Erotic Love Poems from India
Page 5
In the Amarushataka, this archaic element seems at first glance to be basic human sexual affection, with an emphasis on the wounds that drive men and women into anguish. But could it be a more-than-human passion the poems conjure? Do we stand in the domain known as ecstasy of love, kamananda? Or have we entered what yogins call paramananda, the ecstasy beyond love, to which sexual love is but the gateway?
Here I feel we have come to the edge of a great mystery, and the poems of the Amarushataka disappear like tracks into a lightly traveled wilderness. This must be the point that one of the poems arrives at when its poet, confronting his lover’s desperate mix of desire and torment, declares: “What she did next, no poet’s words command the power to tell.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS IN SANSKRIT
Amaruśatakam. With the Sanskrit commentary “Rasikasañjīvinī” by Arjunavarmadeva. Edited by Narayana Rama Acharya “Kavyatirtha.” Mumbai: Nirnaya Sagara Press, 1954.
Amaruśatakam. With the Sanskrit commentary “Sṛn̄gāradīpikā” of Vemabhūpāla. Critically edited with an introduction, English translation, and appendices by Chintaman Ramchandra Devadhar. 1959. Reprint, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984.
Amaruśatakam. British Library, Or. 3566. Palm leaf ms. in straight-topped Nepalese writing, 15th–16th century.
Amaruśatakam. British Library, IO SAN 1503d. Manuscript of Arjunavarmadeva’s edition, bound with two other texts, no date.
Kavikaṇtḥābharaṇa by Kśemendra. Edited by Vāmana Keśava Lele, M.A. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1967. This twelfth-century text by the renowned poet Kśemendra served as a handbook of instruction for poets. It includes guidelines for composition and for study, a discussion of appropriate themes, and detailed recommendations for how a poet should utilize the hours of the day, with adequate time set aside for writing, contemplation, and lovemaking.
The Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa. Compiled by Vidyākara. Edited by D. D. Kosambi and V. V. Gokhale. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. One of the finest compilations of classical Sanskrit poetry. Its 1,738 verses were collected by Vidyākara, abbot of a Buddhist monastery in Bengal, in the eleventh century.
Monier-Williams, Sir Monier. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1899.
WORKS IN ENGLISH
Bailey, Greg and Richard Gomrich. Love Lyrics by Amaru & Bhartrihari, & by Bilhana. Clay Sanskrit Library, New York University Press: New York, 2005. This volume holds the only other translation I know of the Amarushataka into American verse. Bailey works from a different manuscript; his translations are accurate, if at times a bit awkward, because he has “tried to be faithful to the word order” of the original. Not an easy task!
Chandra, Dr. Moti. “An Illustrated Set of the Amaru-śataka.” Bulletin of the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, no. 2 (1953): 1–63.
Daumal, René. RASA, or Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies. Translated with an introduction by Louise Landes Levi. New York: New Directions, 1982. An inspiring and cranky book by the only poet of the European avant-garde to seriously study Sanskrit. Daumal found in yoga and Sanskrit poetics a way out of the perilous drug experiments of his youth, and a method for writing poetry.
Heifetz, Hank. The Origin of the Young God: Kālidāsa’s Kumārasaṃbhava. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Fine translation. This is Kalidasa’s unfinished, long erotic poem on the marriage of Shiva and Parvati. It tells the story of Kama becoming bodiless, and links the earth’s geomorphic and biological forces to erotic love.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H. Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyākara’s “Treasury.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. Ingalls’s introduction remains one of the best accounts of Sanskrit poetry as a whole. Good translations. This is a paperback selection from his complete An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, published in 1965, also from Harvard.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H., Jeffrey Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan, trans. The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Edited with an introduction by Daniel H. H. Ingalls. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Two philosophical-critical texts by the principal figures of Kashmiri Shaivism, with many examples of poetry ably translated. Includes the first mention of the poet Amaru.
Lienhard, Siegfried. A History of Classical Poetry Sanskrit-Pali-Prakrit. Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984. The most thorough scholarly study of classical Indian poetry. Good for its clarification of terms and discussion of principal works.
Masson, J. Mousaieff and W. S. Merwin. The Peacock’s Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Out of print, but a delightful selection of poems with a spirited cross-cultural introduction by Jeff Masson. The authors have selected greatest-hits poems but have also drawn surprising examples from out-of-the-way sources.
Miller, Barbara Stoller. Bhartrihari: Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Bhartrihari wrote three shatakas, collections of one hundred poems, on three topics: worldly counsel, love, and renunciation. He was one of the vivid and troubled personalities in Sanskrit poetry. Miller’s translations are fresh and scrupulous. Miller was one of the luminaries of Sanskrit scholarship—her translations are indispensable. See her renditions of Jayadeva, Kalidasa, and Bilhana as well.
Paz, Octavio. In Light of India. Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Paz served as Mexico’s ambassador to India and has written widely on his experiences and studies there. See his chapter “The Hermit and the Lover” for the Nobel Prize–winning poet’s insightful encounter with the motivating forces of Sanskrit poetry. Includes ten poems translated.
Schelling, Andrew. The Cane Groves of Narmada River: Erotic Poems from Old India. San Francisco: City Lights, 1998. One hundred poems translated from the Sanskrit and related vernacular traditions. The introduction argues that in India there has existed an intimate, though infrequently examined, relationship between erotic poetry and ecological literacy.
———. Bright as an Autumn Moon: Fifty Poems from the Sanskrit. Mānoa Journal, University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 2013. Of the fifty-odd poems in this book, six come from the Amarushataka. This collection gives the deva-nāgarī original, a vocabulary list, and a brief essay on each poem, so general readers can get a fuller glimpse of the tradition, the poets, and the world of Sanskrit poetics.
Selby, Martha Ann. Grow Long Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Poems from the Amarushataka compared with lyrics from two earlier Indian traditions—classical Tamil and the Prakrit Gaha-kosa. Selby’s essays are scholarly and enthusiastic, her translations brisk and contemporary.
Shankar, Ravi. Raga Mala: An Autobiography. Edited and introduced by George Harrison. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 1999. Endearing account of his own life by the musician who has done more than anyone else to bring a sense of India’s artistic heritage to the West. Shankar provides a practicing artist’s look at the rigorous training required for competency in India’s traditional arts.
ANDREW SCHELLING has published more than twenty titles, including Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo and Pacific Coast Culture, a folkloric account of linguistics, wilderness encounters, bohemian poets, and traditional lore of the California Indians. His translations from Sanskrit and related lyric poetry have been published in North America, with several volumes reissued in India. In 2018 Shambhala Publications brought out Some Unquenchable Desire: Sanskrit Poems of the Buddhist Hermit Bhartrihari. A mountaineer and a student of ecology and linguistics, he lives in Colorado, where he teaches at Naropa University. When traveling to India he guest-teaches at Deer Park Institute in the bird-thronged Himalayan Foothills.
ALSO BY ANDREW SCHELLING
Tracks Along the Left Coast:
Jaime de Angulo and Pacific Coast Culture
The Real People of
Wind and Rain
A Possible Bag
From the Arapaho Songbook
Old Tale Road
Wild Form, Savage Grammar
TRANSLATIONS
Some Unquenchable Desire:
Sanskrit Poems of the Buddhist Hermit Bhartrihari
Love and the Turning Seasons
Bright as an Autumn Moon:
Fifty Poems from the Sanskrit
The Cane Groves of Narmada River
For Love of the Dark One:
Songs of Mirabai
Dropping the Bow:
Poems from Ancient India
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