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)
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