Between the Lines with Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh

Sanskrit has too often been regarded as the sacred language of the gods, yet it is love that has been the overwhelming obsession of Sanskrit writers for over 3,000 years. How to Love in Sanskrit is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry, bringing together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers like Kalidasa and Banabhatta, Buddhist and Jain monks, scholars, emperors, and even some modern-day poets. How do you brew a love potion? Turn someone crimson with a compliment? How do you make love? How do you quarrel and make up? Nurse a broken heart? And how do you let go? There’s something for everyone in this brilliantly translated ancient guide to love for modern readers.

The translators of this charming new anthology join us for a conversation on their writing and translation practices and how their own love life has been defined by these Sanskrit poems.

Read more below:

Q. Sanskrit love poetry, as you mention in the introductory note to the book, plumbs through the incomprehensibility of the emotion by “typifying its farthest possible extremes.” What were some challenges that you faced while adapting these extremes to suit the modern readers’ sensibilities?

Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh: How can we align the aesthetics of Sanskrit literature with that of the contemporary world? This was the challenge before us. Sanskrit and English convey ideas using different building blocks. Sanskrit poets naturally gravitate towards poetic devices that are unnatural to English – hyperbole, poetic fancy, extreme wordplay etc. For instance, our book features a poem (v. 109 Missing her) where a man imagines his darling to be a pond, where her loveliness are its cool waters, her eyes its lotuses, her eyebrows its ripples and so on. Such extended chains of comparisons are very natural in Sanskrit, but not so much in English.

Similarly, certain cultural ideas do not translate – comparing a woman’s thighs to an elephant’s trunk does not make for romance today. Similarly, certain descriptions of yearning can come across as quite ridiculous—imagine your bracelets falling off your arms because you became so thin from missing your lover, or even worse, becoming so thin that you disappear outright (Definitely not making this one up)! To the modern reader, this imagery may feel overdone, or even cringy. We have largely avoided translating such material in our book, but sometimes we use modern paraphrases when the verse is too good to ignore.

In some cases, it is not the imagery that is the problem, but that we tend to feel embarrassed by emotional depth or displays of vulnerability. These verses we have retained, because they are not just believable but also relatable with a little self-indulgence. After all, when you are in love and they are away, it can feel like the end of the world. Who has not indulged in some deeply sentimental music after a breakup? Some of these verses belong to the same genre.

Q. The book also testifies that yearning and grief become such important limbs for love—which is something that the modern readers perhaps cannot particularly relate to, as the book suggests too. How do you think yearning, distance and absence affect love-connections and how has Sanskrit love poetry integrated these ideas in its ocean-like range?

AR and SM: Love in Sanskrit is set in a world that most of us have never experienced: where lovers can’t be summoned with the click of a button, where people board caravans and travel with no clear itineraries, where the monsoon brings the world to a halt for months on end. This, in fact, inspires the whole genre of messenger poetry, starting with Kalidasa who has a lover despatch a cloud with his message (v. 73 Here there and everywhere). There is an entire genre of verses on women agonizing about when their lover will come back from his travels (v. 86 Global warming). One of our philosophy professors once remarked that, to be happy, we need the right amount of distance from the things we want—too much is discouraging, too little and there is nothing to work for. It works that way with love too, and poets recognize this – yearning is the focal point of Sanskrit love poetry. As one poet says: if you’re not yearning is it really love?

Q. You also mention that there are a lot of cultural differences between the contemporary readers and the ancient Sanskrit poets. The images and metaphors are not consistently meaningful across time and space, for instance. How was the process of curation and translation impacted by these gaps—if they may be called gaps?

AR and SM: Sanskrit poetry often works its magic by combining conventional poetic imagery in very unconventional ways. For instance, a pair of ruddy geese (chakravaka) represent devoted lovers separated by the vagaries of fate. A woman’s arched eyebrow is like the bow of the Love God (v. 11 Miss Universe). Bimba fruits stand in for wonderfully red lips (v. 1 Inferiority complex). We have such conventions today too: the all-consuming nature of passion is compared to fire or flames, roses are an expression of romantic interest and so on.

Notes about these conventions would mean that the poem cannot be read independently in translation and no longer functions as poetry, which we wanted to avoid. This unfortunately means that a large fraction of beautiful poetry could not even be considered for the book because it would need very long explanatory notes. To give the reader a fair sampling though, we have retained verses where a gentle nudge to the reader’s imagination is enough to understand the poetic convention—such as that the face of the beautiful woman is more radiant than the moon (v. 15 No other like you), or that spring is torment when your lover is away.

Q. While working with ancient scripts, translation becomes an act of compromise, as you have also mentioned in the book. Tell us about the amphibious qualities of How to Love in Sanskrit—given its ability to breathe in an ancient language, and communicate with a modern readership.

AR and SM: While we have modernized the context of some verses, we are proud of the fact that the book has great fidelity to the ideas in the Sanskrit material. If you consider some translations of Rumi, Rumi has been altered and uprooted from its native culture to an extent that it would no longer be recognizable to readers of the source. However, if you were to take our translations and give it to Kalidasa (if he could be brought back), we are fairly confident that he would resonate with the translated imagery, and deem it to have an utterly Sanskritic spirit. In contrast, most translations of Sanskrit today are literal to an extent that the principal jolt in the poem cannot be experienced, and instead has to be deciphered.

Q. There are consistent mentions of wars, battles, conquests in these love poems. Interestingly, it’s often the women who come out victorious! Could you tell us about the recurrent comparisons of brows with bows and bindis with arrows and the idea of wounding and attacking the lover in these poems?

AR and SM: That women are so prominent in the anthology definitely has something to do with the fact that most (but not all!) poets were men, as you can imagine. We also have verses by women poets in our book. But women’s desire is celebrated in this poetry—they are far from passive recipients of affection.

In Sanskrit, women are agents of the Love God, Kama, in his conquest of the world. Their eyebrows are bows and their glances are arrows that wound men, sometimes fatally. Women are also sometimes credited with resurrecting the Love God, who was burnt to ashes by Shiva, through their beauty.

Q. How does the rich tradition of Sanskrit love poems compare with other Western traditions? For instance, there are certainly some parallels and diversions between Sanskrit love poetry and courtly love poetry.

AR and SM: There are several divergences between this literature and courtly love poetry. Primarily, there is no ambiguity here about the presence of an erotic or sexual dimension to love, nor a conception of a higher spiritual love that goes beyond sexual desire—desire and love go hand in hand. Secondly, women are not objects of devotion; they are desiring subjects who participate in and usually direct games of love.

Q. There are almost no references to homoerotic/same sex relationships in the poems… Could you tell us a bit about the presence (or absence) of these relationships in the Sanskrit poetic tradition?

AR and SM: The influence of the Natyashastra’s nayaka-nayika model with a hero and heroine (sometimes several heroines) really solidified the structure of love poetry in Sanskrit, and indeed, perhaps all pre-modern Indian languages. No homoerotic poetry has so far come to light, but there are 30 million manuscripts waiting to be read! The Kamasutra establishes without doubt (and without condemnation) the existence of serious homosexual relationships in ancient India. At the same time, Buddhist codes of conduct and texts like the Manu Smriti view it less favorably. An interesting verse came to our attention recently, which says that women who saw Draupadi bathe “became men in their minds”. Only a few such tangential references to homoerotic desire are yet available, and the matter deserves fuller treatment at the hands of scholars.

Q. While the poems do away with metre and rhyme, they employ similes and metaphors quite frequently. Please tell us a bit more about the technical processes of translating these poems. Does the Sanskrit tradition limit itself to certain figures of speech and literary devices?

AR and SM: Sanskrit has dozens of literary devices and most of these do not work in English. What would be regarded as purple prose in English comes across very naturally in Sanskrit—and so we have had to do away with qualifiers and adjectives in the source that are not necessary to convey the main intent of the verse. For instance, the moon is sometimes called ‘shita-kara’ ( ‘cool-rayed one’) in Sanskrit (v. 89 Ready to mingle). We just call it the moon, unless the epithet is actually meaningful in context. Additionally, the punch in many Sanskrit verses comes from wordplay that cannot be replicated in English. We have used a localizing approach in several cases (v. 56 I rest my case), such as replacing one pun (mukta; meaning both pearl and liberated) with another one that works in English (cultured, referring both to being refined, as well as to pearls).

Q. Personally, I really enjoyed the last two chapters on ‘How to Break Up’ and ‘How to Let Go,’ which speak to an embittered but also troubled/melancholic heart—something most of us may be familiar with. You describe the original poems to be as dramatic as a grand Indian wedding in your introductory note to the book. What do you think Sanskrit love poets and poems might have to say about emotional regulation or composure?

AR and SM: This is a fascinating question—several Sanskrit philosophical traditions would respond to this in different ways, most involving cultivating indifference towards the world and to the vagaries of love, and using it as a path to liberation. For instance, Bhartrihari, whose Shringara Shataka features in our collection, abhors ambivalence of all kinds. He advocates going all in—either enjoy the pleasures of the world with abandon, or abandon these pleasures and seek liberation. An entire tradition of Kashmiri aesthetics tells us that the point of some poetry is to teach us the impermanence of the world and help us cultivate a state of vairagya or dispassion. Legend goes that Bhartrihari was a king who renounced the world as a result of the disgust and disappointment when he found out about his queen’s affair with the stable keeper. But some speakers in these poems point out that these matters of composure and emotional regulation are to do with rationality, which flies out of the window when love is concerned.

Q. There is a charming anecdote in the introduction about how you both use these poems in your everyday exchanges… Tell us about how the Sanskrit love poems have enriched your personal love lives!

AR and SM: Honestly, Sanskrit love poetry has not just enriched our love lives but fashioned them in the first place. Right from the time we first made a study date with each other to read Bhartrihari’s verses on detachment and ended up reading Amaru’s verses on love instead, love in Sanskrit has been an inseparable part of us. Looking back, reading these verses together and exchanging them, and later, working on this book, kept us going through over six years of long-distance from different continents and time zones, and gave us a special idiom of communication unique to us both. And what is love but a bunch of inside jokes and sweet nothings built up over time? Perhaps this is why we appreciate verses on yearning all the more.

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast

 

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