Reddit Reddit reviews The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition

We found 9 Reddit comments about The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Literature & Fiction
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Ancient, Classical & Medieval Poetry
Ancient & Classical Poetry
The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition
The Essential Rumi
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9 Reddit comments about The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition:

u/[deleted] · 5 pointsr/TwoXChromosomes
  • e. e. cummings I carry your heart
  • Richard Brautigan's I was trying to describe you to someone
  • Rumi
    > May this marriage be blessed. May this marriage be as sweet as milk and honey. May this marriage be as intoxicating as old wine. May this marriage be fruitful like a date tree. May this marriage be full of laughter and everyday a paradise. May this marriage be a seal of compassion for here and hereafter. May this marriage be as welcome as the full moon in the night sky. Listen lovers, now you go on, as I become silent and kiss this blessed night.

    or this from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet:
    > Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
u/Autopilot_Psychonaut · 3 pointsr/Christianity

You'll find Christ because you're asking. You shall receive.

One of the best books to explore the relationship between Man and God is Coleman Bark's translations of the Sufi Mystic, Rumi.


But to know Christ, you need to read the Gospels.

u/Shaquintosh · 2 pointsr/Poetry

Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi, particularly "The Essential Rumi".

u/TheBaconMenace · 2 pointsr/philosophy

My first try didn't seem to go through, so here's a second.

Amazon reviews are an okay place to start. A lot of people offer helpful comments. But, as you said, getting into thinkers that appeal to other audiences outside of just philosophers gets a bit sticky. I wouldn't be so quick to denounce or dismiss the religious aspect. Keep in mind if you want to read Augustine you'll be reading a religious thinker, so he has to be translated as such. For example, you could get a more technical translation of the Confessions, or you could find one operating more in the poetic spirit of Augustine, but regardless you're going to be reading a deeply religious text. Both are good translations, and both capture something of Augustine that the other probably misses. In the end, you have to ask yourself what you want more and what fits your purposes more. Also with regard to religious thinkers, it's important to try to read them on their own terms without having made up your mind before getting into the book. Allow yourself to agree with the thinker as much as you can--get inside their heads, travel with them, dwell with them. At the end, you can make a judgement, but give them a fair trial. This is also where translations can help. Some are simply more engaging, even if they're not "word-for-word" translations. A great example of this is Coleman Barks' "translations" of the poems of Muslim mystic Rumi. He actually completely fails (intentionally so) to translate Rumi word-for-word. Instead, he tries to write a poem in English that captures the language, feeling, and ideas of Rumi himself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's a lot nicer than just reading a book of translated poems full of footnotes and technicalities. If I'm going to write a deeply researched paper on Rumi, perhaps I should find another translation, but if I want to really learn Rumi and try to gain from his knowledge, I might want to begin with Barks.

As for other reviews, you can often find them simply by Googling. For example, here's a review on Hannay's translation of a book by Kierkegaard that is done in a professional, scholarly way. I found it on the first page of Google searching "alastair hannay translation review."

It sounds like hard work, and it is, but it's worth it.

Also, if it makes you feel any better we used Penguin editions for many of my undergraduate classes as text books.

u/nikiverse · 1 pointr/yoga

For everyday little thoughts or things that my yoga teachers say around savasana I like


u/-momoyome- · 1 pointr/wemetonline

This is my go-to for Rumi if you're interested.


Aww that's really sweet that he seems to send you flowers a lot <3 It's always fun to open the door and find a nice bouquet waiting :D You should post a picture when they're all in bloom, I'm sure they'll be breathtaking!

u/sharpiepriest1 · 1 pointr/worldnews

Everything you describe are the modern political movements of Wahhabism and Salfism, funded almost entirely by Saudi Arabia in an attempt to spread their influence throughout the Islamic world. The ideology they espouse is fascistic and repulsive, but it has very little connection to the actual history of Islam. In fact, they were founded on the premise of sweeping away Islam's history and starting over. One of the first things the Wahhabis did when they took Mecca: destroy the actual tomb of the Prophet.


The people burning people alive count for less than 1 percent of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. You cannot use the present to make assumptions about history, that's absurd. If you focus on the current state of Baghdad, and make the assumption that it's always been like that, you never learn about the fact that, for a few centuries, it was the richest city in the world and home to a flourishing intellectual culture that hosted people from as far away as China. You never learn about the Islamic golden age, or the libraries of Muslim Spain which collectively held millions of books while the royal library of Paris contained a grand total of 92.

You never learn a damn thing.

And as far as what it does that makes people's lives better? Including producing some of the best poetry ever, written, by humans, Islam has a long tradition of feeding and caring for the poor by paying out Zakat. The real world examples of this far outweigh any violence done in the name of religion.

People misquote Marx on this all the time when they say "religion is the opium of the masses." The full quote is: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"

u/Kirkayak · 1 pointr/atheism