The prospect of reviewing a book of poetry in translation when one doesn’t have access to the original can prompt a misgiving or two.  By absence of access I mean, here, access to the source language. The book of Rumi’s poetry on hand, a translation from the Persian by Farrukh Dhondy, presents just this difficulty, as I have no knowledge of Persian.  In such a situation, one has to confine oneself to judging whether the translation in its own right “works” for one or not, without concerning oneself with measures of its quality, such as its fidelity to the original, or its capture of the original’s diction and spirit. As an instance, if the poems in translation possess a certain grace – or a certain cumbrousness, or power – does one take it as given that the original, too, must be endued with the same qualities? The conundrum was brought vividly alive for me once in connection with the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges. I remarked, to a native speaker of Spanish, that I was enchanted by the timbre of Borges’s poems, their lyricism and plangency. My interlocutor, who had read the same translations as I had, by Alasdair Reid, said that the lyricism was in fact an artifact of the translation, and that the poems in their Spanish original were considerably more matter-of-fact, less ‘soulful’.  And yet, I was certain that were I to encounter translations of Borges’s poems – Limits, The Watcher, The Labyrinth – that were rendered less ‘soulfully’, I’d love them  no less for that, as I’m sure their kernels of ellipsis, of idiosyncratic observation, of portentousness (fingerprints of Borges’s poetry that have moved me deeply) would survive pretty much any translation save the most ham-handed.

When reading Dhondy’s rendition I got the same sense of Rumi’s poetry: of its animation by an indwelling, ineffaceable beauty, of a ‘tamper-proof’ sort, that the original must possess. One of the resolves Dhondy avows he made when setting out on the enterprise was to adhere to the metre of much of Rumi’s original, the iambic pentameter, and to the rhyme schemes Rumi employed. This avowal straightaway renders the translation fascinating, on at least two counts. One continually wonders whether the rigours of adhering to the original’s meter might not have come in the way of conveying some of the fervour, and indeed nuance, of Rumi’s flights of mystical inspiration.   Parallely, one wonders whether certain word choices have been compelled more by the exigencies of deferring to the rhyme schemes than by the calls of hewing close to Rumi’s poetic sensibility and Sufiyana transport.

Whatever the resolutions to these speculations (and I’ll perhaps never be privy to them), one thing is for sure: the poetry works, and splendidly. The translation is marked throughout by a delightful ingenuity of wordplay, and of felicitous choice of word, of turn of phrase.  These attributes are apparent in each of the volume’s four sections, one apiece for the Rubaiyat, the ‘philosophical poems’ or ghazals, the parables from the famed Masnavi, and the aphorisms.  Whether it’s the bbab rhyme pattern of the Rubaais, or the iterative ends to the second lines in the ghazals’ couplets, or the variable prosody (baba, baab) of the aphorisms, Dhondy sculpts his lines with admirable, and often extraordinary, finesse and resource.

Set beside the translations that have long been considered by many as definitive for Rumi’s oeuvre, Coleman Barks’s, I find Dhondy’s to be considerably more engaging. In his Translator’s Note (placed artfully at the book’s close, not, as is often done, at its head), Dhondy has a clutch of observations about such efforts as those of Barks’s, professing impatience with the mutation of Rumi’s poetry into what he censoriously terms, at one place, “chopped-up prose” whilst at another, “prosaic nonsense”; and I have to say that on reading his, Dhondy’s, translation, I felt his peeve might not be wholly unwarranted. (Incidentally, the book is well worth acquiring just for the pleasures afforded by Dhondy’s introductory notes and his translator’s afterword – they are as illuminating as they are trenchant and caustic.)

Arguably the most effective translations are those that transport you to such a plane of absorption that you cease to preoccupy yourself with the technicalities involved, and abandon yourself to your delectation of the work. To this class belong, to my mind, the likes of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translation of Kabir; Dilip Chitre’s of Tukaram; John Ciardi’s of Dante’s Commedia; or Rahul Soni’s of Ashok Vajpeyi and Shrikant Verma, or – from the Persian again –  Fitzgerald’s famed recreation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (for which Dhondy, too, is unstinting in his praise).  Happily, Dhondy’s translation possesses this merit in abundance, and so lends itself well to being read as a standalone literary text, offering its own seductions and rewards (though never without, it has to be said, Rumi’s spirit making itself felt from under each line).  Witness this rubaai, its musicality and its imagery of ceaseless, fluidal departure: