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.
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.