Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

In this rich collection of Sanskrit verse, the late Daniel Ingalls provides English readers with a wide variety of poetry from the vast anthology of an eleventh-century Buddhist scholar. Although the style of poetry presented here originated in royal courts, Ingalls shows how it was adapted to all aspects of life, and came to address issues as diverse as love, sex, heroes, nature, and peace. More than thirty years after its original publication, Sanskrit Poetry continues to be the main resource for all interested in this multifaceted and elegant tradition.

"Numerous more followed, including the third in the CSL selection, the sixteenth-century "Swan Messenger," composed also in Bengal by Rupa Go svamin, a devotee of Krishna. Here romantic and religious love combine in a poem that shines with the intensity of love for the god Krishna."--BOOK JACKET.

In this mesmerizing debut collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series, we’re witness to an expansive travelogue of the human spirit that moves throughtfully through multiples ages, cultures, and beings. Each poem explores in depth, through pensive, evocative images, aspects of the human condition and their place within the rich continuum of animal existence. W.B. Keckler presents these poems in a fugal form, uniting the individual works in what he describes as a “holistic formalism” that reveals the poems’ powerful collective meaning. Lives and afterlives are explored with equal care as Keckler attempts to restore the concept of “spirit” in a modern world often overwhelmed by materialistic priorities. “Readers will find these poems lively and pleasurable. They are deft and rich in language, grounded in the actual—even the ordinary—yet admitting into their brief structures a deeper existence of strangeness, or mystery. Which is to say, that they have entered the true realm of the poetry. In a literary age pleached with sameness, this book is a bright and swirling original.”—Mary Oliver

An award-winning translator finds surprisingly modern themes in a selection of erotic and religious stanzas from one of classical India's most celebrated poets. Although few facts are known about his life, the Indian poet Bhartrihari leaps from the page as a remarkably recognizable individual. Amidst a career as a linguist, courtier, and hermit, he used poetry to explore themes of love, desire, impermanence, despair, anger, and fear. “A thousand emotions, ideas, words, and rhythmic syllables stormed through him,” writes translator Andrew Schelling in an evocative introduction. “In particular he shows himself torn between sexual desire and a hunger to be free of failed love affairs and turbulent karma.” Schelling’s translation represents a rare opportunity for English-language readers to become acquainted with this fascinating poet. Attuned to Bhartrihari’s unique poetic sensibility, Schelling has produced a compelling, personally curated set of translations.

"A single stanza of the poet Amaru," declared a ninth-century poetry critic, "may provide the taste of love equal to what's found in whole volumes." Graceful and yet remarkably playful, intensely passionate, and at times hinting of divine transcendence, the poems translated here offer poignant glimpses into the many faces of erotic love. This collection, known in Sanskrit as the Amarushataka ("One Hundred Poems of Amaru"), was compiled in the eighth century and remains to this day one of India's finest collections of love poetry. It has never been fully translated into English poetry before. Legend connects the poetry's authorship to King Amaru of Kashmir, while present-day scholars generally consider it an anthology of the verses of many poets. Poet and translator Andrew Schelling's artful translations render the ancient verses with freshness and immediacy. Schelling's compelling introduction and afterword offer musings on the colorful background and history of the original Sanskrit text.

Historically, Kashmir was one of the most dynamic and influential centers of Sanskrit learning and literary production in South Asia. In Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir, Hamsa Stainton investigates the close connection between poetry and prayer in South Asia by studying the history of Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotras) in Kashmir. The book provides a broad introduction to the history and general features of the stotra genre, and it charts the course of these literary hymns in Kashmir from the eighth century to the present. In particular, it offers the first major study in any European language of the Stutikusumāñjali, an important work of religious literature dedicated to the god Śiva and one of the only extant witnesses to the trajectory of Sanskrit literary culture in fourteenth-century Kashmir. The book also contributes to the study of Śaivism by examining the ways in which Śaiva poets have integrated the traditions of Sanskrit literature and poetics, theology (especially non-dualism), and Śaiva worship and devotion. It substantiates the diverse configurations of Śaiva bhakti expressed and explored in these literary hymns and the challenges they present for standard interpretations of Hindu bhakti. More broadly, this study of stotras from Kashmir offers new perspectives on the history and vitality of prayer in South Asia and its complex relationships to poetry and poetics.