Coleman Barks ' books of Rumi's poetry have sold more than half a million copies worldwide, and in 1994 Publishers Weekly announced that Rumi was the bestselling poet in America. Poetry like classical music is a minority artform; yet Rumi has opened up a new market for poetry, the size of which classical music would die for. So can classical music learn from the Rumi success story? What is little-understood is that the bestselling volumes of Rumi's poetry from Coleman Barks are not actually his translations, but are in fact very skilled creative interpretations. Coleman Barks makes it no secret that he does not speak Farsi (Persian), the language of Rumi, or that his versions are populist re-writes of scholarly translations. In Rumi: Soul Fury he explains that: Of course, as I work on these poems, I don’t have the Persian to consult. I literally have nothing to be faithful to, except what the scholars give... What I do is a homemade, amateurish, loose, many-stranded ...
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Does the answer lie here?
One of the pieces that I'm doing is the Schoenberg/Marx brother's tennis match. Who was the person who always wanted to be Schoenberg's student? I can never remember.
Adolf Weiss?
No. No. No. The populist. Gershwin! Gershwin, Harpo, Oscar Levant, and Schoenberg used to play tennis every Wednesday. If not Harpo, then Groucho and sometimes Chaplin...blah blah blah. That was the standard foursome. I always understood that John Cage was the ball boy. Is it possible that it's him. Yes, but then I suspect Schoenberg's finger is in the pie there somewhere.
Schoenberg used to apparently carry around, I didn't know this either, he used to travel round with a violin case. People would actually query him, "Arnie, I didn't know you were a fiddler." He was not a fiddler. He had table tennis paddles and a net in the violin case. He was a maniac table tennis player.
Whatever, I bet it wasn't Toscanini.