Grieve, Brother!
Rent from DeepDyve- Grieve, Brother!
bhrātaḥ kaṣṭamaho mahān sa nṛpatiḥ sāmantacakraṃ ca tat pārśve tasya ca sāpi rājapariṣat tāś candrabimbānanāḥudriktaḥ sa ca rājaputranivahas te bandinas tāḥ kathāḥ sarvaṃ yasya vaśād agāt smṛtipadaṃ kālāya tasmai namaḥ
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bhrātaḥ. (voc.) Oh brother
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kaṣṭam. grief
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aho. [cry of grief]
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mahān. great
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sa nṛpatiḥ. the king
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sāmanta-cakraṃ. inner circle (courtiers)
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ca tat. with
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pārśve. at (his) flank
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tasya. his
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ca. and
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sa api. also
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rāja-pariṣat. council of advisors
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tāḥ candra-bimba-ananāḥ. (bv. cmpd.) the moon-disc-face-ones (women)
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udriktaḥ. prominent (adj. with warlords)
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sa ca. and the
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rāja-putra-nivahaḥ. multitude of warlords (rājaputra)
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te bandinaḥ. the poets or heralds who praise the king
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tāḥ kathāḥ. their chronicles
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sarvaṃ. all
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yasya. of this
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vaśat. from power
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agāt. gone, swept
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smṛti-padaṃ. into memory (literally, onto the path of memory)
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kālāya. by Time
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tasmai. to whom
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namaḥ. homage (we bow) [End Page 60]
Grieve, brother!Great was the king with hisinner circle,a council that flanked him,warlords in prominent ranks,courtesans pale as moonlight.Scribes and poetschronicled it all as it happened.Those days have vanishedswept into memoryby Time—to whom wefinally kneel down.
This poem reminds me of another, from the anthology Sattasai (Seven Hundred Poems of Hāla). Tradition places that book two thousand years before the present, and therefore six hundred years earlier than Bhatṛhari’s poem. Bhartṛhari’s has a wide sweep—the deep gong of prophecy—while the earlier poem, written in a vernacular of Maharashtra State, rings with an acutely personal grief over time’s passage.
Young Men
Young menused to slip thiswooden Ganeshunder my head for a pillowtodaycursing old ageI bow down before it
[Anonymous, Sattasai 4:72]Translated by Andrew Schelling [End Page 61]
Andrew Schelling, born in 1953 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., has written, edited, or translated twenty books. Early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, plus an encounter with India’s texts, set him on a lifelong engagement with Asian literature. He studied Sanskrit at the University of California at Berkeley, and began to translate from its classical poetry tradition around 1978. His first book, Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India, received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992, the first time the Academy had honored work done from an Asian language. Schelling’s own poetry and essays emerge from the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion in which he lives. Recent books of poetry wrangle with the Arapaho language as a way of reading landscape and the natural cycles; they include From the Arapaho Songbook and A Possible Bag. He has edited The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature and Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual and Erotic Longing (forthcoming from Counterpoint Press). Living on the Front Range of Colorado, he is active on land-use issues and teaches at Naropa University. He also teaches regularly at Deer Park Institute, in India’s Himalayan foothills.
