Erotic Love Poems from India
Page 4
86
Somehow she
got through the day
anticipating
the hundred pleasures of night.
Her dear one’s returned!
But now it’s time to enter the bedchamber
and relatives
won’t stop their dull conversation.
Mad with desire the girl finally cries
something bit me
shakes her skirt fiercely
and knocks over
the lamp—
87
My breasts at first
little buds
grew plump under your hands.
My speech
instructed by yours
lost its native simplicity.
What shall I do?
These arms
left my old nursemaid’s neck
to creep around yours,
but you no longer
set foot in the neighborhood.
88
When my heart leaps at
a sight of her
and I devise a thousand ways to engage her—
when desire flares and the
messenger girl
brings explicit descriptions—
who could imagine the ecstasies
of a single quick night?
I walk the oxcart path
outside her house and obtain the
fiercest pleasure.
89
Camisole shed to the floor,
she shakes—shakes—
a leaf-soft hand and casts her crushed
string of jasmine at the
lamp flame.
Disheveled but smiling
she covers his eyes.
Now that they’ve made love, again
and again his enraptured
eyes find her.
90
Face turned aside
eyes squeezed angrily shut
she pretends she’s asleep.
Into her thin legs and arms
with a clever motion he
inserts his own.
And when a trembling
hand goes to her waistband she
sucks her already
tight stomach tighter.
91
Far as the eye can reach
she gazes down
the footpath her lover takes.
The roads have gone silent.
Day’s given way to stealthy night.
She takes one reluctant step
homewards—
delayed a few minutes maybe—
snaps her head back,
searching darkly.
92
Kingdoms lie between them.
Hundreds of rivers, soaring peaks,
forests. Nothing
he tries could bring her
to view.
Why stand on tiptoe
on the good earth craning his neck?
The traveler rubs grit
from his eyes, he studies
the far horizon—
thinking—
93
Sweat on your face?
—the bright sunshine.
Your eyes look red and excited—
—his tone made me furious.
Your black hair scattered—
—the wind.
What about the saffron designs on your breasts?
My blouse rubbed them off.
And winded—
—from running back and forth.
Of course.
But what’s this curious
wound to your lip?
NOTE: A poem nearly identical in content though with quite different vocabulary, attributed to Lady Shilabhattarika (ca. ninth century), appears in several later anthologies. The theme of a jealous young woman and the messenger girl who has possibly betrayed her occurs often in Sanskrit poetry. It is a theme that occurs in devotional poetry as well, with theological and yogic design.
94
Hard-hearted girl
drop these suspicions, the stories
are false—
malignant rumors
designed to bring discord.
If you’re that impressionable
do as you like though.
May it
bring peace.
95
Knotted my brows a long time,
learned to squint,
trained myself sedulously
to suppress smiles
even achieved the yoga
of silence.
In my heart courage is fixed.
The stage is set, the attendants of anger
are gathered—
success now
lies with the gods.
96
He’d drop at my feet,
cry and make oaths,
sweeten me with crazy words.
There’d be savage love for this
starved body and hard
kisses everywhere.
Angry displays bring compelling rewards
but dare I risk it—
this lover lies near my heart—
can I toy with him?
97
My lover
stepped towards the bed.
Somehow the skirt
clung to my hips
but the knot came undone by itself.
What can I say?
Nothing makes sense in his arms
not who I am
not who is taking me.
Is it me that comes?
Is it him?
98
Sighs parch my lips.
My heart is a
black torn-up root.
Sleep doesn’t come, my lover’s face
won’t appear.
Night and day this husk of a
body trembles since he lay at my feet
rejected.
What were you thinking, friends—
goading me to
treat him so harshly?
99
She did nothing to
bar the door
did not turn her face away
there were no brittle words.
She gazed with indifferent eyes through
steady lashes.
He could have been anyone.
100
When he’s frisky
and steals her undergarments
she squeals in distress
quick—before someone sees us!
But the love god sees,
mighty archer of the three worlds,
and though the fortifications
are breached,
the erotic struggle decided,
he flashes back to the
battlefield.
NOTE: In Indian mythology, the three worlds, or lokas, are traditionally heaven, earth, and the underworld. One can’t help appreciating the distinctness—and perhaps uniqueness—of a cosmology in which the love god goes armed with arrows, not through heaven and earth only, but even into the underworld.
101
Half mad with desire a young
woman raises her
leaf-soft foot—
anklet and cochineal tattoos—
and kicks him for some offense.
Thus is a man claimed
by the god with the crocodile banner,
the holy
god of love.
NOTE: Crocodile? Some give it as dolphin or sea monster. The Sanskrit word is makara, a “hybrid aquatic creature” of mythology. Like a crocodile but unlike the dolphin, the makara has teeth.
It is a mystery why this elemental figure appears on the pennant of Kama, the love god.
AFTERWORD
To examine one of the poems attributed to Amaru is to glimpse a single charged instant in the human drama. A lifetime can seem compressed into those few measured words. From them, threads of passion wind deep into the past, or maddeningly into the future. It is not just the psychological precision found in such a small poem. It’s the skill in devising a minute artifact that feels as though it contains the dimensions of a human life.
I want to speak about the origins of the Amarushataka poems. My first thought is that upon entering their world, one instantly recognizes one’s own troubled heart. Yet the economy of language is staggering. No metaphors extended, or images tracked to their lair; no syllables wasted, no digressions, no explanations. Does this mean the book lies close to the origins of writing? To a time of scant or intractable resources? Think of vellum—how the bookmaker required the hides of two hundred sheep to make a single illuminated gospel in early Christian Ireland. Think of inscriptions cut painstakingly into stone, bamboo stalk, or fragile tortoiseshell. In ancient India, craftsmen devised books of pressed palmyra or plantain leaves. These they incised with a metal stylus, washed with ink made of lampblack and vegetable oil, then bound with a cord strung through one or two holes drilled in the stack of brittle leaves. Two wooden boards, sandwiching the pages, formed the covers, which were painted and sometimes incised with luminous motifs.
At the time the Amarushataka was compiled, writing systems had been present in India for hundreds of years. South Asia’s hot, humid climate, with its torrential monsoon rains, persistent molds and bacteria, and burrowing insects, has been ruinous for old manuscripts though. It is hard to know how widespread writing was in the eighth century. But at a court where poetry stood in high regard, where a prince or warlord like Amaru took an active interest in writing poetry, there would surely have been scribes employed in the production of books.
The poems of the Amarushataka may have circulated in written form from the time of their composition, perhaps accompanied by collaborative illustrations from artists or painters. Several handmade manuscripts of the anthology include colorful miniature paintings. I saw one such manuscript on display in the archaeological museum of Bhubaneswar in 1993. Rather than using Devanagari, the more common script for Sanskrit, a scribe had reproduced the text in the Oriyan alphabet, the characters used throughout Orissa State. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum in Mumbai (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India) also houses an illustrated edition. Judging by a published description of the manuscript, as well as reproductions of a few of its miniature paintings that I’ve had the good fortune to see, the copy is a cultural treasure. Its paintings have flat, bold fields of color; its drama is restrained and dignified.
Yet we don’t really know how these terse poems appeared to their first audience. Like Native American song or Japanese haiku—other poetic traditions known for their crystalline and compressed verses—the original “publication” of Sanskrit verse probably lay in oral performance. Poems, including those of the Amarushataka, could have been sung or formally chanted, with phrases and lines repeated, with musical embellishment or the insertion of so-called meaningless syllables. Intriguingly, one manuscript of the Amarushataka housed in the British Library has been bound together with a treatise on music.
Sanskrit drama of the period—in formal ways close to the Buddhist-inspired Noh plays of Japan—might provide a clue. In Sanskrit theater, action and dialogue come to a pregnant halt several times during each act, at moments of intense emotional pitch. An actor then slowly intones a four-line verse to musical accompaniment and performs a dance of concentrated grace and intensity. Since the earliest treatises on India’s aesthetics concentrate on theater, some scholars see drama as the origin of Indian poetry. The multifaceted, primordial art of the theater or the ritual dance slowly divided, and the separate arts, poetry one of them, went off to develop on their own.
* * *
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As far as I’ve been able to discover, the Amarushataka as a whole had not been translated into English or American poetry before this edition was issued in 2004. A few prose versions with no pretense to poetry appeared in India last century, but they were awkwardly phrased and hopelessly scholastic. Why had nobody translated the book in England or the United States? Given its status in India as one of the classic collections of poetry, I see its nonappearance in the West as part of a long-standing neglect, even dismissal, of South Asia by official American and European culture.
India has made exceptional contributions to music, art, poetry, religion, cooking, medicine, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy for at least four millennia. Yet the South Asian Studies departments in our universities subsist on starvation budgets. The languages go little acknowledged; the geography remains terra incognita to most outsiders. Fortunately, a dedicated counterculture or nonofficial effort keeps India, her arts, and her religious traditions visible in the West, especially since the 1960s. With Ravi Shankar’s U.S. tour in 1965, then his notable friendship with George Harrison, India’s music became widely known and readily available. In its wake, a steady interest in India’s poetry has arisen. I hope this little book can contribute to that nonofficial effort to make known the achievements of South Asia’s arts.
As a poet, not a South Asia expert, I have worked at the Sanskrit language for thirty-odd years. I had encountered some of Amaru’s poems in other anthologies—even translated a few of them—but not until I began to work with the full collection did I come to admire how carefully articulated the book is. If these poems intrigue you, you can find further accounts of the Amarushataka and Sanskrit poetry in general by looking through my bibliography. I’ve noted some of the books that proved useful in recent years, as well as those translations that strike me as good poetry. Several scholars have produced useful if not inspired translations, but few poets have touched the tradition.
In their original Sanskrit, each of the Amarushataka poems is a four-line verse. They occur in complex metrical patterns, with a distinct preference for the one known as shardula-vikridita, “tiger’s play.” About two thirds of the poems are set in this meter, which has nineteen syllables to a line. It would be crazy to try to reproduce in English translation either the cadence or the intricate sound combinations of the far-away tongue.
The Sanskrit sounds like this:
dampatyor niśi jalpator gṛhaśukenākarṇitaṃ yad vacas
tat prātar gurusaṁnidhau nigadatas tasyātimātraṃ vadhūḥ
karṇālambitapadmarāgaśakalaṃ vinyasya caṅcūpuṭe
vrīḍārtā vidadhāti dāḍimaphalavyājena vāgbandhanam
(v. 15)
I hold to John Dryden’s wry observation in his essay “On Translation”: “A good poet is no more like himself in dull translation than his carcass would be to a living body.” Accordingly, I want to breathe the thirteen-hundred-year-old lyrics into life as contemporary poems. The crankiest translator wouldn’t try to wrench some modern language into tiger’s play—an act that that could only tempt the displeasure of the gods.
Four versions of the Amarushataka exist. They contain different numbers of verses, from 96 to 115. In many respects it is a leaky book. Some of its notable poems show up attributed to other poets in anthologies compiled centuries after the Amarushataka. Some of them occur with significant variations in vocabulary or meter, enough that one wonders if the two versions might really be separate poems. Surviving manuscripts come with mistakes or omissions, the result of sloppy transcription.
I have handled and compared several editions in the British Oriental and India Office, housed in the British Library in London;in the end I decided to work exclusively with the southern Indian version. This was edited with a commentary by Vemabhupala sometime between 1403 and 1420, and published in a modern, critic
ally edited volume in 1959 by C. R. Devadhar (who also provides a nearly impenetrable English prose description of each verse). The number of poems in Vemabhupala’s version, one hundred and one, feels satisfying—like the expression “forever and a day.”
Scholars now believe that Vemabhupala, working nearly seven centuries after Amaru, had a somewhat larger manuscript at his disposal than those that have come down to our own times. He discarded at least fifteen poems, possibly more, considering them spurious or not up to Amaru’s standard. Vemabhupala writes that he established his version after “having gathered the root poems and tossed out [later] insertions” (mulaślokaṃ samāhṛtya prakśiptān parihṛtya ca). His acid test was, I suppose, his own particular instinct for poetry.
In addition, Vemabhupala rearranged the order of the poems. His sequence ends up substantially different from the other three versions. He also composed a commentary, the Shringara-dipika or “Lamp of Eros,” in which he sedulously discusses elements of each verse. A good and restrained annotator, he intended his “lamp” to light up, not interpret, the poems. Its purpose was simply to help a reader through baffling turns of grammar or odd vocabulary, to highlight subtleties and suggestions in the poems, and provide the names of their meters.
In Vemabhupala’s edition, the four opening verses conjure the principal gods of classical India. This is a convention in Sanskrit works of scholarship, religion, science, and literature. But to open the Amarushataka with these particular verses introduces a touch of humor —humor or something slyer? Did Amaru—or Vemabhupala—mean them to be playful? Subversive? Philosophical? Anticlerical? If you look back at verses three and four, pause for a moment over them. From the charged encounter of human sexual partners, the powerful pantheon of Hindu gods gets dismissed—abruptly, forcefully, unsentimentally—their powers declared insignificant. This could be a moment from the Upanishads, when the esoteric teachings stand revealed: the old gods, potent as they seem in religion or myth, have no dominion over the surge of instincts that govern our actual lives. Confronted by something so starkly elemental, the gods of conventional religion are exposed as irrelevant.