“I know he breathes secrets to you – I can see their perfumes still dispersing among the leaves of your longing. Have I no memory of my own? Besides, your head is full of flowers. Go wait for him in the last shreds of your innocence, crazy girl, until grief comes for you.”
— Rabindranath Tagore, writing as Bhanusimha
Poetry is as conducive to expressions of love as a kettle is to the production of a pot of tea – which is to say, extremely conducive. Here, united in translation, are dozens of poems that bubble, whistle, whisper, fume, and fog – all in the vain quest to get the beloved’s attention for a full minute. The lover is a mortal, of course. The beloved, on the other hand, doesn’t possess the same status.
India has a long tradition of fabulously blending desire with devotion. In recent times, books like Kama: The Riddle of Desire and Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India have urged audiences to think about our collective memories, our shared heritage of syncretism, our honesty towards bawdy matters of the body. In the joyous wake of the Supreme Court’s partial striking down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, I came across a particular tweet that reminded people: this isn’t India getting westernised, this is India getting decolonised. Even for a tweet, the message was perfectly succinct and sharp. This is the legacy we should all lay claim to, the legacy that Andrew Schelling reminds us of in Love and the Turning Seasons.
A collection of poetry of both spiritual and erotic longing from India, the anthology is filled with works that are both vivid and sparse. It draws from the careers and translations of several prominent poets, and alternates these with a commentary that is as insightful as its subject poetry is evocative. I am especially grateful to this commentary that delightfully opens the door to both the difficulty of translating poetry, and the pleasure of reading a good translation.
Eliot Weinberger ends his illuminating introduction with the following: “But beyond literary history, beyond the many pleasures of the individual poems, it also serves the function of translation at its best – that is, as inspiration. Here is a poetry that does not exist in our language, but, transformed, it could.”
Dazzling and impossible
The poetry featured here is so delicious and dazzling that it multiplies the typical impatience induced by great literature a dozen times: one wants to read all the poetry in the world in a day, in an hour, in a minute. Gathered here by Andrew Schelling’s appreciative eye are not just unbelievably beautiful descriptions of desire, but also of the failure of desire. Needless to say, this failure isn’t induced because a mortal desires the almighty, because the pair doesn’t match. Rather, this desire fails because it’s authentic and shameless in the claim it lays to being desirous. It is indifferent to the passage of time, to the wastage of that which is precious. And this undaunted, desiring scenario calling to us from a different world is frustrating, for desire is so utterly bound to fail that it can only frustrate one when it does collapse.
Consider this simplest of simple lines from Kabir, a sentence so plainly put that it really did make me want to tear my hair out: “When you’re trying to find a hardwood forest, it seems wise to know what a tree is.” But the entire project of desire is to attain that forest – and many more – based solely on a structure, a fantasy, of a forest. When it comes to this forest, we’ll never know what a tree is.
It goes without saying that Schelling’s North American ethics of academic rigour add vastly to the beauty of this volume. Although this book does seem intended for an audience comprising his Western students, there is nothing in it that detracts from an Indian’s enjoyment of it. Nothing is set down on a clean platter, or put on display in a spotless window. Instead, every poet, editor, and commentator that has had anything to do with this work has focussed on bringing the murkiness and impossibility of the oral tradition to the determination of written expression. As Schelling’s quote from Robert Bringhurst points: “Writing is the solid form of language.” And to toy around so brilliantly with this solid form requires genius, something common to all the poets and their translators.
Love And The Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry Of Spiritual & Erotic Longing, edited by Andrew Schelling, Aleph Book Company.