I’ve been granted permission from Andrew Schelling to post a small excerpt from his new book of Vidyā translations for my ongoing online workshops. The new book is Old Time Love Song Magic: Sanskrit Poems of Vidyā Translated by Andrew Schelling. He notes “Vidyā may have been the earliest woman to write poetry in classical Sanskrit… Scholars date Vidyā between the seventh and the ninth centuries…”
Here is the section I asked to post:
7
A poem is not an idea or a description. Its care with rhythm and
the placement of sounds makes a poem into a spell or incantation.
Sanskrit poets intended their verse to transport you. Its purpose:
to place listeners or readers in direct contact with rasa, bedrock or
irreducible emotion. For this to occur, a listener or reader has to come
prepared. The preparation is not that of the critic, but that of the
lover. Perhaps poetry is less spectacular a discipline than a tantrika
undergoes, yet Vidyā recognizes a “field of no sound,” a non-verbal
state of shuddering emotion.
The problem with Western scholars writing about Sanskrit poetry
is that few prepare themselves for the encounter. The preparation
might include study of literature, a science of sound, an inventory of
figures of speech, an intricate understanding of nuance and dialect.
Yet the deepest preparation is one of the heart. The response is not
studious, but thrillingly somatic. Falling in love may be the one
requisite preparation you cannot avoid. Poets called the prepared
listener a sahrdaya, person with heart, or rasika, adept of spirit-juice
(there’s no good single translation for rasa, a word that one may titrate
for years). I’ve found scholarly books that say such things as, the
“discriminating . . . generally take pleasure not only in an artistic turn
of phrase, in purely poetic qualities, but also prize whatever learning
a poem has to offer… they take note of any details that reveal the poet’s
breadth of reading and education,” (Siegfried Lienhard in A History
of Classical Poetry).
This may be true but Vidyā celebrates something the poem does
to the body. She captures the arousal, the way hair on the limbs and
body bristle. The response to a poem is a vast involuntary shiver,
closer to orgasm than to any thought about “breadth of reading
or education.” As when lovers touch. Silence is the intellectual
response, while the body reacts in its hormones. The poet “sets
forth,” or her “intention” is, an aśabda (soundless, wordless) range.
Vidyā’s word for range is gocaram, etymologically, cow-pasture. Yoga
students know it as the “field” where the senses roam: caram is a
wandering, a going on foot. The poetic meter, vamśastha-vilam, refers
to the hollow of a bamboo stalk. It could be the finger holes or aperture
of a bamboo flute. Vamśastha also means a genealogical line, clan or family.
(The image is taken from the way a bamboo grows, one joint issuing into
the next). My earlier translation was impressionist. I had not gone
deep enough into gocaram, the field of the senses, which speak when
the voice goes silent.
I praise that silent
listener
her whole body bristling—
only a poet
linking words with ineluctable cadence
can touch
her entrails with fire.
from The Cane Groves of Narmada River
See poem 12 for a quite different use of the word gocaram by Vidyā.
I have planned a Zoom session to talk to Andrew about the notions expressed above and surely it is linked to my interest in a somatic approach to poetry. When that happens, I will add this post.