As I was sorting through old files the other day, I came across some translations I had done during coursework in grad school. Since I doubt I’ll find the energy to do much else with them in the near future, I thought I’d just share them here, unedited. (If I let myself, I’m sure I’d find dozens of changes to make. But I’m not feeling so masochistic.)
The poems are from a work of modern Sanskrit that was published in the 1980s by Radhavallabh Tripathi. They were featured as the first and last “waves” in his book, The Ten Waves (लहरीदशकम्). The notes are also from when I completed the translation, somewhere around 2014.
Spring
As words approach memory, dissolve,
sink into some corner of the mind;
As sprouts of poetry burst forth, wither,
now, in the mind of a poet — there is Spring.
They say the honey months, Madhu and Madhava,
spread forth the sumptuous glory of Spring.
Now, honeysuckle yields no honey
and the months pass likewise, empty-seeming.
Take Spring and make a poem!
The Sun’s critical
columns glow
for the poet.
I search repeatedly all around
to bring the spring into my eyeline.
The whole world scattered with its shattered form,
it vanishes into some hidden abode.
Lost indoors amid amassing duties,
a girl’s lovely face comes no more to the mango grove.
The heart’s desires are hacked off —
mango shoots cut by axes.
Displacing once-played-in mango groves,
droves of stuccoed homes swarm the land.
Knowing no subtlety, like hyperbole
they swallow what matters, and yawn for more.
I search for it, always, in my time — Spring,
somewhere nearby, fog-destroyed.
From dawn til dusk, stuck with so much to do —
I can almost catch its scent.
But evening comes, and, gone out to wander,
I walk a path unpeopled, head bent low.
I spot two or three trees, silent, standing;
true men, heavy-hearted.
Disrobed of worn-out leaf-rags,
they stand scorched by Time’s wild fire:
vow-observing sages bathed in the rough waters
of the western mountain’s red sunbeam-river.
As the last net of sunlight is hauled in,
a fisherman gathers his own net.
Twilit, he grabs the hooked fish
and heads back to shore by night.
Caught here in the net it flops around, twitching,
the vernal fish squeezed by the binding,
hanging here like Trishanku According to Hindu mythology, Trishanku was a king who asked a powerful sage to use his powers to get him into heaven. But the king of the gods, Indra, did not like the idea of a mortal in heaven, so he sent him back down to earth. Since both Indra and the sage were equally powerful and too proud to relent, Trishanku ended up suspended between earth and heaven.
in the space between the breath in and the breath out.
Where vernal glory burns
on an earth ablaze with battle’s acrid flame,
shadows of flesh-eating demons roam,A direct quote from Kalidasa’s 3rd century play, Shakuntala ( अभिज्ञानशाकुनतलम ).
spilling oil over the sea.
The wind insinuates, does not disturb the stillness.
Flower-bunches bloom as if pried by needles.
Wanting to release his swift, half-drawn arrow,
Love checks himself in doubt.This verse also quotes a passage from Shakuntala, in which the King’s grief over his mistakes manifests itself as a delay of the onset of spring.
Invisible, it watches from afar the universe at war.
Fear-stricken, it has reason to be afraid.
Spring, wasted by time’s passing,
sighs and comes so slowly.
Seeing this “spring”
Spring vanished, gone,
they fall all over the ground, wet,
those decrepit clumps from the trees.
Reduced to bones, the decrepit, old Vindhyas
cradle, careful like a grandfather,
that weak baby, Spring,
in the lap of their forests.
Roads muddied with cars coming and going,
every direction filled with the scent of petrol,
Smoke pours over the city’s highway.
The earth, spotted with black asphalt, holds the dust.
Smoke-shrouded faces on the road
choke down polluted wind.
Every dusty car tramples
the glory of Spring.
The shoreless sea of new-city-civility
churns; poison and nectar rise to the surface.
Spring swallows both.
It may be clothed in yellow, but its throat turns blue.In Puranic mythology, the gods churn the primeval ocean in order to separate from it the nectar of immortality. In doing so, a great poison was released from its death. Shiva swallowed this poison, which turned his throat blue, earning him the epithet “the blue-throated.” Krishna, on the other hand, an avatar of Vishnu is known by the epithet, “the yellow-clothed.” Thus this verse punningly suggests the contradiction that spring could be both Vishnu and Shiva.
Flutteringly, the butterfly roves
to find its floral sweetness.
How to get nectar from the blossoms
stunted on every vine?
Copper cords of lightning carry
featherless fliers
hanging by their feet,
betraying nature’s perversion.
The cuckoo’s throat chokes a broken call
reddened by the cold.
Bees fly into our homes,
hit the walls, and flick about the floor.
Innocent, absorbed in his nest-making, the bird
wearies, always collecting a pile of straw.
He sees the Spring, like grain, being crushed
between a pair of grinding stones.
What was, what will be, what must be:
this revolving present hangs in the middle.
Forgetting all this, politics establishes its own ends
swallows it all.
Inside: a corpse, the winter of imperialism.
Outside: the terrorist summer.
Anxious, in between,
how could Spring show itself?
Among all the flowering sounds
in a field blossoming wide with words aglimmer,
among the sprouts of new cultures —
is all that remains of it mere semblance?
Weak horses hooked to tonga-carts falter.
Flag-whipping carriages tour the kingdom
cloaked in the politics of religion —
whether Ram’s or Rahim’s.
Driven from mango groves sapped of essence
where honey is invisible and bees scant,
it slinks through downtown streets,
a quiet beggar.
Radha has left the gopi-barren banks of the Yamuna,
left the family that her lover left.
There are no more carnations there,
Spring, too, has left in dejection.Radha is Krishna’s most famous lover. She lived on the banks of the Yamuna river with a clan of cowherds. The young girls of this clan (known as gopis) were all lovers to Krishna. They (and Radha in particular) are treated in Hinduism as symbols of a perfect relationship with god.
With a battle raging between modern society
and the path borne out by practice,
Spring, powerless, seeks its home elsewhere,
a displaced refugee.
Distorted are all the words
and meanings in which lie beauty’s essence.
The playful Spring goes unseen
even by those bespectacled men in white.The men might be wearing white because white is the traditional color of mourning in South Asia, the implication being that Spring has died.
Shirking its very nature,
it no longer lets itself be seen.
Spring plays deceitfully,
uncovering the mind’s perversity.
Students scribble uncaged
phrases on walls; the cultured deign to disapprove.
Animating the syllabled pain,
teenage girls grow mercurial.
Power-drunk, an official happily takes bribes,
liquors himself up,
living in perpetual Spring.
Neglecting his duties, he debauches his office.
While Spring dances, leaps, and glides in exuberance,
among groups of gleeful girls,
and on every side the city is filled
with the loud reds and yellows of Holi,Holi is a spring festival.
Those who live vile lives throw
filthy clods by the hundred,
mudslinging rough, blunted slanders,
leaving Spring’s grandeur smothered.
Although hidden, perhaps altered,
the season can still be sensed sometimes.
I realize it before me — a sudden, tangible Spring:
a new-blown lotus in the mud, glistening.
I come home, long abroad,
spot my daughter’s sparkling laughter,
It pulls me from depression —
lovely on her, like Spring.
The cloying coquetry of the ornamented wife,
the embraces and clandestine sex,
the glow of pleasure-groves radiant
with blossoming vines of ceylon ironwood,
the feigned rebuff, the cute brow-knitting,
the flailing of limbs, the innocence,
the elaboration of metaphors twisted and turned
sibilant on the bitten lips of lovers:
I don’t want to bring all this old, established
tradition down to the level of my poetry.
Tossing aside this mirrored expanse of poetic pleasures,
may my words scrape clean the spring.
I see it taking new shape,
making a new home,
ever flashing vernal
inside life’s abrasive whirlwind.
It hungers for life in the coriander-
and turmeric-stained home
of the good wife over the stove,
cooking good food for her family.
Spring clings as lines of dried sweat
on the sweet cheeks of men
ploughing the durva-richDurva grass is a common plant used for medicinal and ritual purposes throughout India. earth
with ploughs of their own power.
If still writing and creating, if still speaking,
if still breathing, I shall have no fear.
The Spring I’ve found is a bond of sound and sense
The power to cleave it escapes even the gods.
Even Now
Even now,The refrain of this wave (“even now”) echoes a classic work of Sanskrit poetry, Bilhana’s “Fifty Stanzas of a Thief,” which consists of fifty stanzas of a man on death row, remembering his princess-lover fondly. “Even now” his mind focuses on her, despite his oncoming death. She is also the reason for his being executed. they disturb the mind:
tasks finished and tasks undone.
Doubts, like nimble snakes, slither;
and questions swallow my soul.
Distorted in this monstrous din,
words crafted by wise men of old vanish.
I search the dark for words among words,
look for the primordial with a new lamp.
Even now, amid bustling crowds
on busy roads, I search
for the famed, old path
lost now amid my footprints.The original contained a series of puns: “footprints” can also mean “words,” and “path” can also mean “[literary] style.”
Even now, in the tremendous infinity
of life’s churning sea,
tossed by bubbles, waves, and whirlpools,
there remains a full flood of compassion.
Even now, a toddler knee-crawls to cry, “momma,”
clearly, beautifully, innocently,
with clumsy, stuttering speech
from his milk-smeared, smiling face.
Even now, the Ganges purifies the earth here,
though polluted knowingly.
And the Rewa — its not as if it stopped flowing,
although it is clogged with so many dams.
But the Vindhya forest does lack
its vast, dense thickets of dhaw and bakul trees.
The lands of beastly roars
shake the earth no more.
But why does the Vindhya look south,
hopeful, with a compassionate glance,
where, even now, the sage Agastya’s
footprints seem still to mark the earth.
Where have the swans gone? I don’t know.
And the cranes don’t play by the sea.
Even now, a pair of owls somewhere here in the evening
hoot ominously from the trees.
Even now, they light up my mind’s alleyways,
like flashes of netted lightning embedded in black clouds:
those teachers who, delighting in the imagination
of their students, have claimed student-defeats as their victories.
Even now, cruel, ten-headed Ravana snatches
Sita from the Dandaka forest,
but there’s no Jatayu to come to her rescue,
that poor, sobbing daughter of Videha.This verse and the following play on traditional Hindu stories, each of which is changed here so as to draw attention to some perversion in the poet’s “now.” For example, in the Ramayana, Jatayu comes to rescue the heroine Sita, after her abduction by Ravana.
And he of the black-deeds, Duhshasana, likewise
drags Draupadi from the assembly.
Even now, wretched faces watch
as she, terrified, calls to Krishna.There is a repeated play on the Sanskrit word कृष्ण(black) in this verse. The epithet used to name Draupadi is कृष्णा (for she is dark-skinned), Duhshasana is said to have deeds that are कृष्ण, and, of course, the God to whom Draupadi calls out is named कृष्ण (Krishna).
Dushyanta, caught up in the hunt,
even now roams right here, struck by Love’s arrow.
But Shakuntala is fixated on her own responsibilities
that she just chastises him, and stays within her bounds.
Even now, Durvasa’s terrible curse
roars to destroy memories
as if to burn them bright and fierce,
but that daughter of Kanva hears him and laughs.[Note added in 2021: I think this is only a partial translation, and the original poem is a fair bit longer, but I don’t have it in front of me to check]