Access Love And The Turning Seasons: Indias Poetry Of Spiritual Erotic Longing Conveyed By Andrew Schelling Presented As Mobi

book has been well researched, the text made good reading but the poems did not, perhaps the vernacular poems would have made a better impact, don't know. I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone to buy, the book has been well researched, the text made good reading but the poems did not, perhaps the vernacular poems would have made a better impact, don't know. I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone to buy, For thousands of years, the Indian subcontinent has proved a fertile ground for the worlds most captivating erotic love poetry, and the genius of its devotional writing harnesses great energy and mystical insight.
It is in fact often hard to tell whether the poets are offering poems of spiritual longing using the garment of love poetry or writing erotic pieces in the guise of devotion.
perhaps, in a land where erotic sculpture routinely ornaments its many temples and gods are known for their explosive sexuality, this question has little meaning to these remarkable writers.
In their devotional traditions, eroticism and mysticism seem inseparable,

This wonderful collection spans,years, and includes work originally sung or recited by Indias wellknown bards: Kabir, Mirabai, Lal ded, Vidyapati, and Tagore.
There are also poems from the upanishads, ancient sanskrit poetry, and punjabi folk lyrics, The poets have largely emerged from the ranks of the dispossessed: leather workers, refuse collectors, maidservants, women, and orphans, Their vision is of a democratic society in which all voices count, much like American gospel and blues, shaker songs, or the grand vision of Walt Whitman.
often they faced persecution for speaking candidly, or daring to speak of spiritual matters at all, The notes include profiles of these legendary lives, several of these poets simply vanished, absorbed into a deity, or disappeared in a flash of purple lightning, A few

produced miraclesmost of them are surrounded by clouds of mystery,

Andrew Schelling has drawn on the work of twentyfour other translators, including ezra pound, Robert Bly, W, s. Merwin, Jane Hirschfield, and denise Levertov, to build the finest anthology of Indias erotic and spiritual poetry ever assembled for the general reader.

Indias poetry was totally unknown to me, This was a perfect first book to start with, Now I know I absolutely need more, An interesting read. Do wish the original text had been been included, in addition to the translation, A good level of detail and context provided, including the poet's history, The introduction reads a bit like it fetishes India, in my opinion, and I wasn't too fond of it,

Quite a bit of acknowledgement of caste, which I appreciate,
At one point, the author notes how Bhakti poets from persecuted castes were often "dressed up for church" and their origins magicked away by scholars and religious leaders, to hide the fact that these poets were from marginalised communities.
The author goes on to say that since the poets origins stories were manipulated, it is entirely possible that some of the poems and stories themselves may have been adapted under duress.


All in all, a good read, with a wonderful selection of poems, I left shame behind,

took as an ornament
the mockery of local folk,
Unswerving, I lost my cleverness
in the bewilderment of ecstasy,

Manikkavacakarthcentury, Tr, A. K. Ramanujan

In a lovers enraptured world, love is the breeze that strips one, quite simply, of the garment of shame.
In reading Love and the Turning Seasons, the newest offering from Aleph Classics, a series that aims to bring new translations of Indias literary heritage, the reader is swept in that denuding breeze.
Edited by Andrew Schelling, the collection of poems bears the slightly beguiling subtitle, Indias Poetry of Spiritual amp Erotic Longing, I say beguiling because it would seem like the poems could fall in either category spiritual or erotic, In reality, as Manikkavacakar, the ninthcentury Shiva devotee tells us, the line between the two states is as diaphanous as air itself.
For, in the “bewilderment of ecstasy”, who is left to distinguish between the flesh and the spirit This seamless merging of the body and the soul is at the heart of this anthology of bhakti poetry, translated by various poets and literary translators.


Love and the Turning Seasons alights upon the reader as a songbird to take her across time and space from the sixth century barring the Isa Upanishad right up to the twentieth, on an anticlockwise path beginning in the south of India and ending in the east.
Despite the multiplicity of expressions of the bhaktas or poetminstrels, informed as they were by specific cultural and regional parlance, what unifies them is their rejection of societal norms in their unwavering quest for the divine.
These were among the first true radicals in the Indian context, repudiating, with delightful contempt, tradition and convention, Genderbending, castesubverting, these individuals lived and even died on their own terms and sang of the divine with ariose abandonment,

Most of the featured singerpoets wrote or rather sang in the vernacular language of the region they came from, The translations, despite the obvious limitations of the exercise, are sensitive, lyrical and playful same as, one surmises their creators intended them to be.


Read this book to be swept off your feet by the extraordinary wind of mystical love, Andrew Schelling is a poet, essayist, and translator of the poetry of India, He has taught at Naropa University for twenty years and fromserved as chair of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics founded by Alan Ginsburg and Anne Waldman.
His publications include Tea Shack Interior and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, He lives in Boulder, Colorado, .