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Robert Bly's Folly

© Linda Sue Grimes

For over fifty years, Robert Bly has been "translating" poetry from Spanish, German, Swedish, Persian, Sanskrit, and other languages. As far as I know, Bly is not fluent in any of these languages. His so-called translations are merely revisions of other people's translations. Bly takes a translation by someone who actually knows both the target language and English, who has actually translated the poem and changes some words and calls his product a "translation."

An example of Bly's fraudulent translation scheme is his title The Kabir Book; he has revised forty-four of the translations of One Hundred Poems of Kabir, a title by Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Nobel Laureate, and Evelyn Underhill, renowned spiritual writer and recipient of numerous honory degrees. Bly would have his readers believe his revisions of the translations of these outstanding creative thinkers better represent Kabir. Bly's folly leads him astray.

In his introduction to The Kabir Book, Bly claims that the Tagore-Underhill translations are "hopeless." He does not explain what he means by "hopeless," but he does claim that his purpose of re-translating some of the poems is to modernize them, put them into contemporary language. However, in his product we find that he has attempted to fix something that was not, in fact, broken. Instead of merely modernizing the language, he loosens the diction, causing it to descend into a talky, laid-back kind of style that is not appropriate to its purpose. The religious significance that these works have for the yogi-saint Kabir and his followers has changed into a libertine sixties-style free-love fest instead of the divine union of soul and God as is their purpose.

Because the poet Kabir was a God-realized saint, his poems and songs reflect the deep religious significance of his state of consciousness. They essentially perform two functions: the first is to express in words as nearly as possible the saint's devotion to God, and the second is to inspire and instruct his followers. According to yogic philosophy and training, the yogi who has succeeded in uniting his soul with God has risen above all earthly, physical desires. Such a saint has only two desires left and those two desires correspond to the above purposes ascribed to Kabir's songs: to enjoy union with God and to share it with others.

Many Western thinkers, philosophers, and poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence have attempted to explain Eastern religion to the West. But T. S. Eliot noticed that he had great difficulty trying to understand Eastern philosophy. And Eliot admitted his difficulty and at the same time observed that what was passing as Eastern philosophical analysis was "romantic misunderstanding." I suggest that this misunderstanding is evident in Bly's version of the Tagore-Underhill translations.