POCKET POETSOld India’s finest in translationANDREW SCHELLING

LOVE LYRICS

AMARU AND BHARTRI-HARI, TRANSLATED BY

GREG BAILEY

BILHANA, EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

RICHARD GOMBRICH

Clay Sanskrit Library: New York University Press, 2005

380 pp.; $22.00 (cloth)

AT ONE POINT Henry David Thoreaumay have owned the single largest col-lection of Sanskrit books on our conti-nent. A British friend and disciple,Thomas Cholmondeley, had sent themfrom London, the gift of an admirerwho thought he might assist Henry’sspiritual growth. Thoreau built abookcase with his own hands andproudly displayedthe strange volumesto visitors. He neverbothered to learn thelanguage, not eventhe alphabet, tellingone friend that for allhe knew he had theworld’s wisdom inhis bedroom. Whatif he learned thetongue and discov-ered all he ownedwas a bunch of oldbooks?

Since at leastThoreau’s day, weNorth Americanshave been fascinated with India’s juicyspiritual traditions, its poetry ofexcruciating desire, its magnificentmusic, wild folk arts, medicine, andglittering metaphysics. Anyone hop-ing to consult the original languages,though, finds the resources frustrat-ingly limited. Living in Colorado, as I

do, if I want to dig into that “para-dise of texts,” I have to travel a dis-tance about the width of India toraid a library. Very few collections ofSanskrit deep enough for research arehoused anywhere in North America.Now, twenty-five hundred years afterthe death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library

may remedy thisstate of affairs.

The Clay is a seriesof winsomely com-pact, hardbound vol-umes, in turquoisedust jackets. Theyhave been modeledin size and format onHarvard University’sbilingual Loeb clas-sics, which issuesancient Greek ingreen and Latin inred. Published byNew York Univer-sity Press, the Clayseries will amount

to a hundred uniformly designedvolumes over the next three years.The project will include all of thetwo major epics Ramayana andMahabharata, and dozens of spiri-tual, dramatic, and satirical volumesthat most Americans have neverheard of. Buddhist biographies and

9 4 | T R I C Y C L E W I N T E R 2 0 0 5

UPCOMINGEXHIBITION:

VISIONS OF TIBET Color photographs by

Brian Kistler and Sonam Zoksang on view December-February

Opening Reception & BooksigningThursday, November 17, 6 p.m.

SAVE THE DATES:AUCTION at CHRISTIE'S

to Benefit Tibet HouseThursday, December 15, 2005 BENEFIT CONCERT

CARNEGIE HALL Wednesday, March 1, 2006

HIGHLIGHTED WINTER OFFERINGS

Psychology & BuddhismRobert Langan

Joseph Loizzo, MD

The Varieties of Yogic PracticeWilliam Bushell, PhD

Please visit the website for completeprogram listings and descriptions.

TIBET HOUSE USNew York City

www.tibethouse.org212.807.0563

Bri

anK

istl

er,

cove

rV

isio

ns

ofTi

bet

BOOKS|REVIEWS

TRI.W05.088-113.reviews 10/11/05 12:04 PM Page 94

folklore will appear; Kalidasa’s plays;intricate volumes of Hindu mythology.And happily, for the enthusiast, muchof the notable kavya (poetry) producedin India between the fourth centuryand about the twelfth. The originalSanskrit—this holds true for every vol-ume—will not appear in devanagari,the standard North Indian script.The editors decided to romanize it,which is good news for anyone whodoesn’t know the Indic alphabet.That way anyone can sound out a bitof verse or wisdom text, which is aprofound opportunity since the San-skrit science of word magic is one ofits highest accomplishments.

Harvard’s Loeb Classics are mostlyquite old now. Their translations rangefrom the unpretentious to the sort offusty, neo-Victorian “englishing” thattwisted Sappho of the bright-petaledfoot and wily-minded Odysseus intoobjects of torture, and rendered Catul-lus—tender, angry, libidinous Catul-lus—toothless. The Clay will benefitby having up-to-date translations, freeof the squeamishness that neutered theVictorian era’s pioneer Sanskrit books.Love Lyrics, one of the first volumes inthe Clay Library to appear, containsthe full output that survives by threeprincipal poets of old India, Bhartri-hari, Amaru, and Bilhana. It is agood place to experience some

W I N T E R 2 0 0 5 T R I C Y C L E | 9 5

Portraits of TibetanBuddhist MastersDON FARBERForeword by Sogyal Rinpoche. With Words fromthe Masters and Text by Rebecca McClen Novick

“Beautiful…. His artistry, skill, and approach tothese wonderful subjects bring us to a placewhereby lama, photographer, and reader mergeinto one contemplative, heart opening experience.” —Robert Thurman,

author of Essential Tibetan Buddhism$29.95 cloth

ALSO BY DON FARBER

Visions of Buddhist LifeDON FARBERForeword by Huston Smith

“Inspired and inspiring.…. [A] visual treat.”—Shambhala Sun

$19.95 paperback

Smile of the BuddhaEastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today

JACQUELYNN BAASForeword by Robert A. F. Thurman

“I welcome this thoughtful and richly detailedstudy of how many aspects of Buddhism havestimulated, invigorated, and enriched Westernarts over the past 150 years.”

—Stephen Addiss, author of The Art of Zen$45.00 cloth

A Seat at the TableHuston Smith In Conversation with NativeAmericans on Religious FreedomEdited and with a Preface by Phil CousineauWith Assistance from Gary Rhine

“A valuable and insightful book about a too longoverlooked topic—the right of Native Americanpeople to have their sacred sites and practiceshonored and protected.”—Bonnie Raitt$24.95 cloth

Enlightened Reading

At bookstores or order (800) 822-6657 • www.ucpress.edu

TRI.W05.088-113.reviews 10/11/05 5:06 PM Page 95

deeply human poetry in readablemodern versions.

Very little factual or biographicaldetail is known of these poets. Theylargely exist as the books they leftbehind in their passage through life.All three are scored with grace, com-plexity, love—and furrowed with painand insight. Bhartri-hari, from possi-bly the third or fourth century, is thegrowliest poet in Sanskrit.

In the womb it exists in pain,Limbs contracted in the midst of piss

and shit.Enjoyment in youth is variable,Mixed with misery following separation

from one’s beloved.Even venerable old age is unsatisfactory,One dwells in the laughter and derision

of lovely-eyed women.Hey! Men, speak up,If there is the slightest happiness in

transient existence.

When the Chinese pilgrim andfolklore hero Hsuan-tsang braved cen-tral Asia and the Hindu Kush to getto India during the T’ang Dynasty,managing to score a rucksack full ofMahayana Buddhist manuscripts tosmuggle home, he learned of Bhartri-hari. Back in China he reported him aBuddhist, a poet, and a linguist.

It is hard to tell what Bhartri-hariwas, but his three hundred survivingpoems fit neatly into three discrete col-lections: Politics, Passion, and Disen-chantment. A hundred poems ofworldly advice. A hundred poems on thetorments of love in India’s sumptuouspleasure gardens. A further hundred onrenunciation as he haunts the headwa-ters of the Ganges amid Himalayanrock. His renunciation seems no lesstormented than his love affairs, and hisaccounts of samsara (a word he’s quitefond of) resound with the DiamondSutra: “In this dreamy transient exis-

tence where any result is uncertain /There are two paths for the wise.” Thefirst, of course, is “the ambrosial liquidof true knowledge,” the other a lifedevoted to sexual pleasure.

Amaru, of the seventh or eighth cen-tury, never doubts for a moment whichpath to follow. This makes him one ofour planet’s finest love poets. Not atrace of religion stains Amaru’s Shatakaor “hundred poems,” only a gentle deri-sion. Curiously, each of these threepoets has a verse that dismisses the tra-ditional deities of Hinduism, findingthem irrelevant in the face of sexualpassion—a gesture that seems Tantricin origin.

Of a slender woman,Lovemaking just completed in the

male position,Her face

Eyes languid at the end of sexBindu almost removed by a subtle

9 6 | T R I C Y C L E W I N T E R 2 0 0 5

BOOKS|REVIEWS

TRI.W05.088-113.reviews 10/11/05 12:04 PM Page 96

spray of moistureShaking earringsDisheveled tendrils of hair

May it long protect you.Gods—Vishnu, Shiva and Skanda—Are useless.

Amaru is new to Americans. Myresearch has turned up no translationsinto English poetry of Amaru beforethis year. Then in January I publisheda translation of the hundred poems(actually a hundred and one) as EroticLove Poems from India (Shambhala),and now Greg Bailey’s collectionappears. We have used two differentversions (there exist four altogether),so anyone interested won’t find ourbooks redundant. With a poet likeAmaru—tender, unbridled, tossedwith anguish, explicitly erotic, syn-tactically complicated—every trans-lator is likely to discover a differentpoet anyhow.

The third poet, Bilhana, is aneleventh-century Kashmiri. His bookof fifty poems, translated by RichardGombrich, is a tight affair. They are therecollections of a man on death row,about to be executed for carrying on anaffair with a prince’s daughter. Legendsays that as he was led forth to be pub-licly hung or dismembered, he recitedthese verses—so touching that theprince not only forgave him, but wedhim to the royal daughter. Gombrichtakes the poems—each a four-line versein the meter known as vasanta-tilaka,or “ornament of spring”—and repro-duces them in rhymed, iambic pen-tameter, six-line verses.

Still could I see once more, as day declinesMy loving mistress of the fawn-like eyes,Carrying like two nectar-laden jarsHer swelling breasts, I would for such a prizeRenounce the joys of royalty on earth,Heavenly bliss, and freedom from rebirth.

Gombrich writes:

I have attempted to convey something ofthis formal strictness by adopting arather exacting rhyming scheme andrigid metre. In this I differ from my col-leagues, especially my American col-leagues. Partly it is a question ofnational and individual taste. In trans-lating Sanskrit, the “elaborated” lan-guage, I do not think it necessary toeschew poetic diction.

Despite his quite constrainedform and bizarre assumptions(poetic diction is iambic pentame-ter), some of Gombrich’s versionsare pretty good. But too many readnot so much stiffly as cartoon-like.I laud Gombrich’s intent to portray“both the manner and the matter ofthe original as nearly as may be.”But his exacting scheme is neitherBritish (as opposed to American)

W I N T E R 2 0 0 5 T R I C Y C L E | 9 7

TRI.W05.088-113.reviews 10/11/05 12:04 PM Page 97

nor is it about formal precision.After the twentieth century withits terrific advances in poetic form,its discovery of subtle sound pat-terns adapted to our own contem-porary ears, his selection ofrhyming pentameter sounds oldfashioned, overstuffed, and in afunny way childish. End rhyme,after all, came in with the NormanFrench, disrupting the genius ofEnglish and American poetry asmuch as enhancing it. Finally seenas not much fun any longer, it haslargely died out of our practice. Nei-ther Bilhana nor any of the Sanskritpoets worked with end rhyme. San-skrit verse is measured by quantity,not by stress; it works with com-plex patterns of internal rhyme, andsounds more like Louis Zukofskythan like Professor Longfellow.

One of my own concerns as atranslator of India’s poetry is the

abyss that separates scholars of SouthAsian languages (including bothSanskrit and Tibetan) from the mag-nificent discoveries of twentieth-century verse. By comparison,think how many fine poets havegone to Chinese and Japanese:Pound, Waley, Rexroth, Cid Cor-man, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder,Arthur Sze, our coyote master RedPine, the reclusive David Hinton,Wang Ping, Jane Hirshfield, andSam Hamill. All these poets havecontributed significantly to thespread of Buddhist thought inAmerica. I could add anothertwenty names to the roster of poetswho have brought East Asianpoetry to North America. So whyhave so few poets migrated towardSouth Asian poetry? Maybe it is thelack of poets with whom to frater-nize that has prevented South Asianscholars from recognizing how to

bring current poetic practice intotheir own work.

Perhaps with the appearance ofthe Clay Library—hopefully fillingcity libraries and bookstores acrossthis North American Buddha-land—aspiring poets, scholars, andcontemplatives will begin to gethold of the classics of India in goodbilingual editions. Who knows whatmight happen if people begin tocarry them around in their pockets,learn a bit of the language of thegods, and try their hands at a versionor two? After all, it is clear thesebooks have been explicitly designedto fit the rear pocket of your Levi’s.And you can have three of India’sfinest poets for far less than the costof a tank of gas. ▼

Andrew Schelling is a poet and translator. Hismost recent book is Erotic Love Poems fromIndia: A Translation of the Amarushataka.

9 8 | T R I C Y C L E W I N T E R 2 0 0 5

Boulder, Colorado 800-772-6951

Religious Studies“The world’s religious traditions have

power and richness that can teachyou how to conduct your life artfully and

ethically, with care for yourself and kindness for others.”

—Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

Integrating contemplative traditions to engage life’s challenging questions. BA, MDiv, MA degreesin Religious Studies and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism(including Sanskrit and Tibetan language tracks).

www.naropa.edu

BOOKS|REVIEWS

TRI.W05.088-113.reviews 10/11/05 12:04 PM Page 98