Songs of Mirabai
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Erotic passion, rebellion, spiritual thirst, and a strong hint of early feminism, --these are what make Mirabai's songs irrepressible five centuries after she sang them.
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.
About this Author
Mirabai was a 16th C Rajput princess, mystic, rebel, and poet, celebrated for her songs and her devotion to Krishna.
Andrew Schelling is a poet and translator of 20-odd books. He lives in the Southern Rocky Mountain Ecosystem and teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Schelling has spent many years in the study of Sanskrit and related languages, with 10 collections of translated poetry in USA and India. His poetry and essays areknown for their attention to ecology, linguistics, and poetics of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Reviews
"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
"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, author of Loba and Revolutionary Letters
"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-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
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