A few months ago I was sent a new anthology, How to Love in Sanskrit, edited and translated by Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh. This is a charming and quietly provocative little book which deserves international attention, not least for the editors’ engagingly robust discussion of what contemporary classical translation is really for.
Here’s number 2, titled by the editors ‘Prolonging the moment’:
As the girl at the well
pours out water
making it trickle thin
and thinner still,
the traveller bends,
eyes upwards
sipping the water
through cupped hands
spreading his fingers wide
and wider still.
The note at the bottom of the page tells us that this poem — like many others in the book — is from the Seven Hundred Gahas, put together in about 100 CE in the Deccan in central India. Many of the poems are also followed by a sentence (or, at most, two) of context or interpretation. The note for this poem remarks simply: ‘This verse went viral in old India. Umpteen other works across languages quote it and imitate it.’
The Gāhāsattasaī (Seven Hundred Gahas) is actually in Prakrit, not Sanskrit. As the editors explain in the introduction: ‘This book is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry in the way that an invitation to tea is an invitation to tea, biscuits and pakoras.’ Around 150 of the poems are from the Sanskrit, 50 from Maharashtri Prakrit, a couple from Apabhramsha (a late type of Prakrit closest to the modern languages of Northern India) and one from Pali. The languages described as ‘Prakrit’ are closely related to Sanskrit and form part of the same rich literary culture: it makes good sense to combine the two, in the same way that any proper anthology of, say, seventeenth-century English epigram would naturally consist of both Latin and vernacular poems. This is especially true for an anthology of love poetry, with which Prakrit was particularly associated.1
The quotations give you a sense of the colloquial tenor of the editorial interventions, and the plain style of the translations. This “chatty” style of commentary has become quite fashionable in verse anthologies — Kaveh Akbar’s recent Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse adopts a similar tone.2 Rao and Mahesh’s collection resembles Akbar’s in other ways too: like Akbar, they include a few extracts from works written in prose rather than verse (e.g. by Bana, the seventh century master of Sanskrit prose), and the chosen poems are translated into largely straightforward free verse. An even more recent Penguin anthology — Christopher Childers’ monumental Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse — takes a roughly opposite approach in almost every respect. His translations are mostly into metrical, rhyming English verse. And though Childers always writes clearly, his huge volume is bristling with apparatus — multiple serious prefatory notes, an introduction to each separate poet, an afterword on lyric contributed by a leading classicist (Glenn Most) and a huge 324 pages of detailed notes before a series of indices. By comparison, Rao and Mahesh have kept their playful but highly disciplined little book down to 299 A5 pages, inclusive of everything.
Childers’ remarkable project deserves a serious appraisal of its own, but despite appearances How to Love in Sanskrit is in fact — beneath the bonnet, as it were — much more like the Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric than the Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. For a start — like Childers — the editors have made all their own translations, rather than (like Akbar) using mainly existing ones, and they have also made their own selection based on a long-term immersion in the field. According to the introduction, the 218 short poems included were chosen ‘after examining over 10,000 verses from over 150 Sanskrit and Prakrit works, many nearly forgotten’. They have selected poems or extracts from works ranging from the earliest types of Sanskrit (such as a hymn from the Rig Veda) to modernity — a few pieces are contemporary compositions — and grouped them into nine roughly thematic sections. (‘How to Flirt’, ‘How to Break Up’, and so on.) The selection alone is a real demonstration of taste and expertise.
I recommend the very brief introduction and (especially) the following ‘Tour of the Translators’ Workshop’ for anyone doing serious thinking about classical translation. The editors are frank and funny about their project and its principles. They pull no punches and are not afraid to admit what they think can’t be done, and why. In the note on translations, they cite a couplet from the Ramayana which, in a way that is typical of Sanskrit poetry, relies upon a series of four word-plays: one meaning ray or hand; one star or pupil (of the eye); one redness or love; one the sky or a dress. As a result, the same couplet can be read simultaneously in two different ways: as a description of stars fading from the sky at dawn, or of a woman in love who takes off her clothes. The rhetorical effect is similar to that of a multi-correspondence simile, but the poetic effect is quite different, since the two elements of the comparison are conveyed by the same words. The editors are straightforward: ‘Indeed, it is impossible to translate such poetry for general audiences; the magic dissipates in the process.’ This seems to me, essentially, true, though it does rule out of practical scope a lot of the most characteristic Sanskrit verse. For this and other reasons, they conclude: ‘though a ship’s worth of Sanskrit poetry has survived, only a bucket’s worth has potential in English’.
In their view, the proportion of Sanskrit verse which has the potential to make successful, accessible short poems in contemporary English for readers without particular knowledge of pre-modern India is very small, so they have read through thousands of poems on the look out for ones that will work. It’s hard to imagine a translator of Latin or Greek candidly admitting such a thing, though I have often felt something similar, especially about the unfathomable expanse of untranslated later Latin.
The book is published in India and it’s aimed at an Indian audience. The Introduction begins: ‘You’ve probably done a little Sanskrit in school, learnt a few prayers at home, or at least heard them somewhere’, which is obviously unlikely to be true of most readers outside India. But it assumes no particular knowledge of Sanskrit (or Prakrit) language, literature or literary conventions beyond the most basic mythology — the notes assume you know the outlines of the romance between Rama and Sita, for instance, but little beyond that. The style of translation is exuberant and often modernising: one poem begins ‘Is she politely Victorian / when they’ve fought?’ (no. 164), others refer to Vogue (no. 165), ‘sexperts’ (no. 52) even ‘tighty-whities’ (no. 187).
Sanskrit and Prakrit poetry is metrically as well as grammatically complex, and in ways that are very different from English. The editors acknowledge this and clearly have an ear for it — the brief comments on metrical effects in the introduction are sharp. But, pragmatic again, they are honest enough to admit that they have made no attempt to reproduce sound or metre in the English translations: ‘we choose to focus on meaning, and say goodbye to metre and sound’.3 Partly as a result, I think it’s fair to say that few of these translations have lyric beauty on their own terms: when they are most successful, it is their wit, concision or imagery that does most of the work.
But the project has a cumulative force as well, and here I think the editors’ enthusiasm and depth of knowledge really tells: for all the lightness of tone and intentional accessibility, anyone reading straight through will learn a great deal about how Sanskrit and Prakrit love poetry actually worked — its conventions, themes, favourite images, even a feel for its linguistic playfulness. Though the editors are realistic — perhaps even conservative — about the limitations of translation, they come up with some creative solutions. I was amused by this version (no. 131) of a poem from the Warehouse of Verses — a late collection, from about 1800 — which is structured around the Sanskrit denominative, a secondary conjugation in which a suffix added to a noun, then conjugated normally, produces a verb:
The mighty God of love
just glances their way
and in their passion
the hidden thicket — castleizes
pitch darkness — chanderlierizes
the bare ground — mattressizes
even a rock — pillowizes
and plain old dirt — makeupizes.
So this is an intentionally accessible set of translations, but it is a serious project as well, and wears its considerable learning lightly. My favourite innovation is the ‘List of Verses in the Source Language’. In the back of the book, in a modest 28 pages, the anthology prints the original texts for every single translated item, in Roman type following standard transliteration conventions, with line breaks marked with | or || to save on space. The Prakrit texts are followed — as is standard in Sanskrit commentaries — by a Sanskrit version in square brackets, and for each text we are also given a concise reference to allow us to locate the wider context of the original. This immediately opens the book right up — any reader who does have some Sanskrit can, if they wish, get right down into the weeds and see what Rao and Mahesh have done, and even, if really motivated, track a verse extracted from a longer poem or play back to its original context.4 This is a great compromise between a full parallel-text presentation — probably appropriate and justifiable only for editions aimed primarily at students of a classical language — and the standard ‘anthology in translation’. I wonder why I have never seen a Western anthology of classical translations with a similar format, and whether such a thing might work.
The final three poems in the book (216-218) have no attributions. We need to refer to that list of original texts at the back to confirm what we might have guessed, that these are translations of Sanskrit verses written by the editors themselves (in fact, all three are attributed in the Sanskrit versions to Suhas Mahesh, who also contributed no. 34). The last is titled ‘Parting benediction’:
May all the losers swipe left on you.
May your girlfriend pull you tighter in embrace.
May our parents not cast spying glances.
And finally —
may the Love God always
fire his arrows in pairs.
This is our parting benediction.
A final unnumbered prose piece of ‘original text’ corresponds closely though not exactly to English inscription which closes the main body of the book: ‘Thus concludes the anthology titled How to Love in Sanskrit put together by Anusha and Suhas’. Consulting the Sanskrit text tells us in addition that the editors are from Karnataka in Eastern India, and that they now live in Toronto (charmingly rendered as turantura). They are themselves a couple, and the beautiful and characteristic use of the dual (here in the instrumental case) in this final text is a touching coda to the volume.5 For these editors, Sanskrit and Prakrit are living languages.
I’ve written briefly before about my own attempts at translating Sanskrit poetry into English verse. My approach to translation is mostly very different in style from How to Love in Sanskrit, and many readers will find things to argue with from their own perspective, but anyone embarking on or contemplating a translation project from Latin or Greek — or indeed thinking more generally about what it means to translate literature for a non-scholarly audience — would do well to take an hour or two to explore and admire what Rao and Mahesh have done here.
A few poems do make some use of end-rhyme, sometimes quite skilfully (e.g. 189), but none follow a set metrical pattern. Indeed, the editors comment in the translators’ preface that ‘metre has largely been abandoned in English’. Many readers who love — and even write — metrical poetry in English will bristle defensively at that statement, but for the purposes of a general reader it’s not unreasonable.
The book also includes a complete list of all the primary sources used for the anthology, with full publication details, and a separate summary list of all sources examined, according to category and language.
The dual is a grammatical number between singular and plural, used to refer specifically to two objects or people, commonly used for words like ‘hands’ or in conventional compounds such as ‘mother-and-father’. Unsurprisingly, it is also found frequently in erotic and romantic contexts. Ancient Greek also has a dual, which is quite common in Homer, and somewhat less frequently in Greek of the classical period.
If anyone is interested in the Peacock's Egg, here's a scan I got made:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZIMGyjLpO-LI-q_dy_TqwSh8c3SA3x61/view?usp=sharing
(I don't usually share copyrighted material, but this one is long out of print)
Wonderful review, Victoria. As someone who grew up learning Sanskrit at home and at school, this book was delightful. Bravo to Rao and Mahesh.