ASIAN 226 Poetries of Asia

Sanskrit court poetry from Vidyaakara's subhaashitaratnakosha.
	 (translated by Daniel H.H. Ingalls)

622		The pet parrot chatters,
		"Give me to eat or I shall tell aloud 
		 all you have done in secret."
		at which the young wife's face,
		lowered in shame but with an inward smile,
		is charming as a half-blown lotus
		bent down beneath a bee.						
							[Dimboka?]

1528		The vultures, beating back the flames
		with strokes of their flapping wings
		and each competing with fierce beaks against the rest,
		have dragged from the blazing pyre a corpse
		and gorged themselves on its freshly roasted, almost 
                       flaming flesh.
		See them with burning craws
		now heading for the river.						
							[Paanini]	

61		The column of black smoke
		attacks the women of the Triple City:
		hastening over their kerchiefs & tarrying on their braids,
		it creeps to the opening of their bodices
		and bursts in flame upon the ridges of their breasts.
		Victory to the god who looks, wet-eyed with pity,
		and lets the bow fall from his hand.					
							[Mayura]

1405		The ladies of your enemy have nothing left for earrings
		but palm-leaf ornaments; for garlands they wear 
			wildflowers
		& clothe their swelling loins with birchbark from the woods;
		their breasts they ornament with liquid mineral
		found on the Vindhya slope. And thus they spend their days
		playing with baby monkeys in their laps.					
							(a turnabout)

1306		Somehow, my wife, you must keep us and the children 
		alive until the summer months are over.
		The rains will come then, making gourds and pumpkins
			grow aplenty,
		and we shall fare like kings.					
							[Dharaniidhara]

1321		You gave me feet to tire of travel,
		a wife to leave me, a voice for begging
		and a body for decrepitude.
		If you are never ashamed, O God,
		do you not at last grow weary of your gifts?			
							[Raajashekhara?]

1307		The children starving, looking like so many corpses,
		the relative who spurns me, the water pot
		patched up with lac - these do not hurt so much
		as seeing the woman from next door, annoyed
		and smiling scornfully when every day my wife
		must beg a needle to mend her tattered dress.

1320		Often the pauper's children go to others' houses.
		With their little hands leaning against the doorways,
		hungry, but with voices hushed by shame,
		they cast half glances at those who eat within.

1175		When villages are left but all but a few families
		wasting under undeserved disaster
		from a cruel district lord
		but still clinging to ancestral lands,
		villages without grass, where walls are crumbling
		and the mongoose wanders through the lanes;
		they yet show their deepest sadness
		in a garden filled with the cooing of gray doves.
		
1461		Happy are they who in some mountain dale
		sit meditating on the highest light,
		the fearless birds alighting in their lap
		to taste the tears of bliss.
		But here I sit in a pavilion
		set in a pleasure garden by a pool
		within the palace of daydreams;
		and as I  daydream, I grow old.			
						[Satyabodha]

653		"My child." "My lord." "Leave off your anger, proud one."
		"What harm if I am angry?" "It makes me sad."
		"But you have done no wrong, the fault is wholly mine."
		"Why weep then as you speak?" "Who sees me weeping?"
		"Why, even I." "And what am I to you?"
		"The one I love." "I am not; and that is why I weep."			
						[Kumaarabhatta]

697		The bond of his affection broken,
		the value that he placed on me in his heart erased,
		this man now walks before me like any other man,
		his love now ceased.
		The days pass with my thinking & thinking of these things.
		Dear friend, I know not why my heart
		breaks not into a hundred pieces.					
						[from Amaru]