Most of the Rumi you have read in English was not translated from Persian. The lines that travel furthest online — the field beyond right and wrong, the wound where the light enters, the guest house — come mainly from Coleman Barks, an American poet who does not read Persian and who calls his work versions rather than translations. Rumi himself is entirely real, and so are his books: roughly 25,000 couplets in the Masnavi alone. But a great deal of what circulates under his name is either a loose reworking of a translation, or not his at all.
This page does three things. It tells you what Rumi wrote in Persian, it shows you which famous lines we can and cannot trace, and it names the translations so you know which text you are actually holding. Where we are unsure, we say so.
Who Rumi was, and what he left behind
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi lived from 1207 to 1273. He was born in the eastern Persian-speaking world — traditionally Balkh, though recent scholarship favours the nearby town of Vakhsh — and his family moved west ahead of the Mongol advance, settling finally in Konya in Anatolia. Anatolia was then the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, and that is where his name comes from: Rumi, the one from Rum. He wrote in Persian, with Arabic throughout and occasional lines of Turkish and Greek.
Two poetic works carry his reputation. The first is the Masnavi-e Ma’navi (مثنوی معنوی, मसनवी) — “rhymed couplets of deep spiritual meaning” — six books of stories, argument and Quranic commentary. The second is the Divan-e Kabir, also called the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (दीवान-ए-शम्स), thousands of ghazals and quatrains. Shams of Tabriz was the wandering dervish who arrived in Konya around 1244 and disappeared a few years later; where a Persian poet would normally sign his own pen name in the closing line, Rumi often signed his friend’s. He also left prose: the discourses known as Fihi ma Fihi (“It is what it is”), letters, and sermons.
What “a version” actually means
Coleman Barks came to Rumi in the 1970s, when the poet Robert Bly handed him A.J. Arberry’s scholarly translations and suggested these poems needed releasing from their academic cages. Barks worked from Arberry’s and R.A. Nicholson’s English — accurate, deliberately plain, sometimes stiff — and rewrote it as American free verse, cutting, compressing, merging passages and giving them new titles. The Essential Rumi appeared in 1995 and has sold in numbers no scholarly translation has come close to.
Barks has never hidden this. He describes the results as versions, and his books generally indicate which scholarly text stands behind them. The problem is not his labelling; it is what happens after the line leaves the book. By the time it reaches a graphic on your feed, two removes from the Persian have collapsed into two words: “— Rumi”.
You will often read that Rumi is the best-selling poet in the United States. That claim comes from publishers and press reports rather than any single audited figure, so treat it as plausible rather than established.
What tends to fall away in the popular versions
The Masnavi is a Muslim book. Its Arabic preface describes it as the roots of the roots of the roots of the Religion — Nicholson’s phrase — and the poem moves constantly through Quranic verses, hadith, the prophets, ritual prayer and law. The later Persian poet Jami is traditionally credited with calling it “the Quran in the Persian tongue”. None of that is decoration; it is the structure.
The clearest example is the most shared Rumi line in English, Barks’s “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The Persian quatrain behind it does not pair wrongdoing with rightdoing. It pairs kufr (کفر, unbelief) with islam (اسلام), and the place is not a field but a sahra (صحرا), an open plain or desert. A specific theological claim — that the lover’s station lies past the categories of belief and unbelief — has become a gentle, unplaceable sentiment. It is worth adding that quatrain collections in Persian manuscripts attracted stray verses easily, so even the original’s authorship is not beyond question.
This critique is not ours alone. Rozina Ali made it at length in The New Yorker in January 2017, and the scholar Omid Safi has written about it repeatedly. The point is not that Barks is a villain. He brought millions of readers to a thirteenth-century Persian mystic, including many who went on to the scholarly texts. Readers simply deserve to know which text they are reading.
Famous “Rumi” lines, checked
Below, the quotes are given as they circulate in English. Our finding is what we can and cannot trace.
| The line as it circulates | Usually credited to | What the evidence shows |
|---|---|---|
| “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.” | Rumi | Version, not translation. Coleman Barks, reworking an earlier English rendering of a Persian quatrain whose first line pairs kufr and islam, not right and wrong. |
| “This being human is a guest house.” | Rumi | Genuine poem, loose rendering. Barks’s “The Guest House” reworks a real Rumi ghazal. Credit it as a version by Barks. |
| “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” | Rumi | Corresponds to a real Masnavi couplet on trading intellect for bewilderment. We are not confident enough of the book-and-line number to print one. |
| “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” | Rumi | Not traced to a primary source. Circulates from Barks-era English. We cannot point to a Persian couplet behind it. |
| “What you seek is seeking you.” | Rumi | Paraphrase. The idea — that the water seeks the thirsty — is unmistakably Rumi’s; the five-word English aphorism is not a translation of any single couplet we can cite. |
| “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” | Rumi | Not traced. Absent from the scholarly translations. No Persian original identified. |
| “Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” | Rumi | Not traced. Appears in popular collections in many languages with no source. Treat as anonymous. |
| “The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” | Rumi | Likely misattributed. More commonly linked to the American teacher Ram Dass in the 1970s. We have not found it in any Rumi translation. |
| “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” | Rumi | Barks phrasing. Quote it as Rumi in a version by Coleman Barks. |
Passages you can cite with confidence
The Masnavi is organised into titled stories and sections, and that is how it should be cited: by book, by heading, and by line number where the edition supplies one. Four examples that any reader can check:
- The Song of the Reed — the opening of Book I. The first line reads Beshnaw in nay chun shekayat mikonad (بشنو این نی چون شکایت میکند): “Listen to this reed, how it complains.” The cut reed, separated from the reed bed, is the soul separated from its origin. Barks titled his rendering “The Reed Flute’s Song”; E.H. Whinfield’s verse abridgement opens with the same lament.
- Moses and the Shepherd — Book II. God rebukes Moses for correcting a shepherd’s crude, loving prayer. One of the most quoted arguments in Sufi literature for sincerity over correctness.
- The Elephant in the Dark — Book III. Men in a dark stable each touch one part of an elephant and each describe a different animal. Rumi’s version of a story much older than him, retold to make a point about partial knowledge of God.
- The Quarrel of the Four over Grapes — Book II. Four men from four language communities fight over what to buy, not realising they all want the same fruit.
A note on our own practice: we print a book-and-line number only where we are confident of it. Numbering differs between Persian editions and between translations, and an invented reference is worse than none.
The English Rumi: a short field guide
- R.A. Nicholson — the Masnavi in full: Persian text, a literal English translation and two volumes of commentary, issued in the Gibb Memorial series between 1925 and 1940. Still the reference standard. Nicholson also published a selection from the Divan in 1898.
- A.J. Arberry — Mystical Poems of Rumi, plus retellings of the Masnavi tales and a translation of the discourses. Readable and scholarly; the second volume of his Divan selection appeared after his death.
- E.H. Whinfield — an abridged Masnavi, first published in 1887 and long out of copyright. Condensed, Victorian in idiom, freely available online.
- F. Hadland Davis — The Persian Mystics: Jalalu’d-Din Rumi (1907), a short public-domain introduction with selections.
- William Chittick — The Sufi Path of Love, which arranges translated passages by theme with sources given.
- Jawid Mojaddedi and Alan Williams — more recent complete verse translations of the Masnavi, published in volumes from the 2000s onwards.
- Coleman Barks — the versions. Read them as poetry in English, and cite them that way.
Rumi in the subcontinent
Indian readers do not come to Rumi as outsiders. Persian was a court and literary language across much of South Asia for centuries, the Masnavi was read, memorised and commented on here, and Urdu translations and commentaries were produced in the subcontinent long before Rumi became an English-language phenomenon. Muhammad Iqbal took Rumi as his spiritual guide and put him into his own long poems as a master addressing a disciple.
That inheritance matters practically: if you read Urdu, you can reach Rumi through a tradition that never separated him from his Quran. It is also why the resemblance to a poet like Mirza Ghalib is not accidental — Ghalib wrote in the same Persian literary world. And the inward turn Rumi shares with Kabir is a real convergence, not a modern mashup.
How to credit a Rumi quote honestly
Three habits are enough. First, if the line is short, aphoristic and sounds like it was written for a wall, assume it is a version or an orphan until you find a source. Second, when the wording comes from Barks, write “Rumi, in a version by Coleman Barks” — it costs six words and it is true. Third, when you cannot trace something, say that. “Widely attributed to Rumi; not traced to a primary source” is an honest, useful sentence, and readers trust it more than a confident citation they cannot check.
Our own Rumi archive and the collection Rumi on love follow those rules, as does quotes for hard times, where misattributed consolation is especially common.
Frequently asked questions
Are Coleman Barks’s Rumi translations accurate?
They are not translations. Barks does not read Persian; he worked from existing English translations, chiefly by R.A. Nicholson and A.J. Arberry, and reshaped them into free verse. He calls the results versions. They are often beautiful and frequently faithful to Rumi’s spirit, but they cut, merge and re-title, and they usually remove the Quranic and Islamic vocabulary that saturates the Persian.
Did Rumi write “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field”?
Not in those words. The line is Coleman Barks’s. The Persian quatrain behind it speaks of a plain beyond kufr (unbelief) and islam, not beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing — and because quatrains were loosely attributed in Persian manuscripts, even that original’s authorship is not fully settled.
Which Rumi translation should I read?
For accuracy, R.A. Nicholson’s complete Masnavi with commentary, or A.J. Arberry for the ghazals. For free public-domain reading, E.H. Whinfield’s abridged Masnavi (1887) and F. Hadland Davis’s The Persian Mystics (1907). For recent verse translations of the whole Masnavi, look for Jawid Mojaddedi or Alan Williams.
How can I check whether a Rumi quote is real?
Look for a book, a translator and a location in the text — Masnavi book and line, or a numbered ghazal from the Divan. If a quote appears everywhere with no source, no translator and no Persian, the honest conclusion is that it has not been traced to a primary source. That finding is worth stating rather than hiding.