Rumi’s Sufism Received in and Perceived by the English-speaking and French-speaking Worlds: A Study of the English and French Translations

Abstract

Calâleddin Mohammad Balxi (known as Rumi), a Persian mystical poet of the 13th century, is amongst the best known in the West and one of the most translated authors of Persian literature, especially in English. This is due to the abundance of his poetic works which consist of mystical and didactic Masnavi e ma’navi and a collection of lyrical qazals and quatrains, Divân e Şams e Tabrizi. He is also known and translated because of the relatively recent strong appeal of his poems, with their spiritual undertones, to the North American audience. Rumi’s poems appeared sporadically in German, English and French from the beginning of the 19th century, until the full English translation of Masnavi in the early 20th century. Ever since, the English-speaking world has had waves of reception thanks to numerous retranslations and adaptations. In the French-speaking world, however, the reception of Rumi has been far less important: the majority of the translations were introduced in the second half of the 20th century and failed to find an equally enthusiastic audience. Despite numerous translations into both languages, transferring the poetic discourse of Rumi into French and English is a particularly complicated task, considering the specificities of Persian poetry, Rumi’s poetic and musical genius, his unique use of the language, and the mystical quality of his thought.

In this study, we have first looked into the principal obstacles that translators must surmount approaching the problematic from linguistic, semiotic, stylistic, poetic, and hermeneutic perspectives. The general structure of this quest relies on three core theoretical bases; namely, semiotic, ethical and hermeneutic, as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The research starts with problems posed by the linguistic distance separating the source and target semiotic systems; it continues with the complications caused by the particularities of discourse creation by Rumi – specifically, his use of rhetorical devices; and it subsequently shows how this seemingly impossible transfer process has been carried out by French and English-speaking translators of various periods by applying the principles of Berman’s theory of translation ethics to their works. At the end, these observations of the textual evidence are set in a sociolinguistic context using polysystem theory in an attempt to shed light on the underlying forces of the economic, political, and literary institutions in the receiving cultures, which have an important bearing not only on the choice and the quality of the reception of the original works, but also on the very linguistic choices of the translator as well. Working from a diverse trilingual corpus, composed of the English and French translations (or arguably adaptations) of both the didactic (Masnavi e M’anavi) and mystic-lyric (Divân e Şams e Tabrizi) works of Rumi, the present thesis explains the differences in the level and nature of this reception in the two target cultural spheres, from multiple standpoints and utilizing various theories, in a multidisciplinary approach.