From Booklist
Islamic poetry is enjoying an influx of readers in English, but poems by such Sufi saints as Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi have suffered from terrible translations. Sells, who has proven his talents in the highly regarded anthology
Early Islamic Mysticism (1996), is confident enough to include some of his own poems, inspired by Ibn 'Arabi's love elegies, alongside his versions of the master's work, and his deftly wrought, spare verses are quite good in their own right. But Ibn 'Arabi is the star here, and these translations show the twelfth-century Muslim mystic at his very best. This is truly beautiful love poetry, and the oft-posed question of whether the beloved in it is God or a human quickly becomes irrelevant. Furthermore, by invoking the Beloved in both genders, Ibn 'Arabi invokes love that transcends gender and identity, and flies in the face of the stereotype of Islam as inherently sexist. Love for God and romantic love each is, as Ibn 'Arabi writes, "a garden among the flames." Truly a collection to be treasured.
John GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
One of the great mystics of all time, Muhyiddin Ibn al-'Arabi was a prolific author who wrote on every aspect of medieval Islamic thought. Among the most widely read of his works, and certainly his most famous collection of poems, was his volume of odes, The Translator of Desires (Turjuman al-Ashwaq), which is regarded as a masterpiece of Arabic and Sufi love poetry. Michael Sells's Stations of Desire contains the first translations of Ibn 'Arabi's Turjuman into modern poetic English. Sells, the translator of a highly praised volume of pre-Islamic qasidas, Desert Tracings, carries into his translations the supple, resonant quality of the original Arabic, so that the poems come to robust life in English. In addition to a substantial selection of the odes themselves, Sells provides an insightful introduction that makes this work accessible to contemporary readers, as it locates the poems within the history of Arabic poetics and the tradition of Sufi mysticism. The book also includes a section of Sells's original poems, which are modeled on the Turjuman and serve as further commentary to the medieval odes and their extension into the present climate of poetry.
