Poems From The Sanskrit

In this rich collection of Sanskrit verse, the late Daniel Ingalls provides English readers with a wide variety of poetry from the vast anthology of an eleventh-century Buddhist scholar. Although the style of poetry presented here originated in royal courts, Ingalls shows how it was adapted to all aspects of life, and came to address issues as diverse as love, sex, heroes, nature, and peace. More than thirty years after its original publication, Sanskrit Poetry continues to be the main resource for all interested in this multifaceted and elegant tradition.

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.

Sanskrit messenger poems evoke the pain of separated sweethearts through the formula of an estranged lover pleading with a messenger to take a message to his or her beloved. The plea includes a lyrical description of the route the messenger will take, as well as the message itself. In the fifth century C.E., Sanskrit's finest poet, Kali dasa, composed "The Cloud Messenger." The beautiful and pure expression of an exiled lover's longing is among the best known and most treasured of all Sanskrit poems. In the twelfth century, Dhoyi imitated Kali dasa's masterpiece in "The Wind Messenger." Dhoyi's sentiments of love are blended with praise of the poet's royal patron King Lakshmana sena of Gauda (Bengal). Numerous more followed, including the third in the CSL selection, the sixteenth-century "Swan Messenger," composed also in Bengal by Rupa Go svamin, a devotee of Krishna. Here romantic and religious love combine in a poem that shines with the intensity of love for the god Krishna.

An award-winning translator finds surprisingly modern themes in a selection of erotic and religious stanzas from one of classical India's most celebrated poets. Although few facts are known about his life, the Indian poet Bhartrihari leaps from the page as a remarkably recognizable individual. Amidst a career as a linguist, courtier, and hermit, he used poetry to explore themes of love, desire, impermanence, despair, anger, and fear. “A thousand emotions, ideas, words, and rhythmic syllables stormed through him,” writes translator Andrew Schelling in an evocative introduction. “In particular he shows himself torn between sexual desire and a hunger to be free of failed love affairs and turbulent karma.” Schelling’s translation represents a rare opportunity for English-language readers to become acquainted with this fascinating poet. Attuned to Bhartrihari’s unique poetic sensibility, Schelling has produced a compelling, personally curated set of translations.

In this mesmerizing debut collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series, we’re witness to an expansive travelogue of the human spirit that moves throughtfully through multiples ages, cultures, and beings. Each poem explores in depth, through pensive, evocative images, aspects of the human condition and their place within the rich continuum of animal existence. W.B. Keckler presents these poems in a fugal form, uniting the individual works in what he describes as a “holistic formalism” that reveals the poems’ powerful collective meaning. Lives and afterlives are explored with equal care as Keckler attempts to restore the concept of “spirit” in a modern world often overwhelmed by materialistic priorities. “Readers will find these poems lively and pleasurable. They are deft and rich in language, grounded in the actual—even the ordinary—yet admitting into their brief structures a deeper existence of strangeness, or mystery. Which is to say, that they have entered the true realm of the poetry. In a literary age pleached with sameness, this book is a bright and swirling original.”—Mary Oliver