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Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama (extracts)

LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan in a variety of online and print journals including Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret, The High Window, New Verse Review and Nimrod.

The poem numbers refer to Per K Sorensen’s critical edition: Divinity Secularized: An Inquiry into the Nature and Form of the Songs Ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama, Wien 1990. Translated from the Tibetan by Louis Hunt

The Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama is a collection of 65 poems popularly ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706). The Sixth Dalai Lama was notorious for his indifference to the religious and political obligations of his office. He publicly renounced his monastic vows, preferring to spend his time in the taverns and brothels of Lhasa. He died at the age of 26, taken hostage and presumably killed by the Mongol forces contending for power in central Tibet. Despite his notoriously unconventional behavior, the Sixth Dalai Lama is a revered figure in Tibetan culture. Some have tried to interpret his lack of the conventional monastic virtues of celibacy and abstinence as an example of Tantric Buddhism in which the deliberate flaunting of moral norms is seen as a dangerous but potentially more efficacious route to Enlightenment. But the poems themselves suggest a simpler explanation – Tsangyang Gyatso was an ardent young man chafing at the restraints of familial, religious, and political authority.

The poems themselves are quite short – four lines of six syllables a piece, almost haiku like in their brevity. But the condensed style of classical Tibetan literature, the tendency, especially in poetry, to omit grammatical particles whenever possible, means that one can pack a lot of meaning into a very small compass. Despite their apparent simplicity, these  poems can often be read as an indirect commentary on the difficulties of Tsangyang Gyatso’s precarious position in Lhasa. The “grey-yellow” wind that banishes “the blossom from the bee” is also an allusion to the color of the robes worn by Tibetan government officials. The poems touch as well on specific aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that may not be familiar to the uninitiated reader. For example, the image of the girl returning “again and again in my thoughts” uses the Tibetan expression  for the Buddhist conception of cyclic existence. But I believe these poems work, or should work, even for someone completely unfamiliar with Tibetan history or Tibetan Buddhist practice. I have endeavored to translate these poems in a way that conveys the only thing that can be adequately represented in English – their lucid surface.

The clear white light of the moon rises

above the peaks of the eastern mountains.

The face of a young girl not yet a mother

returns again and again in my thoughts.                                                                                

(1)

The green shoots of last year’s sowing

are now sheaves of dried-out straw –

the bodies of young men grown old

are worn stiff as a bow made of horn.                                                                                   

(2)

The season for flowers has faded

but the bee does not lament its passing.

Love’s deeds have been exhausted

and I will not lament their leaving.                                                                                       

(7)

A few scratches on the ground

can track the stars’ expansive course.

I know by touch her tender flesh

but cannot trace her happiness.                                                                                              

(49)

The grass is covered with frost –

herald of the grey-yellow wind

that will finally banish

the blossom from the bee.                                                                                                      

(8)

The goose longs for the marshes,

hoping to linger there a while,

but lighting on the icy lake

despairs and takes flight again.                                                                                             

(9)

This girl, loved since childhood,

is descended from the race of wolves.

She has learnt to tear my skin and flesh

before she flees to her mountain home.                                                                                 

(36)

These small letters written in black ink –

a drop of water can erase them.

But the mind’s unwritten figures

cannot be blotted or effaced.                                                                                     

(13)

I looked for my love at dusk,

the dawn brought falling snow.

What is there to keep secret?

My footprints mark the snow.                                                                                                

(53)

Posted on by Louis Hunt

Poems from Bhartrihari’s Shatakatraya (‘The Three Hundreds’)

LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory from James Madison College, Michigan State University. In addition to his work as a political theorist, he has studied Sanskrit and classical Tibetan. In Fall 2008, he lectured on politics and studied classical Tibetan at the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit in The Rotary Dial, Autumn Sky, The Road Not Taken, Snakeskin, Lighten Up Online, Metamorphoses and Ezra. He is currently working on a volume of translations from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa, Bhartrihari and Nilakantha Dikshita.

Bhartrihari (circa 4th-5th centuries CE) was an Indian poet writing in Sanskrit about whom nothing certain is known. Some traditional sources suggest he was a Buddhist monk, others that he was a king who abandoned his throne for the life of a renunciant. The editor of the 1948 critical edition of the poems, D. D. Kosambi, called Bhartrihari, on the basis of the poems themselves, “a hungry Brahmin in distress.” He is the author of the Shatakatraya (The Three Hundreds), a collection of three thematically focused “centuries” of epigrammatic verses treating worldly wisdom, erotic love and renunciation respectively. Some of the poems traditionally ascribed to Bhartrihari may be later accretions, but the core of the Shatakatraya reveals a poet with a unique voice that is sometimes at odds with the traditional poetic conventions of classical Sanskrit literature.

Bhartrihari writes in the tradition of what is called muktaka (single-stanza) poetry. Depending on the meter employed, a single-stanza poem can range in size from 32 to 84 syllables. (There are even longer forms but none are represented in the verse chosen for these translations.) The easiest way to analyze the meter of a poem in Sanskrit is to divide it into quarter lines. These lines are generally of equal length and organized in terms of a fixed pattern of short and long syllables. Like Greek and Latin meter, Sanskrit meter depends on the balance between short and long syllables rather than the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables familiar from English. It is impossible to reproduce these complex metrical forms in English. I have chosen instead to employ a “loose iambic” meter which attempts to reproduce the phrasing of the poems. My line breaks generally coincide with metrical pauses in the original Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit poetry does not use end rhyme but it makes free use of various sonic patterns within the poems such as consonance and assonance, alliteration, and the repetition of the same or similar sounding words. I have used similar devices in my translations. One particularly difficult feature of translating Sanskrit poetry is the prevalence of sometimes lengthy nominal compounds. The grammar of these compounds must be unraveled and there is often more than one way to resolve them. Since it is possible to form nominal compounds freely, this feature of the Sanskrit language makes it possible to create a wide variety of synonyms for things. Such variation is impossible to reproduce in English.  Despite these linguistic and stylistic obstacles, I have tried in these translations to come up with a poetic diction that reproduces as much as possible Bhartrihari’s own.

The numbers in parentheses refer to the poem numbers in the critical edition of D.D. Kosambi, The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartrihari.

Poems from Bhartrihari’s Shatakatraya (‘The Three Hundreds’)

(64)

The sun lends its luster to the lotus pond,

the white lotus blooms by the moon’s grace,

unasked the heavy cloud bestows its rain,

the good help others of their own accord.

(13)

Only a stupid king would let these poets,

famed for the eloquent learning

they impart to the young, languish in poverty.

But, even without wealth, the wise are lords.

Jewels do not lose their luster because a fool

cannot judge their worth.

(105)

A rain cloud nurturing passion’s tree,

a welling stream of sensuous play,

the love-god’s cherished kin,

an ocean brimming with brilliant pearls,

the eyes of slender girls drunk on moonlight,

a treasure house of splendid good fortune –

The happy man will always welcome

the arrival of his tumultuous youth.

(257)

Give to the forest deer this sacred grass,

splendid as bamboo cut by a jeweled knife.

And give to the bride this betel leaf,

pale as the skin on a young girl’s cheek,

torn from its stem by her sharp, red nails.

(7)

A splendid palace, amorous girls,

a king’s brilliant white parasol –

Happiness like this is only found

when good deeds are strung together.

But when the thread snaps, see how everything scatters

like a string of pearls broken in a lovers’ quarrel.

(87)

The massing rain clouds fill the sky,

peacocks dance in the surrounding hills,

brilliant white blossoms litter the ground –

Where should the traveler turn his gaze?

(89)

A passing frown, a bashful glance,

a tremor of fright, a lover’s jest –

These young girls with their lovely faces

and darting eyes are scattered everywhere

like lotus blossoms coming into bloom.