by Patricia Lee Sharpe
Ignore the posies this year. Shun the Belgian chocolates, too. Obtain this utterly charming and very wise volume of Indian Love Poems. Then snuggle up to your very own Valentine and read them, together.
This delightful compendium of translations selected and edited by poet Meena Alexander for the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet series is tiny, only 250 pages, but it’s an encyclopedia in disguise: nothing’s missing. The poems are sometimes passionate, sometimes poignant, sometimes pitiless, often wry, witty or amusing, almost never angry. The lovers are hopeful, fearful, ecstatic, euphoric, fulfilled, reflective, resigned, bemused, sad, calm. Whether the selection was written 2000 years ago in Sanskrit, Prakit or Old Tamil or only yesterday in the languages of modern India (Hindi, Oriya, Urdu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, English), the feelings ring true. And the book’s organization couldn’t be more perfect. It follows the very trajectory of love: waiting, meeting, parting. Serenity and wisdom come from accepting the inevitability of this trajectory's occurring, benignly or otherwise.
A few selections evoke the spiritual love of Radha for her Krishna and there are some short passages from the graceful translation of the Kamasutra by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar. For the most part, however, these are poems about the love that happens to you and me, as we are now, as we might have been two millennia ago, which is why your Valentine will love it even though he/she isn't/wasn’t a literature major or a South Asianist.
Now I have come to the part of this review that I have been dreading. I need to quote something, but I am afraid I will choose the wrong items for you and put you off. Still, I must do it. The first poem below is by Bhavabhuti (translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson), who wrote in Sanskrit in the 8th century CE. His lines are as fresh as the snow that fell around my house last night. Next comes a poem by Faiz Ahmad Faiz (translated by Mahmood Jamal), who wrote in Urdu in the early and mid 20th century. I include this one because it encompasses the entire cycle of feeling--and because it illustrates how the pain of the world complicates enormously the already unsimple business of loving one another.
DEEP IN LOVE
Deep in love
cheek leaning on cheek we talked
of whatever cane to our minds
just as it came
slowly oh
slowly
with our arms twined
tightly around us
and the houses passed and we
did not know it
still talking when
the night was gone
DO NOT ASK OF ME, MY LOVE
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you.
There was a time when
life was bright and young and blooming,
and your sorrow was much more than
any other pain.
Your beauty gave the spring everlasting youth:
your eyes, yes your eyes were everything,
all else was vain.
While you were mine, I thought, the world was mine.
Though now I know that it was not reality,
that’s the way I imagined it to be;
for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
and other pleasures, tool
Woven in silk and satin and brocade,
those dark and brutal curses of countless centuries:
bodies bathed in blood, smeared with dust,
sold from market-place to market-place,
bodies risen from the cauldron of disease,
pus dripping from their festering sores—
my eyes must also turn to these.
You’re beautiful still, my love,
but I am helpless too;
for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
and other pleasures too.
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you!
I can't resist adding one more little poem (translated by W. S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson). It shows how all lovers have quarreled--and made up with redoubled passion--since time immemorial. The spat commemorated here took place in Sanskrit fifteen hundred years ago.
IN THEIR QUARREL
In their quarrel she
pretended to be
asleep until he
shaking with passion
started to take off her dress
thief she said laughing and
boldly she bit
his lower lip
If (as I hope) you like my selections, you will be delighted to know that the power of Indian Love Poems is cumulative. Start at page one and read straight through and you will be dizzy with.....love, of course.
I need to warn you of the possibility that I am not bringing total objectivity to this review. The volume does contain one poem translated by me, from Urdu, by Fahmida Riaz, who’s still writing poetry in Pakistan. It’s called “Deep Kiss” and it begins: “Deep myrrh-scented kiss, deep with the tongue, suffused with the musky perfume of the wine of love....”
And to return to the question of what to give your valentine: Indian Love Poems along with the chocolates and roses would be really nice! With a kiss. For starters anyway.
