SUMMER
1.
My Love,
Summer‟s here burning
Sun a scorching scourge
Moon desirable
Rainwater pools for anytime-dips
Dusk agreeable
Kāma mellow
18.
A frog jumps tortured by sharp extreme sun-rays
out of a dirty pond
sits under the parasol-
hood
of a thirsty cobra
22.
A keen forest-fire crop-shoots withered
Fast furious winds dry leaves flung up
In the sun’s heat all around shrunken waters
Watching at forest-edges
High Anxiety
23.
Birds pant
on dry-leafed trees
Tired monkeys take
to mountain shrubs
Bulls roam everywhere
Want water
Elephants extend trunks
into water-wells
RAIN
1.
My dear,
Cloud Misty’s here
The love of lovers
A rather high and mighty entry
like a King
Thunder drums
Lightning flag
Ruttish elephant
7.
Like immodest women unrestrained
Rivers speedy agitated currents
felling trees on banks as they
rush
to the sea
8.
Fresh rainwater
full of termites dirt grass
sallow
snakes downwards
A snake-y crooked gait
Frogs watch
worried
19.
flow Rivers
rain Clouds
roar Ruttish elephants
shine Forest-edges
remember Parted lovers
dance Peacocks
shelter Monkeys
SULTRY SEASON
2.
Bleached
Earth by Kāśa blossoms
Nights the moon
River waters swans
Lakes lilies
Forest-edges flower-laden Saptacchadā trees
Gardens Mālatī blossoms
7.
Night matures
like a wild young girl
day by day
She wears
choice jewelry star-clusters
silken moonlight
Moon-face freed from cloud-veil
22.
Surpassed!
Women’s graceful gait
by swans
Radiant moon-faces
by full-blown lotuses
Eyes
by blue lotuses
Eyebrow-coquetry
by nicely rippling waves
FROST
1.
Here
Grain-sprouts shot up delightful
Full-flowered Lodhrā tree
Paddy ripe ‘n ready
Dew dropped
Wilted lotuses
The frost-season’s arrived
5.
Women prep for sex fests
Smear turmeric on limbs
Etch leaf-designs on faces lotuses
Perfume hair in black-aloe smoke
14.
Some young woman
prettifies her lotus-face
in the mirror
in the morning sun
scrutinizes lips her lover sucked
his teeth-tip bites
15.
Another
body weary from too much sex
lotus-eyes red from waking all night
hair awry loose around her shoulders
tries to sleep
warmed by a mild sunray
WINTER
1.
Hey choice-thighs,
The earth covered reverberates
heaps of paddy a krauṅca-bird warble
and sugarcane someplace
Lots of passion
Women love it!
hear,
winter’s here
2.
Now’s when
People shut windows
stay in
go to
fire sunrays sweaters nubile women
3.
Not moonlight cool sandalpaste
terraces cool as autumn-moon
winds chill with fresh snowflakes
Now
none of these
appeal to people’s minds
4.
The nights
cool from thick dew-fall cooled by moon-rays
decked in bright star-clusters
No use to people
SPRING
21.
All over
Kiṃśuka forests’ hanging blossoms like
wind-shaken fire-flames
The earth glows
Like a new spring-sprung bride in red robes aṃśuka
22.
Why
does this cuckoo try
with melodious warble
to steal the minds of youth?
Are they not already
loaded by pretty faces
poked by Kiṃśuka (why-parrot) flowers the color of parrots’ beaks
seared by Karṇikāra (ear-piercing) blossoms
23.
Happy vague warble of male-cuckoos
Murmur of tipsy buzzing bees
Disturb
even the hearts of
brides bashful and timid
though in their husband’s home
Ṛtusaṃhāram tends to be the least admired of works attributed to Kalidasa. While some scholars have concluded that it cannot possibly be Kalidasa’s, some others suggest it must be juvenilia. Kalidasa’s poetry usually calls for painstaking attention. You begin with a grammatical analysis and rearrange the parts of a stanza in a coherent order. Once you have thus ‘got’ it, then you soak it in. The intricate and multiple relationships between the parts of the stanza allow for repeated reading and appreciation. It‟s amazing how everything is exact and coordinated, a sophisticated machine, wheels within wheels.
Ṛtusaṃhāram has none of that. While there are clusters of relationships, these clusters don‟t quite interact with each other. The syntax is straightforward, easy for a beginner to follow. See stanza 19 from the ‘Rain’ section of the poem – one line of verbs in the plural, and one line of nouns in the plural. Literally: They flow - they rain - they roar - they shine - they remember - they dance - they take shelter. The next line names the nouns that perform these actions. This is like an elementary school exercise. And yet, translated into English, laid out in columns, it has a vaguely charming simplicity – how tempting to jumble them up and pose a mix-’'n-match question! Stanza 2 in ‘Sultry Season’ (Śarat) is also straightforward, a string of relationships defined by the instrumental case ending. What brings unity to this stanza is that every particular is whitish – grass, moonbeams, swans – it’s as if these objects have taken over the landscape – earth, night, lake – with their whiteness, possessed the landscape. What actually happens because of this relationship? The earth does nothing with the grass, it’s just made lovelier by it. In the English translation, I use the connector ‘by’ instead of ‘with,’ thus extending the instrumentality towards a sense of attribution, or authorship: not just ‘earth with Kāśa blossoms,’ but ‘earth by Kāśa blossoms.’
In the translation, the stanzas of Ṛtusaṃhāram shift into the genre of fragments. Each fragment presents a single delightful thing – a frog that inadvertently hops under a snake hood, a woman dressing up, a cute soundplay in Kiṃśuka and the Aṃśuka. If the Sanskrit stanzas of Ṛtusaṃhāram do not deliver profound aesthetic delight, they become delectable in the English translation as minimalistic, carefully laid-out impressionistic vignettes.
The poem excerpts above are from Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader (translated from the Sanskrit by Mani Rao). Reprinted by permission of Aleph Book Company. The book is due in September 2014.
Mani Rao is a poet, translator and independent scholar.Mani has ten poetry collections including Sing to Me (Recent Work Press Australia, 2019), New & Selected Poems (Poetrywala India 2014), Echolocation (Math Paper Press Singapore, 2014; Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2003) and Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2010). Her books in translation from Sanskrit are Bhagavad Gita (Fingerprint India 2015; Autumn Hill Books USA 2010), and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader (Aleph Books India, 2014). Her latest book Living Mantra— Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) is an anthropology of mantra-experience among tantric practitioners in south India. Translations of her poems have been published in Latin, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, French and German. She did an MFA in Creative Writing from UNLV (2010), and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University (2016).