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  EROTIC POEMS FROM THE SANSKRIT

  Translations from the Asian Classics

  TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

  Editorial Board

  Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair

  Paul Anderer

  Donald Keene

  George A. Saliba

  Haruo Shirane

  Burton Watson

  Wei Shang

  Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit

  An Anthology

  Edited and translated by

  R. PARTHASARATHY

  Columbia University Press   |   New York

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York    Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54546-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Parthasarathy, R., 1934- editor, translator.

  Title: Erotic poems from the Sanskrit : an anthology / [edited and translated by] R. Parthasarathy.

  Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Translations from the Asian classics | Includes bibliographical references nd index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059358 (print) | LCCN 2017019170 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231184380 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231184397 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Erotic poetry, Sanskrit—Translations into English. | Sanskrit poetry—Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PK4474.A3 (ebook) | LCC PK4474.A3 E76 2017 (print) | DDC 891/.2100803538—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059358

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

  Cover illustration: Rādhā, Rajasthani, Kishangarh, ca. 1740–1748; courtesy of the National Museum, New Delhi; © photo alamy.com

  For

  Mohan

  Arjun

  Gautam and Masako

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  ABHINANDA

  That’s How I Saw Her

  AMARU

  Who Needs the Gods?

  In a Hundred Places

  A Taste of Ambrosia

  Pincers

  The Bride

  ANON

  Lovers’ Quarrel

  The Pledge

  A Lover’s Welcome

  Regret

  Stonehearted

  Feigning Sleep

  Remorse

  Walking the Street by Her House

  The Sheets

  A Woman Wronged

  Aubade

  Like the Wheels of a Chariot

  The Word

  An Invitation

  The Traveler

  The Devoted Wife

  The Kingdom’s Happiness

  Hair

  Wild Nights

  Thank Offering

  At the Cremation Ground

  On a Rainy Day

  When Winter Comes

  Jewels

  The Creaking Bed

  She Protests Too Much

  She Doesn’t Let Go of Her Pride

  The Ways of Love

  A Lover’s Word

  The Hawk

  A Needle

  Time Wasted

  The Scholar’s Life

  Foolish Heart

  Supreme Bliss

  BĀṆA

  In a Corner of the Village Shrine

  BHARTṚHARI

  Wise Men

  Poets’ Excesses

  The Love Game

  Hips

  Fear of Death

  Desire Alone

  Adoration of Woman

  The Poet Speaks to the King

  Contentment

  Man’s Life

  Old Age

  White Flag

  BHĀSKARA II

  Elementary Arithmetic

  BHAVABHŪTI

  The Critic Scorned

  BHĀVAKADEVĪ

  Bitter Harvest

  BHOJA

  Scrambling Out of the Water

  BILHAṆA

  Bite Marks

  In Life After Life

  All for Love

  DEVAGUPTA

  Drumbeats

  DHARMAKĪRTI

  The Way

  JAGANNĀTHA PAṆḌITARĀJA

  Indra’s Heaven

  JAGHANACAPALĀ

  Wife

  KĀLIDĀSA

  Flight of the Deer

  Such Innocent Moves

  Blessed Sleep

  KARṆOTPALA

  The Lamp

  KEŚAṬA

  The Camel

  KṢEMENDRA

  All Eyes on the Door

  KṢITĪŚA

  The Red Seal

  KUMĀRADĀSA

  Alba

  KUṬALĀ

  Furtive Lovemaking

  MĀGHA

  The Art of Poetry

  Scent

  MAHODADHI

  Stop Being Willful

  MORIKĀ

  Don’t Go

  MURĀRI

  Hidden Fingernail Marks

  An Actor in a Farce

  RĀJAPUTRA PARPAṬI

  Blow Out the Lamp

  RĀJAŚEKHARA

  Her Face

  RUDRAṬA

  What the Young Wife Said to the Traveler

  ŚARAṆA

  Girl Drawing Water from a Well

  SIDDHOKA

  The Empty Road

  ŚĪLĀBHAṬṬĀRIKĀ

  Then and Now

  SONNOKA

  Driven by Passion

  ŚRĪHARṢA

  The Smart Girl

  In Her Direction

  VALLAṆA

  Sea of Shame

  On the Grass

  The Essence of Poetry

  VARĀHA

  Poring Over a Book

  VIDYĀ

  Hollow Pleasures

  Complaint

  The Riverbank

  VIKAṬANITAMBĀ

  The Bed

  A Word of Advice

  YOGEŚVARA

  Far from Home

  When the Rains Come

  Notes

  Sources of Poems

  Bibliography

  Credits

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I thank Terence Diggory, Barry Goldensohn, Robert Goodwin, and Christopher McVey for their comments on early drafts of the manuscript. I am indebted to David Shulman for his insightful remarks on eight of the poems. I have benefited from the suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers, which helped to improve the manuscript immeasurably. My thanks are due to Amy Syrell and Marilyn Sheffer of the Interlibrary Loan Service of the Lucy Scribner Library at Skidmore College for getting me the Sanskrit books I needed. My greatest debt is to my wife, Shobhan, who read and reread the manuscript carefully several times. If the poems speak to us, it is in large measure because of her keen ear and good sense.

  Jennifer Crewe, associate provost and director, Columbia University Press, was from the beginning enthusiastic about the work. Her encouragement and patience were exemplary during my final revisions of the manuscript. My editor, Jonathan Fiedler, and Leslie Kriesel, assistant managing editor, were unfailing in their support. To Mike Ashby, my copyeditor, I am indebte
d for his meticulous editing of the manuscript. He saw to every detail, and nothing seemed to escape his watchful eye.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines in which some of these poems first appeared, either in earlier or current versions:

  Indian Literature: “The Bed,” “The Lamp,” “The Pledge,” “Wild Nights”

  Manushi: “Bitter Harvest,” “The Riverbank”

  Modern Poetry in Translation: “Aubade,” “The Red Seal,” “The Traveler,” “A Word of Advice”

  Poetry (Chicago): “The Sheets”

  Verse: “Jewels,” “Then and Now,” “Who Needs the Gods?”

  Weber Studies: “The Art of Poetry,” “Complaint”

  INTRODUCTION

  This selection of poems is personal; it does not attempt to be representative of Sanskrit poetry in general. It comprises poems that I have enjoyed reading and that have excited me. I have also selected them because I found these poems manageable within the resources of modern English verse. The selection is intended for the general reader and lovers of poetry who might want to know what Sanskrit poetry is like. It offers a salutary corrective to the notion, still prevalent in the West, that Indians in the past were predominantly otherworldly and spiritually minded. Nothing could be further from the truth. These poems reflect a culture that celebrates the pleasures of the flesh without any inhibition in a language that never gives offense, that never crosses the line but always observes the canons of good taste. In this the Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us. The poems speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience—love fulfilled and love unfulfilled, old age, poverty, asceticism, and nature—in a voice that moves us even today.

  The introduction makes no pretense to scholarship; it attempts to provide some basic information to the reader who comes to Sanskrit poetry for the first time and who needs guidance on how to read a Sanskrit poem in translation. The notes at the back of the book throw light on specific elements of the poems such as language, imagery, and tone as well as on culture-specific references. My goal is a modest one: to awaken the interest of the reader in the poem by providing him or her with such tools as are necessary for the enterprise. Wherever possible, the poems are read in a comparative context, with examples from Greek, Latin, English, Chinese, Tamil, and Prākrit poetry.

  Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit comprises poems by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, from sixteen works composed, with two exceptions, between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. The poets are presented alphabetically for the convenience of the reader.

  For a long time, three anthologies of Sanskrit poetry in English translation have held the field: Ingalls (1965),1 Brough (1968),2 and Merwin and Masson (1977).3 These anthologies have contributed significantly to our understanding and enjoyment of Sanskrit poetry. Since then, other translations of Sanskrit poetry have appeared and enriched the field: Miller (1978),4 Selby (2000),5 and Bailey and Gombrich (2005).6 Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit builds upon the work of these distinguished translators. It offers a new verse translation that introduces the richness and variety of Sanskrit poetry to a new generation of readers in a robust, contemporary English idiom that captures, insofar as possible, the tone and register of the Sanskrit originals. The translations are, above all, English poems that can be read with pleasure by readers of poetry.

  Love in all its aspects is a favorite theme of the Sanskrit poets. Poems on the topic of erotic love (kāma) form the centerpiece of the anthologies, and the translations reflect this preference. The poems are often sexually explicit but they never offend our taste. In their openness to the sexual experience, they have a contemporary flavor to them. Readers who wish to have a greater understanding of Sanskrit erotic poetry might want to familiarize themselves with the conventions of the erotic mood spelled out in such texts as Vātsyāyana’s Kāmasūtra (The book of love, 4th cent.) or Kalyāṇamalla’s Anaṅgaraṅga (The stage of the Bodiless One, 16th cent.). Sanskrit erotic poetry has few equals, with the possible exception of the erotic poems in the so-called Greek Anthology, compiled by the Byzantine scholar Constantinus Cephalas in the tenth century in Constantinople.

  Translation from one language into another involves some loss, as the Buddhist monk and prolific translator Kumārajīva (344–413) famously reminded us: “In the process of translating a Sanskrit text into Chinese it loses all its nuances.… It’s something like chewing cooked rice and then feeding it to another person. Not only has it lost its flavor; it will also make him want to throw up.”7 Despite the eminent monk’s opinion, it is possible to carry across the flavor of a poem from one language to another. And that is precisely what this selection has attempted to do.

  Among the problems I wrestled with in making these translations, the hardest one perhaps was how to make the Sanskrit poems heard in English. Here tone and register are crucial factors. English does not have a tradition of erotic poetry comparable to that of Sanskrit. The sexual explicitness of some of the poems may not be to the taste of some readers. As a result, I had to modify the tone and register without compromising the integrity of the poems. In translating from Sanskrit into English, one translates not just the text but also an entire culture and worldview that remain hidden like so many roots beneath the text.

  THE ROLE OF THE POET

  What precisely was the role of the poet in the Indian tradition? In the Rig Veda (ca. 1200–900 B.C.E.) we are told,

  Varuṇa confided in me, the wise one:

  Thrice seven names has the cow. Who knows the trail

  should whisper them like secrets, if he is to speak

  to future generations as an inspired poet.8

  According to the commentator Sāyaṇa (14th cent.), speech (vāc) in the form of a cow (aghnya) has twenty-one meters corresponding to her breast, throat, and head. Only after the intervention of Varuṇa (Vedic god of natural and moral law) does the poet who is the wise one (medhira) become the inspired one (vipra). His exceptional knowledge imposes a responsibility on him. He is both the keeper and the transmitter of the tradition that regarded poetry as a way of knowledge. It was believed that the spoken word, properly formulated, could produce a physical effect on the world. The word was invested with sacred power. This image of the poet as a seer (ṛṣi) in the Vedic period gives way in later times to that of the poet as a learned man of refined sensibility and taste (kavi) who made his living as a court poet. Not all poets were, however, fortunate enough to make their living as court poets. The case of the Kashmiri poet Bilhaṇa (11th cent.) comes to mind. After many unsuccessful attempts to find a patron, he eventually found one in the Cāḷukya king Vikramāditya VI Tribhuvanamalla (r. 1076–1126) of Kalyāṇa (present-day Basavakalyan in Bidar District, Karnataka). He repaid his patron a hundredfold by composing a fulsome panegyric in his honor, The Deeds of His Majesty Vikramāṅka (Vikramāṅkadevacarita).

  The twelfth-century poet and critic Kṣemendra, also from Kashmir, takes an exalted view of the poet’s vocation.

  A poet should learn with his eyes

  the forms of leaves

  he should know how to make

  people laugh when they are together

  he should get to see

  what they are really like

  he should know about oceans and mountains

  in themselves

  and the sun and the moon and the stars

  his mind should enter into the seasons

  he should go

  among many people

  in many places

  and learn their languages.9

  Works on poetics, such as Rājaśekhara’s (10th cent.) An Inquiry into Poetry (Kāvyamīmāṃsa), offer elaborate accounts of a poet’s education and of the faculties he must possess in order to be a poet.10 His readers and listeners would, like him, be connoisseurs (sahṛdayas) and would be educated and endowed with similar faculties. Poetry was a highly cultiv
ated art. It was patronized by kings and flourished in their courts. A. Berriedale Keith has described the situation well: “The great poets of India wrote for audiences of experts; they were masters of the learning of their day, long trained in the use of language, and they aimed to please by subtlety, not simplicity of effect. They had at their disposal a singularly beautiful speech, and they commanded elaborate and most effective metres.”11

  Sanskrit literary culture has been the subject of research and study in recent years.12 I have provided, wherever necessary, historical contexts for the poets: the circumstances and constraints under which they wrote, the sort of reception their work received, and the frustrations they experienced in their search for a patron. Sanskrit was an “artificial” language learned after a “natural” language (Prākrit) had been learned. It was restricted to the educated classes and was used in the courts and in religious institutions. As a pan-Indian language, it was not tied to any specific region. As a result, Sanskrit poetry came to have a pan-Indian audience. The court was the epicenter of Sanskrit literary culture. It included poets, scholars, professional reciters of poetry, and storytellers. At poets’ gatherings organized by the court, poems were recited or sung; poetry was not meant to be read. Poets flocked to the court in search of patronage; in return, they sang the praises of the king.

  The Sanskrit poet rarely expresses his own thoughts and feelings. The notion of individual self-expression was foreign to the culture at that time. What the poet expresses are the thoughts and feelings of the personae in a given situation: the unfaithful husband returning home at dawn after a night with a courtesan, the wife overjoyed on seeing her husband return from his travels abroad, the hermit expressing his disaffection with the world, and so on. The poet’s originality lies in the way he exploits words, images, and meter, in fact all the resources of the language, to make an expertly crafted poem that would redound to his glory.

  READING A SANSKRIT POEM

  The introduction offers close readings of a number poems in the light of Sanskrit poetics. Let us look at an anonymous poem, “The Sheets” (p. 15), from Amaru’s One Hundred Poems (Amaruśataka, 7th cent.), an influential anthology of erotic verse, transcribed in roman type, followed by a word-for-word translation and a verse translation. The original poems do not have titles. I have provided the titles for the translations.