Sanskrit Poetry

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.

Study on the works of Jagannatha Panditaraja.

This book is both an introduction to Sanskrit and an investigation into the relationship between the nine basic affective states and the form they take in the absence of self-interest according to the theory of Indian aesthetics as developed in the Dhvanyaloka and the Abhinavabharati.

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.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.