Since then, the landscape has grown even sparser: some translations by the Indian poets Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, and especially Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; versions of Mirabai by Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfeld, a few scholars (most notably David Shulman, an immensely prolific translator of classical Tamil and Telugu). The editor of this anthology, Andrew Schelling, is the first American poet to translate directly from the Sanskrit. Incredibly, given the long history and oceanic vastness of classical Indian poetry, for some thirty years he has been virtually alone in the field.
This anthology gathers much of the best that has been done to date. It usefully serves one function of an anthology, as an introduction to a certain kind of poetry, written in certain languages in certain eras. But beyond literary history, beyond the many pleasures of the individual poems, it also serves the function of translation at its best– that is, as inspiration. Here is a poetry that does not exist in our language, but, transformed, it could.
ELIOT WEINBERGER
: NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND PRONUNCIATION
WHEN ALEXANDER reached the banks of the Indus River in 326 BCE he encountered “the speaking tree.” Human and animal figures hung from its trunk and branches, babbling in many or maybe all languages. The oracle-tree could answer questions in the tongue of “anyone who addressed it.”
The 2001 census of India identified 1,600 different “mother tongues.” In 2009 the census listed 452 “official languages,” and speakers of nonofficial languages continue to petition the courts for recognition. Thirty of India’s languages have more than a million speakers. This means that many, many languages may have had fine singers, but no accomplished translator has worked with the songs. I have drawn on translations done into English by Indian and American writers, most of them poets. It turns out that everything in this collection originates in one of those thirty languages spoken by big populations, except for a few instances where a vernacular such as Braj Bhaṣa is no longer used.
Most of India’s languages fall into two families, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. No matter how closely related, from region to region they pronounce words a bit differently. A few contain sounds borrowed from Persian or Chinese. Meanwhile, publishers and scholars have never fully agreed how to spell words when using Roman script. You can find books with the god written Shiva, Śiva, or Siva. The Rajasthani singer shows up as Mira, Mīra, or Meera.
Some of the translators in this volume use diacritical marks, others skip them: rāga or raga. I have followed the way each chose to spell names and words, out of respect for their individual decisions, though it makes this book look inconsistent.
For the commentaries I’ve spelled familiar names and places the way you’d see them in a newspaper: Rajasthan and Varanasi, Mirabai and Ramanujan. Less familiar words and names I tend to give with diacritical marks to help with pronunciation.
Vowels sound like this (some differences region to region):
a as in hut
ā as in father
i as in hit
ī as in heat
u as in put
ū as in boot
ṛ (or ri) as in cricket (with a little flap of the tongue
against the roof of the mouth)
e as in say
ai as in aisle
o as in poke
au as in cow
Consonants sound pretty much as in English, though the c is a ch sound. Note that after a consonant an h signifies a tiny outbreath that does not change the quality of the vowel. Th is a t followed by a tiny outbreath, top; similarly, ph sounds like the p in pot.
You might not notice the difference between these:
ś as in shut (soft palate)
ṣ as in harsh (hard palate)
: TRANSLATORS
DB Deben Bhattacharya
RB Robert Bly
DC Dilip Chitre
AC Ananda Coomaraswamy
VD Vidya Dehejia
HH & VNR Hank Heifetz and Velcheru Narayana Rao
LH & SS Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh
JH Jane Hirshfield
AK Arun Kolatkar
DL & ECD Denise Levertov and Edward C. Dimock Jr.
AKM Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
WSM & JMM W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson
LN & CS Leonard Nathan and Clinton Seely
GP Gieve Patel
EP Ezra Pound
AKR A.K. Ramanujan
AS Andrew Schelling
GS Gary Snyder
CT & TKS Chase Twichell and Tony K. Stewart
You, my messenger
are a tender sprig
but I trust you with a secret dispatch.
Go to the wind-tossed forest
where that dark man
awaits me.
Black clouds trouble the heavens,
spring breezes stir and the heart
also stirs.
But go to him safely.
May the gods keep a close
watch
over your art.
Śīlābhaṭṭārikā
:AS
: ĪŚA UPANIṢAD
(CIRCA 600 bce)
1.
The Great One dwells
in all this, and in all
that moves in this mobile universe.
Enjoy things by
giving them up, not by craving
some other man’s
substance.
2.
Engaged in works
hope to live
here for a hundred years—
it’s what you receive,
nothing else.
There is no one for karma
to cling to.
There are worlds
they call sunless,
turbulent,
covered with gloom—
those who
violate spirit
depart after death
into them.
4.
The Immobile One’s
swifter than thought,
not even a god
can approach it.
Stands, yet outflanks what runs;
holds the waters
the Hidden Female let forth.
5.
Moves,
and does not move.
Is distant,
is near.
Inhabits all this,
stays outside of it all.
6.
Who sees
all breathing creatures
as spirit, spirit
in everything breathing,
no longer shrinks
from encounter.
7.
When the spectator
of this unity
regards all creatures as Spirit,
who can suffer,
who be misled?
8.
It is out traveling—
bright, bodiless, pure,
unflawed,
unpierced by evil. All objects
have in their self-nature
been arranged precisely about us
by that presence—
poet, and thinker.
9.
They enter a turbulent
darkness, who
cultivate ignorance—
a yet thicker darkness
who are addicted to
knowledge.
10.
It is different
from knowledge—different also
from what you do not know—
this we heard
from the steadfast ones
who opened our eyes.
11.
Who is cunning
towards knowledge
and ignorance,
with ignorance
moves across death,
with knowledge reaches
the deathless.
12.
They enter a turbulent
darkness, who
cultivate unmanifest worlds—
a yet thicker darkness
who are addicted
to empirical worlds.
13.
Different
from what you can see—
different also
from what goes unseen—
this we heard
from the steadfast ones
who opened our eyes.
14.
Who is cunning
towards loss and creation,
with loss
crosses death,
with creation reaches
the deathless.
15.
A golden solar disc
hides the gateway
into the Real—
remove it O Nourisher,
so I can see
the Unwavering.
16.
O Nourisher, sole Seer,
judge of the dead,
O sun, offspring of the Father of Creatures,
fan out your rays,
draw up luster.
That most
splendrous form, yours—
I would see—that is—
the I am.
17.
Animate breath
is undying
but the body ends in cinder.
Om!
Oh volition, remember,
remember that which was done.
Remember
that which was
done.
18.
O Fire,
knower of every creature’s breath,
take us along the good road,
far from deviant evil.
We offer you
precious verse.
:AS
Īśa Upaniṣad
INDIA’S ONE HUNDRED and eight Upaniṣads are an enormous compendium of cosmic speculation, folklore, mystical insight, and homespun humor. They range in length from Īśa’s eighteen brief stanzas to book-size treatises. Some interpret complex yoga formulas, others lay forth solar and lunar paths to follow after death. They are laced with stinging anticlerical diatribes, and contain vast open spaces for the mind. Scholars, gurus, and poets—including William Butler Yeats, who worked with a Vedantist friend—have chosen and translated ones they consider the principal, the oldest, or the most significant, generally ten or fifteen.
The term upaniṣad means “sit down near.” It refers to a period of spiritual upheaval in the first millennium BCE when the early Vedic religion came to seem outmoded. Priests dominated the spiritual landscape, requiring payment to perform the necessary sacraments of birth-names, initiation, marriage, and funeral rites. Complicated rituals enveloped the calendar, along with horse sacrifices, prayer beads, fire ceremonies, payment to priests in cattle, and a pantheon of nature deities that left the significant philosophical questions unanswered. Alienated seekers left the towns and cities in large numbers to collect around teachers in the forest. They lived simply, or founded retreat centers—where they swapped ideas, held debates, posed questions, and struggled toward a renewed sense of spirit.
The verses of Īśa, “The Great One,” lie among the oldest strata of the Upaniṣads. Scholars generally place it six to eight centuries BCE, though I suspect most of its stanzas are rooted deeper, maybe circulating orally for centuries before someone brought them together. They read like snatches of song from some very distant yogins, passed on as fragments of a large tradition, and eventually—like the lyrics of many folksong and spiritual traditions—brought to rest in a context or “text” where they seem to fit. The stanzas were almost certainly cobbled together from several sources: a bricolage more than a treatise. In the original Sanskrit, shifting rhythms, an archaic vocabulary, statements that resemble riddles, and quick dialectical turns of phrase give the piece a strikingly postmodern ring. So does the use of a neuter pronoun “that”—not masculine or feminine—for the great one, addressed as “poet, and thinker.”
Īśa’s fragmentary utterances on knowledge and ignorance, the visible and the invisible, seem to echo from another life. Toward the final verse rises a cry for vision: it starts as a plea to remove the “golden solar disc” that holds back the truth. Its crescendo seems to reach for some far limit of human speech. With no named author or visible poet attached, the whole thing possibly came together as a funerary chant. The closing stanzas are for the burning grounds: Animate breath / is undying / but the body ends in cinder. One can read Īśa Upaniṣad as a breath of the archaic—in contrast to the personal tone, so individuated, so fierce with emotion, of India’s bhakti poetry, the vernacular song that would sweep India two thousand years later.
: SANSKRIT POEMS
(CIRCA SIXTH—TWELFTH CENTURIES)
Krishna went out to play
Mother
and he ate dirt
Is that true Krishna
No
who said it
Your brother Balarāma
Not true
Look at my face
Open your mouth
he opened it
and she stood speechless
inside was
the universe
may he protect you
Caṇḍaka
:WSM & JMM
Between his hands
Krishna takes
Yaśodhā’s breast
in his mouth takes
her nipple
at once he remembers
in an earlier life taking
to his mouth the conch shell
to call to battle
all bow down now to
the thought of his skin
at that moment.
from the Kāvyaprakāśa
:WSM & JMM
The goddess Laksmi
loves to make love to Vishnu
from on top
looking down she sees in his navel
a lotus
and on it Brahmā the god
but she can’t bear to stop
so she puts her hand
over Vishnu’s right eye
which is the sun
and night comes on
and the lotus closes
with Brahmā inside
from the Kāvyaprakāśa
:WSM & JMM
Friend
I am cursed
may or may not see him again
yet by itself
sound of his flute if into my ears should fall
enough
Anonymous
:WSM & JMM
Holy sixth day
in the woods they worship the
trees then
then my heart beat hard
at how far I was going into
the woods
a snake appeared in front of me
and I fell down
I started writhing and rolling
this way and that way
my dress fell off
my hair burned along
my back
thorns scratched me
everywhere
suddenly who am I
who was I
how I
love those celebrations
Govindasvāmin
:WSM & JMM
Oh friend you
play in the mud like a child
your blouse not
even covering your breasts
your father the cowherd
thinking you still a child
has done nothing
to find you a husband
but then suddenly
your eyelids leap as you hear
in the Vṛnda forest the s
ound
of Krishna’s flute
and you tremble with longing
and show the whites of your eyes
Anonymous
:WSM & JMM
Anyone would think
I alone
had been unfaithful
what did you
feel inside you
when you heard the flute
Krishna was playing
and no woman said no
Anonymous
:WSM & JMM
Sanskrit Poems
ON THE SURFACE, Sanskrit classical poetry looks resolutely secular, the bulk of it being love poetry. The poets worked with rasa, bedrock emotions, which they considered parallel to spiritual states of being. They also lived in a landscape full of deities, mythologies, and mysteries; they could not keep the gods out.
I cannot locate any information on Caṇḍaka except that he may have been Kashmiri. His theme is an old story, familiar through India, an episode from Krishna’s childhood. In J. Moussaieff Masson’s words, “the emphasis is on the elusiveness of the epiphany,” the poem depicting “Kṛṣṇa as a young boy, impetuous, playful, disdainful of his elders, who at a given moment allows them an insight into his mystery.”