Love and The Turning Seasons Read online

  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.

  3.

  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.”