Rumi: The Big Red Book: The Great Masterpiece Celebrating Mystical Love and Friendship - Hardcover

Barks, Coleman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061905828 ISBN 13: 9780061905827

Publisher: HarperOne, 2010

Synopsis

"Rumi's Divani Shamsi Tabriz" ("The Works of Shams of Tabriz" - named in honor of Rumi's spiritual teacher and friend) is a collection of lyric poems that contain more than 40,000 verses by this bestselling poet, and is a classic of Persian literature. Its most familiar form is as a big red book, hence the name. Coleman Barks is famous for his renderings of Rumi's poetry and his work on these particular poems has never been published anywhere. This book represents over thirty-three years on Rumi's seminal classic.

About this title

Review:

“Coleman Barks is a pioneer and renown scholar on Rumi, the great Sufi. In his elegant and exquisite way, Coleman has made Rumi as popular as Shakespeare to the world and continues to inspire us with the Rumi’s ecstatic poetry.” (Deepak Chopra, author of The Shadow Effect and Jesus)

“Really, what other book would anyone ever need?” (Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Honeybee)

“Coleman Barks found Rumi floating in some Georgia lake and brought him back to life. What a blessing! Rumi says, ‘Some nights stay up until dawn, as the moon sometimes does for the sun.’ Coleman has stayed up all night, and every reader is grateful.” (Robert Bly, National Book Award-winning poet and translator)

“Rumi’s Big Red Book tells us: ‘Compassion builds a door, Restlessness cuts a key.’ I am forever grateful to Coleman Barks, restless, yearning to find the bridge from Rumi and Shams to the world we presently inhabit. He is truly to Be Loved for making this ‘transaction with beauty’...” (Debra Winger, Actress)

“Without question, we can credit Coleman Barks with making Rumi accessible to American readers through his modernized renditions of the best-known poems of the great Islamic mystic.... Richly sensual yet never flowery, Barks’ language emphasizes Rumi’s embodied spirituality in a book to savor.” (Booklist (starred review))

“An emeritus English professor at the University of Georgia, Barks has spent 34 years working on Rumi’s poetry — you could even say that Rumi has been the secret companion musician Barks has danced to.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Barks has become internationally renowned for his translations.... Rumi: The Big Red Book is the culmination of his work.” (Shambhala Sun)

From the Back Cover:

Considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, The Big Red Book is perhaps the greatest work of Rumi, the medieval Sufi mystic who also happens to be the bestselling poet in America.

Rumi was born in 1207 to a long line of Islamic theologians and lawyers on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire in what is now Afghanistan. In order to escape the invading Mongol armies of Genghis Khan, his family moved west to a town now found in Turkey, where he eventually became the leader of a school of whirling dervishes. It was a fateful day in 1244 when he met Shams Tabriz, a wild mystic with rare gifts and insight. The renowned scholar Rumi had found a soul mate and friend who would become his spiritual mentor and literary muse. "What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, "I met today in a human being."

Out of their friendship, Rumi wrote thousands of lyric poems and short quatrains in honor of his friend Shams Tabriz. They are poems of divine epiphany, spiritual awakening, friendship, and love. For centuries, Rumi's collection of these verses has traditionally been bound in a red cover, hence the title of this inspired classic of spiritual literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0061905828
• ISBN 13: 9780061905827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512