Songs of Mirabai

TRANSLATOR

Andrew Schelling

Mirabai (16th century India) is one of the world’s celebrated and renowned poets. Her life embedded in legend, her poems go straight to the heart. She was devoted to a god she called Shyam, “the Dark One,” and in lyric after lyric pursues her love with fervor. Every singer of note in India knows her songs and sings them; in the West her reputation is second only to Kabir among India’s poets. What makes Mirabai remarkable is the way she weds religious devotion with India’s old tradition of love song. These versions have been anthologized in India and the USA, worked into performances by singers and theater groups in the USA and Europe, and present Mirabai without embellishment. An introduction sets the historical context; a bibliography points towards further reading.

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Reviews

“While she has been widely translated over the decades, what makes these renditions by Andrew Schelling so alive and distinct is the fact that they offer us not the stylized saint, but the wild, cindering Mira. The Mira who will not be tamed by footnotes. The Mira who will not be silenced by legions of tepid imitators. The Mira who will not be prettified....”

—Arundhathi Subramaniam, from the Foreword

“These classical translations have a transparency that enables the reader to ‘see through’ contemporary language to the living sound and color, the actual civilization the poems derive from.”

—Diane di Prima

“Andrew Schelling’s fine translations bring us a powerful embodiment of one of the world’s greatest poets. In this book, the erotic quality of Mirabai’s address to the sacred as Beloved comes clear as never before.”

—Jane Hirshfield, author of Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women

“Erotics, rebellion, spiritual thirst, a strong hint of early feminism, and a steaming animal passion—these are what make Mirabai’s songs irrepressible five centuries after she sang them. Andrew Schelling, who gave Americans their first clean taste of the erotic tradition of old Sanskrit, now provides a Mirabai to dance on our own highways. To open this book is to get close to the oldest kind of song—sweet and bitter, sage and spontaneous. And to remember why we’re on earth.”

—Anne Waldman, author of Fast Speaking Woman and Bard Kinetic, co-founded of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Andrew Schelling, born 14 January 1953 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington D.C. The 1970s and ‘80s he spent in Northern California: studied ecology of mind with Gregory Bateson and poetry with Norman O. Brown. Took up Sanskrit language; developed wilderness skills in Sierra Nevada and Coast Range mountains. In 1990 moved to Colorado to take work at Naropa University, where he teaches poetry and Sanskrit. Among twenty-odd titles are From the Arapaho Songbook and The Facts at Dog Tank Spring. Another book, Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture, is a folkloric account of linguistics, old time stories, poets, and cattle rustling in California. Besides Mirabai, he has seven books of translation from India’s old languages, most recently Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha, with Anne Waldman. Schelling lives in the “middle mountains,” between the high plains and Colorado’s Indian Peaks.

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