The Lover of God Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to the Reader

  Introduction

  On Translating Bhānu

  The Poems of Sun Lion

  1. Spring at last! The amuyas flare (English) • (Sanskrit)

  2. You innocent (English) • (Sanskrit)

  3. He never came to me (English) • (Sanskrit)

  4. That jewel-dark blue becomes you, Lord (English) • (Sanskrit)

  5. Shake off that sadness, Rādhā! (English) • (Sanskrit)

  6. Come to me with a mouth full of words (English) • (Sanskrit)

  7. Listen, can you hear it? (English) • (Sanskrit)

  8. He’s there among the scented trees (English) • (Sanskrit)

  9. A warm breeze frets through the woods (English) • (Sanskrit)

  10. Your flute plays the exact notes of my pain (English) • (Sanskrit)

  11. High in the blossoming canopy (English) • (Sanskrit)

  12. I know who visits your dream, Dark One (English) • (Sanskrit)

  13. Not only is it dark, but clouds roar (English) • (Sanskrit)

  14. When we’re together, nights like this delight me (English) • (Sanskrit)

  15. Don’t talk about love to me, Mādhava (English) • (Sanskrit)

  16. When pitiless Mādhava left for Māthura City (English) • (Sanskrit)

  17. So many times, Lord, I have implored you (English) • (Sanskrit)

  18. How long must I go on waiting (English) • (Sanskrit)

  19. You resemble my Dark Lord Śyāma (English) • (Sanskrit)

  20. Who are You, who keeps my heart awake? (English) • (Sanskrit)

  21. Who wants to hear the long, miserable story (English) • (Sanskrit)

  22. I’ve fallen from my life, friend (English) • (Sanskrit)

  Postscript

  Appendix: The Life of Bhānusiṃha Ṭhākura

  About the Translators

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  Introduction

  Sometime late in 1875, the prominent Calcutta journal of Bengali arts and letters Bhāratī published the first of eight poems by a newly discovered seventeenth-century Vaiṣṇava religious poet, Bhānusiṃha, or Sun Lion. That journal would eventually publish thirteen over the next six years. The poems told of the love of Lord Kṛṣṇa, through the ministrations of a friend to Kṛṣṇa’s adolescent lover, Rādhā. Typical of the genre, the confidante was an older woman—the poet’s persona—who chides and scolds Kṛṣṇa, soothes Rādhā’s anguish, and ruefully comments on the plight of all who suffer the love of this fickle master. Typical, too, was the language, Brajabuli, a long-dead literary dialect of Bengali reserved for the exclusive use of Vaiṣṇava poets. At the time, it was a notable discovery as scholars within the academy were at pains to construct a proper literary history for India, one of the earliest nation-building exercises in the political and intellectual ferment that was late-nineteenth-century Calcutta. Yet several years would pass before leading critics discovered that they had been drawn into a somewhat embarrassing scenario: Bhānusiṃha did not really exist. And perhaps even worse, the true author was none other than a precocious fourteen-year-old boy poet named Rabindranath Tagore.

  So began one of the most curious literary episodes of the period of nationalist India, a mild exposé that alleged deceit, fraud, and, worst of all, gullibility. At the time of this discovery, Rabindranath was beginning to distinguish himself from his enormously talented siblings, some of whom were probably privy to the ruse that originated in this family-sponsored journal. His poetry and his prose were beginning to draw considerable attention, yet as his fame increased he would never abandon these first poems, just as he would for years refuse to acknowledge having written them, as if he wanted them to be neither closely examined nor ignored. He would throw up obstacles at every turn, but would tease his audience by drawing attention to the songs and just as quickly deflect any serious discussion of them. In 1884 he published a fictional biography of Bhānusiṃha, mocking scholars with its sarcasm and wit, but dropping tantalizing clues to Bhānusiṃha’s real identity, tacitly acknowledging that Bhānusiṃha was he (see Appendix). He would continue to criticize the “author” of the poems, as well as those scholars who might try alternately to beatify or to denigrate the poet, this game of cat and mouse continuing as he added more poems to the sequence. Today many schoolchildren know these songs by heart and delight in their recitation.

  Much of the pleasure of these poems derives from their adaptation of an overtly religious form well-known to any Bengali speaker: the celebration of the love of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā. Inspiration came from the Bengali god-man of the sixteenth century, Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486–1533); his followers—called Vaiṣṇavas for their devotion to a particular form of Lord Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa—developed a distinctive lyric style in a language reserved exclusively for this praise. Today more than eight thousand of these poems circulate.1 These Vaiṣṇava poets sang the exploits of Lord Kṛṣṇa as he played with his friends, the cowherd boys of the idyllic land of Braj, but they sang most delightedly of Kṛṣṇa’s discovery of adolescent love. His protracted affairs with the young cowherd maidens, the gopīs, have been a favorite topic in Bengal certainly as far back as the twelfth-century Sanskrit Gīta Govinda of Jayadeva and the slightly later Bengali Śrī Kṛṣṇa Kīrtana of Caṇḍīdāsa. Tagore’s poems name Rādhā as Kṛṣṇa’s favorite, as is hinted at in the scriptural tenth book of the Sanskrit Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Her love for him is selfless and unselfconscious; her lack of self-interest drives Kṛṣṇa to distraction. She innocently deploys all of the coquettishness and trickery at the disposal of a woman bent on attracting a man; her artifices provide a catalog of amorous technique. Perhaps most alluring is the unpredictable nature of her love, characterized as her bāmatā, or crooked temperament. Even God-as-Kṛṣṇa is captivated and so he pursues her in contrived encounters.

  In one popular episode Kṛṣṇa poses as a toll collector who waylays Rādhā until she bargains her way free. In another he disguises himself as a ferryman, stopping midstream to extract his fare from the penniless, but hardly helpless, Rādhā. Once he followed Rādhā and the other gopīs to the river and stole their clothes while they were bathing; one by one they have to emerge from the water and present themselves to him before being allowed to leave. Perhaps the most celebrated episode is the famous round dance, where the gopīs slip out to meet Kṛṣṇa on a brooding monsoon night; such is their passion this night that he multip
lies himself to dance simultaneously with all who gathered. But mostly the songs are about trysts, or, more poignantly, the missed assignation and the longing for union. Rādhā and the gopīs burn in the fires of separation, a pain called viraha. That exquisite pain is intensified by the sound of Kṛṣṇa’s flute, Muralī, or its echo in the plaintive cry of the bihaṅga bird, or by any of a myriad of other reminders. Viraha becomes the dominant trope for Bengali Vaiṣṇava poetry, so naturally it is the dominant mood of Rabindranath’s Vaiṣṇava songs. In these songs he inhabits the persona of an experienced confidante, named Bhānu, bent on consoling an unconsolable Rādhā. But in a twist, the focus sometimes shifts to Bhānu, and there we see Rabindranath’s distinctive voice, expressing concerns about mortality and divinity that belie the Vaiṣṇava form of these poems.

  And so this small batch of poetry that began its printed life anonymously, after a short period in the spotlight reentered the sphere of the unread, its author publicly distanced from its production, the interest of the poetry reader and critic reduced to distracted curiosity. Yet the poems are filled with a power and poignancy, an immediacy and presence that readers have come to expect from one of the world’s greatest poets. Over the course of some sixty-five years Tagore could not leave alone these poems, a private world of whose importance to him we can only speculate.

  1. For the best translations of this poetry, see In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali, trans. Edward C. Dimock Jr. and Denise Levertov, with an introduction by Edward C. Dimock Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967; reprint: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  On Translating Bhānu

  We have rendered these poems into English in the spirit and tone of the revisions finished shortly before Tagore died. As will become apparent—and true to Rabindranath’s own experimentation with the poems—we opted to capture the mood and emotion as much as the literal content. The impulse behind the decision was based in part on the checkered reception and interpretation of the poems themselves and our attempts to negotiate the often boggling array of subterfuges adopted to disguise his voice, a strategy that lent anonymity and distance to the poems’ overt religious connotations.

  The choice to translate these poems was easy enough, for any poetry that occupies such a gifted author for the better part of seven decades has earned a lasting readership. How these translations came about is nearly as convoluted as the history of the poems themselves. In 1978, when I was studying Bengali in the intensive program run by the American Institute of Indian Studies in Calcutta, I first read these poems as an extension of my work on old Vaiṣṇava literature. Appropriately, my initiation came through the perspective of a woman, my Bengali teacher Ms. Supriya Chatterjee, who at considerable risk to her own modesty afforded me insights that would have remained opaque to a nonnative male speaker of the language. I picked up the translations a few years later, gratefully reading them in tutorials with Clinton B. Seely and the late Edward C. Dimock at The University of Chicago. Their insights have, over the years, deepened my own. As a new student of the language, I struggled to reconstruct the etymological roots of obscure terms, more than a few of which defy the comprehensive dictionaries available for Bengali—Rabindranath loved etymologies and the playful double entendres they could engender in the malleable lexicon of Brajabuli. Still very much learning the language, I strove to master the idiosyncracies of Rabindranath’s Brajabuli syntax, a feature of the poetry that is liable to confound the unwary. Then I set the project aside, stymied by the realization that these seemingly insignificant poems were anything but, yet unable to bring out what I intuited of their secrets. From time to time over the next twenty-odd years, I would reinitiate myself into these little poems and, with each new reading, marvel at their depth—their idiom of course now having become intimately familiar in my years of reading and translating Bengali. Each new encounter convinced me that they not only needed to be translated for the general reading public, but required a deft hand that exceeded any of my own aspirations as poet. I followed the inspired suggestion of poet and friend Lee Upton, which led me to Chase Twichell. As I mulled over the strategies for collaboration while working at the British Library in 1996, I translated for the third time all twenty-two songs, this time adding word-for-word breakdowns to be used as guides.

  I approached Chase—we had not previously met, though I knew her poetry—and she agreed to look. For the next three years she looked, listened, and read Tagore, undertaking a personal yogic sādhanā (striving) not unlike that of the old Vaiṣṇava poets themselves. She took my literal translations of the Brajabuli and fired them into new poetry in English. In that sense, they are no longer Rabindranath’s poems; they have become something new through my role as mediator or midwife and hers as poet-alchemist. Chase knows no Bengali or Brajabuli, and for that we are both grateful because it freed us from the constraints that plague most translators: the poems had to become hers in order to live—unlike me, she was not shackled by their original forms. Charmed by Rabindranath’s precocity and cheekiness, mesmerized by the intricacies of Vaiṣṇava aesthetics, she has rendered that which is most likely to cross barriers of language and culture: the songs’ intense emotion, Rādhā’s thrill, her anguish, her exasperation, and her confidante’s consoling. Even if Tagore was right that the conditions of their composition and his own proclivities made it impossible to judge the devotional mood of these poems as authentic to Vaiṣṇava standards, the Vaiṣṇava poets would still approve, I think, not only of the end product but of the process that rendered the emotions intelligible.

  Ours was initially a strange endeavor that resulted in a true collaboration. I followed the Bengali dictum that later versions of texts are better than the mythical urtext (rejecting the decidedly Western fixation on the original), because the text once used takes a shape that reflects the interests and values of its users; earlier versions capture a historical moment, but the last versions demonstrate what endured and, therefore, was for their creator significant. The poems come from Rabindranath’s last revisions.

  The process was a laborious one, and for the curious who might like to peek at the process, let us look at the first twelve lines of song 3. I rained down upon Chase a torrent of renditions, starting with transliterations in roman script so that she could hear the music. This is what she first saw.

  hṛdayaka sādha miśāola hṛdaye,

  kaṇṭhe vimalina mālā.

  virahabiṣe dahi bahi gala rayanī,

  nahi nahi āola kālā.

  bujhanu bujhanu sakhi viphala viphala saba,

  5

  viphala e pīriti lehā —

  viphala re e majhu jīvana yauvana,

  viphala re e majhu dehā!

  cala sakhi gṛha cala, muñca nayana-jala,

  cala sakhi cala gṛhakāje,

  10

  mālati-mālā rākhaha bālā,

  chi chi sakhi maru maru lāje.

  This transliteration was coupled with a word-for-word reading that retained the Brajabuli syntax and included notes on odd grammatical forms, nuances of tone, syntactical variations that included logical inferences quite alien to English grammar, and expositions on erotic symbolism sufficient to satisfy all but the most demanding of pedants. The technique is one that my old teacher and friend A. K. Ramanujan first taught me when we read several of these together in Chicago in the early eighties. Chase dubbed these “word clouds,” the pathway into the poems. Here again the first twelve lines of song 3:

  heart’s / yearning, striving, worship / has been mixed,

  mingled / in heart /

  on or around neck / devoid of stain, unsoiled / garland /.

  pain of separation / with poison / bearing, enduring /

  melted, pass through, be overwhelmed / through or in

  night /,

  not / not (= but [he] never) / came / Dark One (= Kṛṣṇa) /.

  I understood, realized / I understood (~truly, surely) /


  friend, companion (f., voc.) / fruitless, lit. devoid of fruit

  or barren / fruitless / everything, all /,

  Barren, fruitless / this / amorous love (~illicit) / passion

  (glossed as anurāga, “following after passion”)—

  Barren, fruitless / O (~yes; voc. after reduplication = affirmation) /

  this / of me, my / life / youth, adolescence /,

  barren, fruitless / O (~yes) / this / of me, my / body /!

  (N.B., the next four lines are [the author as] Bhānu consoling woman;

  but this is very un-Vaiṣṇava-like to have the author appear

  anywhere but in the signature line [bhaṇitā] at the end.)

  Go, be off; or Let us be off (impv.) / dear friend, companion

  (f., voc.) / home, house / go, be off (impv.) / wipe away,

  cleanse (impv.) / eye- / water, tears /,

  Go, be off; let us go (impv.) / dear friend, companion (f., voc.) /

  go, be off; let us go (impv.) / house, domestic / to work,

  to chores /,

  jasmine / garland, flower necklace / save, keep / young

  girl (dim.) /,

  chi-chi (a sound expressing exasperation, mild censure, sympathy;

  somewhat like tsk tsk) / dear friend, companion (f., voc.) / (you)