Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit

An Anthology

R. Parthasarathy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English.

Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

INTRODUCTION

This selection of poems is personal; it does not attempt to be representative of Sanskrit poetry in general. It comprises poems that I have enjoyed reading and that have excited me. I have also selected them because I found these poems manageable within the resources of modern English verse. The selection is intended for the general reader and lovers of poetry who might want to know what Sanskrit poetry is like. It offers a salutary corrective to the notion, still prevalent in the West, that Indians in the past were predominantly otherworldly and spiritually minded. Nothing could be further from the truth. These poems reflect a culture that celebrates the pleasures of the flesh without any inhibition in a language that never gives offense, that never crosses the line but always observes the canons of good taste. In this the Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us. The poems speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience—love fulfilled and love unfulfilled, old age, poverty, asceticism, and nature—in a voice that moves us even today.

The introduction makes no pretense to scholarship; it attempts to provide some basic information to the reader who comes to Sanskrit poetry for the first time and who needs guidance on how to read a Sanskrit poem in translation. The notes at the back of the book throw light on specific elements of the poems such as language, imagery, and tone as well as on culture-specific references. My goal is a modest one: to awaken the interest of the reader in the poem by providing him or her with such tools as are necessary for the enterprise. Wherever possible, the poems are read in a comparative context, with examples from Greek, Latin, English, Chinese, Tamil, and Prākrit poetry.

Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit comprises poems by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, from sixteen works composed, with two exceptions, between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. The poets are presented alphabetically for the convenience of the reader.

For a long time, three anthologies of Sanskrit poetry in English translation have held the field: Ingalls (1965),1 Brough (1968),2 and Merwin and Masson (1977).3 These anthologies have contributed significantly to our understanding and enjoyment of Sanskrit poetry. Since then, other translations of Sanskrit poetry have appeared and enriched the field: Miller (1978),4 Selby (2000),5 and Bailey and Gombrich (2005).6 Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit builds upon the work of these distinguished translators. It offers a new verse translation that introduces the richness and variety of Sanskrit poetry to a new generation of readers in a robust, contemporary English idiom that captures, insofar as possible, the tone and register of the Sanskrit originals. The translations are, above all, English poems that can be read with pleasure by readers of poetry.

Love in all its aspects is a favorite theme of the Sanskrit poets. Poems on the topic of erotic love (kāma) form the centerpiece of the anthologies, and the translations reflect this preference. The poems are often sexually explicit but they never offend our taste. In their openness to the sexual experience, they have a contemporary flavor to them. Readers who wish to have a greater understanding of Sanskrit erotic poetry might want to familiarize themselves with the conventions of the erotic mood spelled out in such texts as Vātsyāyana’s Kāmasūtra (The book of love, 4th cent.) or Kalyāṇamalla’s Anaṅgaraṅga (The stage of the Bodiless One, 16th cent.). Sanskrit erotic poetry has few equals, with the possible exception of the erotic poems in the so-called Greek Anthology, compiled by the Byzantine scholar Constantinus Cephalas in the tenth century in Constantinople.

Translation from one language into another involves some loss, as the Buddhist monk and prolific translator Kumārajīva (344–413) famously reminded us: “In the process of translating a Sanskrit text into Chinese it loses all its nuances.… It’s something like chewing cooked rice and then feeding it to another person. Not only has it lost its flavor; it will also make him want to throw up.”7 Despite the eminent monk’s opinion, it is possible to carry across the flavor of a poem from one language to another. And that is precisely what this selection has attempted to do.

Among the problems I wrestled with in making these translations, the hardest one perhaps was how to make the Sanskrit poems heard in English. Here tone and register are crucial factors. English does not have a tradition of erotic poetry comparable to that of Sanskrit. The sexual explicitness of some of the poems may not be to the taste of some readers. As a result, I had to modify the tone and register without compromising the integrity of the poems. In translating from Sanskrit into English, one translates not just the text but also an entire culture and worldview that remain hidden like so many roots beneath the text.

THE ROLE OF THE POET

What precisely was the role of the poet in the Indian tradition? In the Rig Veda (ca. 1200–900 B.C.E.) we are told,

Varuṇa confided in me, the wise one:

Thrice seven names has the cow. Who knows the trail

should whisper them like secrets, if he is to speak

to future generations as an inspired poet.8

According to the commentator Sāyaṇa (14th cent.), speech (vāc) in the form of a cow (aghnya) has twenty-one meters corresponding to her breast, throat, and head. Only after the intervention of Varuṇa (Vedic god of natural and moral law) does the poet who is the wise one (medhira) become the inspired one (vipra). His exceptional knowledge imposes a responsibility on him. He is both the keeper and the transmitter of the tradition that regarded poetry as a way of knowledge. It was believed that the spoken word, properly formulated, could produce a physical effect on the world. The word was invested with sacred power. This image of the poet as a seer (ṛṣi) in the Vedic period gives way in later times to that of the poet as a learned man of refined sensibility and taste (kavi) who made his l...