Love and The Turning Seasons Read online

  LOVE AND THE TURNING SEASONS

  Translators

  DEBEN BHATTACHARYA,

  ROBERT BLY,

  DILIP CHITRE,

  ANANDA COOMARASWAMY,

  VIDYA DEHEJIA,

  HANK HEIFETZ AND V. NARAYANA RAO,

  LINDA HESS AND SHUKDEO SINGH,

  JANE HIRSHFIELD,

  ARUN KOLATKAR,

  DENISE LEVERTOV AND EDWARD C. DIMOCK JR.,

  ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA,

  W.S. MERWIN AND J. MOUSSAIEFF MASSON,

  LEONARD NATHAN AND CLINTON SEELY,

  GIEVE PATEL,

  EZRA POUND,

  A.K. RAMANUJAN,

  ANDREW SCHELLING,

  GARY SNYDER,

  CHASE TWICHELL AND TONY K. STEWART

  Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Schelling

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:

  Love and the turning seasons : India’s poetry of spiritual & erotic longing / edited by Andrew Schelling.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61902-241-6

  1. Love poetry, Indic—Translations into English.

  2. Erotic poetry, Indic—Translations into English.

  3. Indic poetry—Translations into English. 4. Indic poetry (English) I. Schelling, Andrew. II. Title: India’s poetry of

  spiritual & erotic longing. III. Title: India’s poetry

  of spiritual and erotic longing.

  PK2978.E5L68 2014

  891.4—dc23

  2013028206

  eISBN 978-1-61902-352-9

  PB ISBN 978-1-61902-471-7

  Cover design by David Bullen

  Book Design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc

  Counterpoint Press

  2560 Ninth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  : CONTENTS

  Introduction, by Eliot Weinberger

  Note on Translation and Pronunciation

  Īśa Upaniṣad

  Sanskrit Poems

  Manikkavacakar

  Āṇṭāḷ

  Nammalvar

  Mahādēviyakka

  Lal Ded

  Dhūrjaṭi

  The Varkaris

  Jñandev

  Muktabai

  Namdev

  Janabai

  Eknath

  Tukaram

  Akho (Akha Bhagat)

  Kabir

  Mirabai

  Surdās

  Dadu Dayal

  Panjabi Songs

  Jayadeva, a verse cycle from the Gīta-govinda

  Vidyāpati

  Chandidāsa

  Govinda-dāsa

  Rāmprasād Sen

  Bhānusiṃha (Rabindranath Tagore)

  Songs of the Bengali Bauls

  Coda

  Afterword:

  On Reading India’s Devotional Poetry

  Notes on Translators

  Acknowledgments and Copyright

  : INTRODUCTION

  Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge

  To conjugate infinity’s dim marge–

  Anew. . . !

  HART CRANE, THE BRIDGE

  WE IN THE US inhabit a misplaced India, the land that Columbus thought he had found. Half a millennium later, the descendants of the original occupants are still bizarrely called Indians, no doubt because it has proven useful for the immigrants to treat the locals as foreigners. But if the story of Indian America is a huge and largely tragic epic, alongside it is a little anthology of lyrics, idiosyncratic moments: the invention of American Indias.

  The mega-bestseller in the colonies, first published in 1751 and reprinted 54 times, was The Economy of Human Life: Translated from an Indian Manuscript Written by an Ancient Brahmin. This “ancient book” had been given by a lama in the Potala in Lhasa to a Chinese official named Caotsou, a man “of grave and noble aspect, of great eloquence,” who translated it from the Sanskrit (“though, as he himself confesses, with an utter incapacity for reaching, in the Chinese language, the strength and sublimity of the original”). Translated from Chinese into English by an unknown hand, the book presented the “Oriental System of Morality” in a series of maxims on modesty, prudence, piety, and temperance, that seemed to emanate more from a Calvinist pulpit than the environs of an adorned lingam: “The first step to being wise is to know that thou are ignorant”; “The terrors of death are no terrors to the good’; “Take unto thyself a wife and become a faithful member of society”; “Keep the desires of thy heart within the bounds of moderation”; “Receive not a favor from the hand of the proud.”

  [The book, now believed to be the work of an English bibliophile named Robert Dodsley, had a curious afterlife. It was reprinted verbatim in 1925 by a group of California Rosicrucians as Unto Thee I Grant, the “Secret Wisdom of Tibet,” which had been transmitted to the Himalayas by the pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten– perennial occultist source of the world’s religions). The text, in turn, became part of the ultra-secret Circle 7 Koran of the inner-city Moorish Science Temple, founded in Newark in 1913 by the prophet Noble Drew Ali (born Timothy Drew) and relocated to Chicago in the 1920’s. Among the initiates of the Circle 7 Koran were Wallace Fard and Elijah Muhammad, who adapted the sacred knowledge to create the Nation of Islam. There is a line, then, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X.]

  Actual artifacts from India began to arrive in New England with the opening of the India trade in 1784: muslins, Bengal ginghams and paisley shawls, monkeys and parrots, tamarind and ginger, knicknacks and small statues of the uncanny gods. The first real Indian– a Tamil from Madras, with a “soft countenance” but “well-proportioned body”– showed up in 1790; six years later, the first elephant, named Old Bet, was a sensation. The East Marine Society, made up of sailors who had been to Asia, had a spectacular annual parade in Salem, with a “palanquin borne by Negroes dressed in the Indian manner.”

  Intellectual Indophilia begins with both global trade and Sir William Jones’ discovery of the Indo-European roots of many languages, the realization that those strange others were somehow part of “us.” Samuel Adams, in his retirement devouring books on the East, wrote to Jefferson that “Indeed Newton himself, appears to have discovered nothing that was not known to the Ancient Indians. He has only furnished more ample demonstrations of the doctrines they taught.” Post-Revolutionary America’s belief in (if not practice of) universal human rights was leading to a preoccupation with a universal human religion. One of the responses was Unitarianism, which found a bridge between the seemingly dissimilar Hinduism and Christianity in the figure of Rammohun Roy, who translated some of the Vedas and the Upanishads and founded the Brahmo Samaj, devoted to recuperating an imagined monotheistic ur-Hinduism, sweeping away the million gods. When Roy moved to London and converted to Christianity (or more exactly, the universal Hindu-Christianity) he became a Unitarian star.

  Roy was read by Emerson, who said that India “makes Europe appear the land of trifles.” In the Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Vishnu Purana, he found the “highest expression” of the “conception of the fundamental Unity.” His philosophical terms, the Over-Soul and the Higher Self, are plainly derived from
the Hindu Brahman and atman; his versions of “illusion” and “fate” come from maya and karma. Curiously, though his beloved aunt sent him Sanskrit poems and he himself extensively adapted poems by Hafiz, Saadi, and other Persian and Arabic poets, Indian poetry didn’t enter into his Indo-worldview and India only appears twice in his poetry: a lament for dead New England farmers, mysteriously titled “Hamatreya,” (a word otherwise unknown, though possibly derived from Maitreya, the future Buddha, which doesn’t illuminate the poem) and the often-anthologized “Brahma” (“If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain, / They know not well the subtle ways/ I keep, and pass, and turn again.”), a poem that eerily seems indeed to come from the future: the voice of another Indophile, Yeats.

  Thoreau discovered India through Emerson, and surpassed him in unqualified enthusiasm: “I cannot read a sentence in the book of the Hindoos [probably either the Laws of Manu or the Bhagavad-Gita] without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and seems as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mounts.” He took the Gita with him to Walden and declared himself a yogi. (Some have seen his retreat to the pond as an act of yogic austerity, though his sisters often brought him cookies.) He was given a large library of Indian books, for which, typically, he built a special bookcase out of driftwood, and translated from the French some Buddhist texts and a story from the Mahabharata. But he was apparently untempted by the poetry, though he said that Indian “philosophy and poesy seem to me superior to, if not transcending greatly, all others.” His enduring contribution to the Indo-American loop is, of course, his “civil disobedience,” which inspired Gandhi’s satyagraha, which inspired Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance.

  Though Emerson called Leaves of Grass “a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald,” though many critics have presented Vedantist readings of Whitman, it is likely that his actual knowledge of India was limited to a few magazine articles. Things Indian are scattered through the work, but merely as items in his human catalog; the “Hindu” aspects probably derive from intuition or experience or Emerson. “Passage to India,” beyond its famously recycled title, is a celebration of the opening of the Suez canal as a metaphor for the joining of the Old and New Worlds, the past and present, and– “Passage to more than India!”– for the soul’s voyage into the ether. Apart from a few lines in the sixth section, India itself barely appears, though the invocation of the “tender and junior Buddha” is irresistible.

  Two years later, in 1893, the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, dedicated to the dream of a single world religion in the new century, featured the glamorous Swami Vivekananda, the first Indian pop star guru, who, like the Brahmo Samaj, preached a Hinduism without gods: the Emersonian uniting of a human soul with the universal consciousness of a universal god. In the wake of his extensive speaking tours and the proliferation of branches of his Vedanta Society, the tabloids were full of stories of respectable Christian housewives suddenly abandoning hearth and home for a life of depravity. The dream of unity, from Vivekananda and the gurus who followed his trail, provoked its nightmare: the Immigration Act of 1917, which prohibited immigration to the U.S. by all Asians except Christian Fillipinos, and which remained in place until 1965.

  In 1896, Mark Twain was the first American writer of note to actually make the passage to India, spending three months there on his around-the-world tour:

  This is India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations—the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien persons, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

  He wrote that “They are much the most interesting people in the world—and the nearest to being incomprehensible.” The Indo-American century ends with his wisecrack: “East is East and West is West, and finally the Twain have met.”

  Anglo-American modernism exuberantly rummaged through the history of poetry– the Greek anthology, the Tang Dynasty, troubadours and Anglo-Saxon bards, the Metaphysicals, the haiku masters– but oddly never discovered classical Indian lyricism. Eliot’s Sanskrit studies at Harvard led only to the famous last line of “The Waste Land.” Yeats translated ten of the Upanishads with Shree Purohit Swami, and dreamed that a modern poet would be inspired to create “some new Upanishad, some new half-Asiatic masterpiece,” but apparently was unaware of the non-canonical texts. Pound collaborated with a young man named Kali Mohan Ghose– a member of the London branch of the Brahmo Samaj, whom he met through Rabindranath Tagore– and translated a few poems by Kabir, which were published in a Calcutta magazine in 1913. But other than a walk-on in the Pisan Cantos, Pound never mentioned Kabir again, nor did he translate or write about other classical Indian poets.

  The “invention of China” transformed Anglo-American poetry, but nothing similar happened with India, despite the Indian currents floating around modern poetry. Pound practiced yogic breathing and was a life-long admirer of the writings of Yogi Ramacharaka (whom he did not know was actually William Walker Atkinson, born in Baltimore), where, among other things, he discovered the vortex that became Vorticism. Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott were dead, but the Theosophical Society was not only promoting its quirky mythologies, but also serious scholarship in Hinduism and Buddhism. Theosophy was inescapable, and its ideas were not only known in varying degrees to the poets, they also colored nearly all the writing, scholarly or occult, on Indian religions and philosophies in the first half of the century. (Its creative masterpiece was the invention of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.) The great art historian and aesthetician Ananda Coomaraswamy had spurred interest in classical Indian art, and Tagore– friend of Yeats and Pound and everyone else– was an international phenomenon, easily the most famous poet in the world.

  Yet taste and happenstance worked against Indian poetry. The texts that were widely known– mainly the canonical religious works and Tagore– had no place in the prevailing Imagist aesthetic against rhetoric and abstraction. (In Spanish, however, the young Neruda could plagiarize Tagore with no apparent stylistic rupture.) Nor was there in Sanskrit a figure who could occupy a place similar to that of Arthur Waley in classical Chinese and Japanese: that is, a reputable scholar who was connected to the contemporary literary life and capable of writing translations of interest to non-specialists. (Neither did India have a popular, literary, all-purpose, Western “explainer,” as Japan did with Lafcadio Hearn.) And, if the religious-erotic bhakti poems presented in this anthology were known at all to the poets, it is doubtful they would have done much with them, for the Anglo-American poets, at least on the page, were a prudish bunch, compared to the novelists. Their poetry had no Lady Chatterleys or Molly Blooms; Hemingway’s earth did not move. It would be hilarious to imagine Krishna and the gopis disporting in Eliot’s East Coker or H.D.’s Delphi or Stevens’ ordinary evening in New Haven or especially in Robert Frost’s snowy woods.

  Probably the first significant American poem located in India is Muriel Rukeyser’s five-part “Ajanta,” included in her 1944 Beast in View. Though presented as a “journey” from the first line (“Came in my full youth to the midnight cave”), Rukeyser had never been to India. Five years later, in the prose meditation The Life of Poetry, she has a few pages on Ajanta as a metaphor for poetry: “The sensation
of space within ourselves is the analogy by which the world is known.”

  James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions, spent two years in India in the early 1950s with the Ford Foundation, advising the new, post-colonial publishers. His verse-memoir Byways has an entertaining chapter set in Trivandrum, and his time there led to the publication of many classical and contemporary Indian and India-related books by New Directions, but none of them were lyric poetry.

  The one major Indo-American poetry “event” or nexus in the second half of the 20th century was the fourteen months Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky spent traveling in India in 1962 and 1963, joined for part of the time by Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, and the mysterious Hope Savage, all in flight from Cold War USA. This “first encounter” (in the anthropological sense) of American poets and actual India is documented in Ginsberg’s journals— one of the masterpieces of Beat prose— Snyder’s quite beautiful journal, Kyger’s more straightforward journal, and in a brilliant retelling by Deborah Baker, The Blue Hand. Ginsberg’s involvement with the religious street singers, the Bauls, led to a few translations, and to recordings and tours in the US. Above all, passages in Ginsberg’s journals and the uncharacteristically few poems he wrote in India come close to an American bhakti: the infinite sights, smells, sounds of India pour through in Whitmanian catalogs, all of them ultimately hallucinatory– sometimes literally drug-induced— and illusory. The only poet to carry on this tradition has been Anne Waldman, herself a later visitor to India.

  It is surprising, as in the first half of the century, that the vogue for Indian things barely carried into poetry. Hippie travelers in Rishikesh or Benares, the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, the invocation of Gandhi in the antiwar movement, Hare Krishnas in the airports, Ginsberg’s harmonium and chanting at his countless readings, the popularity of yoga and the parade of mass-market gurus. . . Yet there were only three noteworthy books by American poets, all slim: Denise Levertov’s collaboration with Edward C. Dimock on Bengali songs, In Praise of Krishna (1967); Robert Bly’s The Kabir Book (1976), a rewriting of Tagore’s translations; and W. S. Merwin’s collaboration with J. Moussaieff Masson (later Jeffrey Masson of the Freud archive controversy), Sanskrit Love Poetry (1977, reprinted as The Peacock’s Egg). A. K. Ramanujan, who lived much of his life in the US, had the Tamil poems of The Interior Landscape (1967) and one book that was popular among poets: the Penguin Speaking of Śiva (1973), translations from the classical Kannada. Ramanujan was perhaps the closest to an Arthur Waley as both a literary figure and a scholar but, although revered in India, he was not widely known in the US. Among the Indologists, Barbara Stoler Miller, who died young, had a good translation of Bhartrihari (1967), and later of the Gita, and Daniel H. H. Ingalls’ massive An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry (1965) remains an inexhaustible delight. Among India-inspired American poems, the most memorable are Charles Olson’s “Poem 143. The Festival Aspect” in the third volume of The Maximus Poems (written in 1965), which came out of his reading of Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, and– with Ginsberg, perhaps the greatest example of an American bhakti of transcendent erotic lyrics– Kenneth Rexroth’s The Love Poems of Marichiko (1978), which purports to be a translation of a contemporary Japanese woman poet.