Excellent performance of an excellent translation of a really striking poem.
Hmm. Even after reading it a few times, I'm not really sure of its significance. Could you help explain the poem?
Well, I'm by no means an expert in either Rumi or Bly, but I'm very happy to offer my thoughts. Explication of poems is always fun work, even though (perhaps because?) it's inherently inconclusive. (here's a written out version, for reference: http://pathtowalk.blogspot.com/2005/09/rumi-edge-of-roof.htm...) The speaker in this poem, possibly a version of Rumi, possibly a projection upon someone else, is badly out of sorts. In a new place where he doesn't know anyone, I imagine, and based upon lines 3 and 4, probably stranded apart from his beloved. It's impossible to tell from the verse whether the new place is really so awful, or whether it's just new and strange. I myself have been acclimating to a new city and other strange life shaping events over the last five 8 months, which is one of the reasons this poems speaks so strongly to me right now. I've been dealing rather continuously with what I call, the Doors phenomenon, i.e., that people are strange when you're a stranger. And the speaker in Rumi's poem may be enmeshed in the same. Either way, the speaker indulges in scathing attack upon this new place (well, dismissal, really), to which he attributes his unhappiness, going so far as to imply that it lacks any spiritual dimension, (lines 5 and 6), which is clearly a part of what would make a place worthy, in Rumi-land. We see similar allegations leveled against places/times in the work of other poets, who each find fault with a lack that they would consider appalling. Wallace Steven's "The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" comes to mind, in which he paints a sad picture of a place or culture lacking in all imagination. In the fifth and sixth strophes/paragraphs, Rumi is taking someone to task. I'm not 100% on this, but I think it may be himself. (His desire body, he's just addressed in the 4th strophe, would be a personification of his pining. Alternately, he may subscribe to a belief in the very real existence of this projection, something akin to an astral body. I'm not really at all sure of Rumi's cosmology or metaphysical defaults). Either way, I think it may be this version of himself that he scolds in the final two strophes of the poem. He is scolding himself for pursuing ephemeral, insubstantial pleasures, which may have brought him to where he now is, where "i don't like it here," and where he is apart from his beloved. Imagine a guy in a strange town who gets loaded and sad and lonely and misses his girl, and suddenly everything around him seems unbearably strange and shabby. I guess, in a single sentence of reduction, that would be my overview. But how about you? Does any of that sound like a good fit? Any idea who he's referring to as "the great Chinese Simurgh bird?"
That does sound like a good explication. I felt I had the most general gist of the poem; don't fall for short-term hedonism in exchange for your dignity or adulthood. I don't know the cultural context with which Rumi employs wren or great Chinese Simurgh Bird, or what distinction he makes between [good wine and rich chocolate] and [mirages and faux milk]. I feel that wine and chocolate are the more pleasurable and hard-to-defend habits. But I like the ending. "Chill out, young man... You're on the edge of a roof"
Ooo wow. Rhotacism! Cool word. Thank you for it. To use it in a sentence, I had known a friend for years before realizing he displayed rhotacist tendencies. Except that it was with ell, not arrr. Ergo, probably a different word. Can't help me with that one, can you? I'm taking Bly on faith when I call it a translation. However, I suspect there may be a much deeper conflict of definition here. So, I must ask, what to you would distinguish a version from a translation?
If the process deals with /l/ then it's something called "gliding of liquids". Anyway, a rhotacism is the general process of producing a hard /r/ while non-rhotic dialects would for example (in American English) be the New English accent and most British English dialects. The dialogue in terms of Rumi is that in the dialect of Persian he wrote in is often not translated directly, that is the "translations" are approximations of what the translator understands the tone and diction of the original text to mean. A version would be such an interpretation. I can't read the language Rumi wrote in and I wonder how faithfully Bly and others have reproduced it, especially since so Rumi is such a popular poet these days. Anyway, good post.