

Shadow

Gamard says Barks 'divested the poem of its Islamic content'; Barks said in 2002, 'I took the Islam out of it.'

Sources11 sources

Primary source

A. J. Arberry (translator), The Rubāʿīyāt of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī: Select Translations into English Verse, 1949, London: Emery Walker; p. 41a, as indexed in Gamard's concordanceAn earlier scholar's English of the same quatrain, opening 'There lies a desert / Past faith and infidelity' — it keeps the desert while rendering islām as 'faith'. Arberry worked from Ulfat's Isfahan edition of 1941, the same text the commercial one-volume Dīvān of 1957 reprinted, which is why his numbering and the popular books' agree at 158.
John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, 1984, Threshold Books, Putney, Vermont; the quatrain at p. 8The first printing of the English lines, and the book whose subtitle states what they are: versions, not translations.
Coleman Barks, Birdsong: Fifty-Three Short Poems, 1993, Maypop, Athens, Georgia; the quatrain at p. 17, reworked from Arberry's 1949 volumeBarks's second, different version of the same quatrain, made nine years after Open Secret and from Arberry rather than Moyne. Gamard's concordance indexes its opening as 'There is a desert' — evidence that the field of 1984 was a choice and not a limitation of his source.
Ibrahim W. Gamard and A. G. Rawan Farhadi (translators), The Quatrains of Rumi: Complete Translation with Persian Text, Islamic Mystical Commentary, Manual of Terms, and Concordance, 2008, Sufi Dari Books, San Rafael, California, 2008 (ISBN 9781597314503); second revised edition Fons Vitae, Louisville, 2023 (ISBN 978-1941610-671). Furūzānfar quatrain no. 395, p. 407 in the first edition = Farhadi-Gamard no. 1314, p. 430 in the secondThe complete English translation, with the Persian, of the nearly 2,000 quatrains in volume eight of Furūzānfar's edition. Gamard quotes their rendering of quatrain 395 on dar-al-masnavi.org, citing p. 407: 'Beyond Islam and unbelief [az kufr-o ze-islâm] there is a "desert plain". For us there is a "yearning" in the midst of that expanse. The knower (of God) who reaches that (plain) will prostrate [sar-râ be-neh-ad] (in prayer), (For) there is neither Islam nor unbelief, nor any "where" (in) that place.' The F-395 = FG-1314 equivalence and the second-edition page are given in the site's own instructions for using the concordances, which use 'Out beyond' as their worked example.

Scholarship

Ibrahim Gamard, Apparently Irreligious Verses in the Works of Mawlana Rumi, dar-al-masnavi.org/apparently-irreligious-verses.html, open access; section 'Concerning "Unbelief" or "Heresy"', item (8)Prints quatrain 395 with the transliteration az kufr-o ze-islâm and the page reference to The Quatrains of Rumi, p. 407; states that Barks 'created (based on a translation by John Moyne) one of the most well-known and memorized "Rumi poems" in the United States', citing Open Secret (1984), p. 8 and The Essential Rumi (1995), p. 36; and judges that Barks 'divested the poem of its Islamic content' and 'substituted his own very un-Islamic dichotomy in the first verse, which is suggestive of the amoral idea of going "beyond good and evil"'. Gamard's own reading of the Persian is that here Rumi 'appears to discard Islam, whereas he is describing a profound state of mystical prayer that is beyond the ordinary mind, which is restricted by beliefs, concepts'.
Ibrahim Gamard, Corrections of Popular Versions of Rumi's Poetry, dar-al-masnavi.org/corrections_popular.html; the quatrain under 'From Versions by Coleman Barks', with notes 30 and 31The concession quoted in the Light: 'Many people have memorized their favorite lines -- usually those rendered by Coleman Barks, because his versions communicate far more successfully than literal translations.' Note 30 carries Barks's own explanation quoted from the San Francisco Chronicle, with Gamard's comment that the Persian poem 'is not about going "beyond good and evil"' and 'is not a rejection of Islam'; note 31 gives the full Persian transliteration of quatrain 395 and points to the renderings by Arberry (p. 41a) and Nevit Ergin, 'Crazy As We Are' (p. 21b), without printing either. The same page prints 'the poet Coleman Barks (1937-2026)'.
Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teaching and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi, 2000, Oneworld, Oxford; revised edition 2008The standard English account of Rumi's textual history and Western reception, including Barks working from earlier English translations rather than from the Persian. Named in docs/SOURCES.md as the single best defence against fabricated Rūmī attributions.
Ibrahim Gamard, Concordance of Translations and Versions of Rumi's Quatrains Published in English, 2008, dar-al-masnavi.org, February 2008 (pdf/quatrains_concord_old.pdf); entries 'Arb p. 41a, Isf 158 (= F 395)', 'Barks OS p. 8b, Isf 158 (= F 395) [also in Barks ER p. 36; also in Barks IR p. 98] b/o Moyne', 'Barks BR p. 17b, Isf 158 (= F 395) b/o Arb p. 41a'Establishes that the quatrain is Isfahan 158 and Furūzānfar 395; that Barks's Open Secret version was made from Moyne's literal ('b/o' meaning based on) and reprinted in The Essential Rumi and The Illuminated Rumi; that Barks made a second and different version of the same quatrain from Arberry in Birdsong; and that F 395 carries none of the concordance's markers, where four quatrains printed beside it at Open Secret pp. 7c, 8c, 9a and 9b do — pp. 7c and 8c '[NOT RUMI: NOT IN EARLIEST MSS]', pp. 9a and 9b '[NOT RUMI: EARLIER POET]'. Its preface also explains the numbering: the popular books rely on the commercial one-volume Dīvān of 1957, whose quatrains are in fact Muhammad Baqir Ulfat's Isfahan edition of 1941, the same text Arberry had used in 1949, 'so that the quatrain numbers used in the popular books matched the same quatrains translated by Arberry'.

Where this claim originates

Poetry Society of America, Poetry in Motion: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, poetrysociety.org; MTA New York Transit in cooperation with the Poetry Society of America, sponsored by Barnes & Noble Booksellers; no year of display givenPrints the lines under the credit 'Translated from Persian by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, from The Essential Rumi, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 1995 by Coleman Barks. Reprinted with the permission of Coleman Barks.' — a public placement presenting as a translation from Persian what Barks's own 1984 subtitle called a version.
Jonathan Curiel, Poet follows his own muse in translating Sufi mystic / His Rumi books are surprising best-sellers, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 April 2002; quoted in full in Gamard's note 30Barks's own account of what he did to this quatrain. Curiel reports that Barks rewrote a line which 'originally read in English, "out beyond what is holy in Islam and what is not permitted in Islam"' as 'out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing', and quotes him by telephone from his home in Athens, Georgia: 'I took the Islam out of it. Yeah, the fundamentalists or people who think there is one particular revelation scold me for this.'
Rozina Ali, The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, 2017, The New Yorker, Page-Turner, 5 January 2017The article that put this quarrel before a general readership, opening on these four lines and reporting that Barks did not read Persian, working instead from earlier English translations — a point independently carried by Lewis (2000) and by Barks's own account to Curiel in 2002. Cited for the reception only: newyorker.com could not be fetched, so the entry does not rely on its account of the Persian vocabulary, taking kufr and islām instead from Gamard's printed transliteration of quatrain 395.