A poem from the Shatakatraya
What’s the point of the Vedas, received traditions,
the reading of ancient tales and learned treatises?
Why these religious rites whose only fruit
is a heaven as narrow as a village hut?
Compared with that alone which gives admission
to the soul’s blissful innermost dwelling,
which burns in its fire the burden of suffering,
all the rest is merely a merchant’s haggling.
The Shatakatraya is a collection of roughly three hundred poems divided into three sections on worldly wisdom, erotic love, and ascetic renunciation respectively. They are single-stanza poems written in a variety of meters, ranging in length from 32 to 84 syllables. Sanskrit meters are quantitative, like Greek and Latin meters, and impossible to imitate in English. I have chosen to use a basically iambic meter with lines of varied length. These translations are obviously not literal, but they hew as closely as possible to the rhetorical and metaphoric structure of the originals.
Louis Hunt taught political theory at James Madison College, Michigan State University. He has published original poems as well as translations from Sanskrit in a variety of print and online journals including The Rotary Dial, Snakeskin, Lighten up Online, Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret and The High Window. He is currently working on a volume of translations from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa, Bhartrihari and Nilakantha Dikshita.
Amethyst Review 