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  • Manuscript Fragments and Eco-Guardians: Translating Sanskrit Poetry
  • Andrew Schelling (bio)

Nature Literacy

A quality I find more and more compelling in Sanskrit poetry and its related vernaculars is the deep, ancient regard shown for the natural world. There is in our current historic period an intense debate over the status of wilderness regions and nonhuman species. It’s put poets on the alert for insights into nature or wilderness that distant artistic traditions might offer, and the best Sanskrit poems seem to hold something instructive. Rooted in Paleolithic habits, they balance a fine-tuned eco-literacy with a cosmopolitan delight in language, social patterns, and erotics. Studied with a close, unsentimental eye, wild creatures were daily familiars to the classical Sanskrit poets, not far removed from the human realm, as in this poem by Apanagara: [End Page 106]

Stag and doe hard short lives ranging the forest for water and grass they don’t betray each other they’re loyal till death

For American poets working to become nature-literate on home territory, it is profoundly interesting to see the ease with which figures of the natural world can become citizens of standing in a poem. The Sanskrit vocabulary for flowers and trees is particularly abundant and botanically accurate. Happening on this tradition at the remove of a thousand years, you might slip past it, but the nonhuman elements of the landscape were carefully regulated inside the Sanskrit lyric. Poets worked specific flowers or blooming trees, particular birds, animals, or phases of weather into compressed cultural ciphers. The mere hint of fragrance off a nearby forested hill told not only in what calendrical moment of what season the poem was located, but also evoked a constellation of human relationships, a precise mood, and vivid moments echoed in other poems.

There’s good evidence this use of landscapes came into classical Sanskrit from the somewhat earlier Tamil tradition of the south. Classical Tamil poets (circa 100 B.C.E.-250 C.E.), writing in a Dravidian tongue, devised for their intricately erotic short poems an alphabet of natural elements, which they calibrated to distinct landscapes—what we now call bioregions. By invoking the name of a plant or animal native to a certain habitat, they would summon an image at once natural, cultural, and resonant with a particular emotion. The Tamil poets identified five wilderness regions, which we would call montane, riparian meadow, forest, littoral shoreline, and arid desert. Each landscape set the scene for a particular erotic mood. Plant companions are so abundantly featured in Tamil poetry that A. K. Ramanujan’s good book of translations, Poems of Love and War, includes a botanical index. It reads like Thoreau’s “List of Plants” at the end of The Maine Woods.

In a looser vein, the Sanskrit poets, from the founding of the Gupta Empire in 320 c.e., used this type of alphabet for their own lyrics, introducing the kind of attention to seasonal changes in various bioregions that has been the stuff of natural history, and superimposing on the natural orders a sophisticated psychology of human life. Regional plants, weather patterns, bird migration or animal habits, and seasonal cycles were all used emblematically—yet the poems lend sound testimony to Ezra Pound’s counsel that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” [End Page 107]

Aside from a hundred rather fierce lyrics by Bhartrihari (circa seventh century)—who was very likely both an accomplished linguist and a bark-clad yogin at different times in his life—little Sanskrit poetry was written by hermits. The poets formed a professional guild—some doing double-time as philosophers or scholars—and rarely chose to live outside human settlements or to develop yogic powers among the wild, nonhuman orders. The fact that poems minutely familiar with nature were not written by recluses gives Sanskrit short poems a different flavor from the Chinese: the settings or landscapes seem closer to home; there are few brooding mountain escarpments, few unvisited gorges along thundering rivers.

In Sanskrit lyric, the human and nonhuman orders seem linked in unsensational daily intimacy. Local villages with birds in flowering trees. The whiff of odors from a nearby forest...

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