GROW LONG, BLESSED NIGHT: Love Poems from Classical India
Translated and edited by MARTHA ANN SELBY
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 265 pages, $35 (hardcover), $15.95 (paperback)

Meena Alexander

When I started reading Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India, I was on a long bus ride through the winter landscape of upstate New York, so I wound myself around the book and dreamt myself back into the landscapes of the love poems. Those poetic landscapes translated from the classical Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Tamil with their sharp details of bird and bush, of anklet and hair and throat-the symbolic rudiments of desire-transported me.
Take, for instance, the following poem. With the tight, allusive quality typical of Prakrit love poems, the canebrakes burdened with blue bees evoke the weight of desire, the meeting of illicit lovers; then, inevitably, as night follows day, the passage of time turns the canes into mere stumps. The direct address gives a startling immediacy to the poem, which is included in the section of the book called "Women Speak to their Lovers":

Dear Friend,

the canebrakes
nestled in the riverbank's lap
their clusters broken
from the weight of blue bees,
have in time
become stumps.
Gathasaptasati 5:22

On that slow winter bus, these poems were a great gift to me. What was it about this anthology that was so powerful?
First, there are the poems themselves. The two hundred poems in the book are drawn from the three great languages of India, and each is culled is from a classical anthology put together by a king or courtly connoisseur. The Tamil poems from the katai-c-cankam are thought to date from the earliest centuries of the Common Era, though they were not anthologized till several centuries later. The Prakrit poems, said to have been picked by King Hala, were put together in the Gathasaptasati in the early decades of the first century, while the Sanskrit poems from the Amarusataka, probably the latest in this collection, are thought to date from the seventh or eighth centuries.
Next, there is the organization of the book. I had, of course, encountered the fine translations from the Tamil by A.K. Ramanujan, well-known to Indian readers of poetry, as well as translations of love poetry from the Sanskrit and Prakrit, including translations by poets such as W.S.Merwin and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, but I had never before encountered an anthology that drew poems from these three classical languages and set them side by side, together with a learned commentary, in quite this fashion. The book is deftly constructed so that you can go straight to the poems and read through them, skipping over the long, detailed and scholarly introduction, or if you wish, you can pore through the introduction, which is composed in a straightforward style, jargon free and most pertinent to the concerns of the poems, the direct and at times almost violent emotions of desire and loss, lust, and longing.
Then, there are the speakers and those who listen, for these are poems minutely chiseled in all the requisite brevity of classical Indian poetics but anchored in the world of audible sound. The one who voices her or his desire and the one who listens or overhears are players in a theater of longing that these exquisite poems unveil.
The poems themselves are laid out in various sections so that this spoken world can be clarified for the reader. There is a section entitled "Young Women Speak to Their Female Friends," and others entitled "Friends Carry Messages to the Lovers," "The Lovers Muse to Themselves," "Wives Address their Philandering Husbands," and most touching, I thought, "The Voices of Mothers and Foster Mothers," in which the intensity of love and, indeed, fear for a grown child is given lyrical expression.
Consider a poem from this particular section. It is a translation from the classical Tamil canon. The mother-musing on her grown daughter, grown hungry in marriage, eating when she can, yet with rich inner resources "more adaptable/than running water/in fine black sand"-thinks back to the little child raised in the luxury of her father's house. How delicately the twin themes of love and domination mingle in the mother's voice. We see the tutelage the child must endure, yet the pride the mother takes in the strength of those tiny ankles:

I held in one hand
a pot of glowing gold
full of sweet milk,
white and tasty,
mixed with honey.
I ordered her to eat,
and as I beat her,
raising a small rod

with a soft tip
wound round with cloth,
she toddled away,
her golden anklets clattering
with their fresh water pearls inside.

                Narrinai,110

In her introduction, whether she is laying out the complexities of the sphota theory of poetic meaning-developed by the ancient grammarian Bhartrhari to explain the astonishing burst of sense that a poetic utterance can raise-or elucidating the paysage ¨¦tat d'ame of Tamil poetics, the notion of tinai, we have in Martha Ann Selby a sensitive and learned guide to the treasures of classical Indian love poetry. Great riches are compacted between the covers of this book.

Meena Alexander was born in India, raised there and in North Africa, and educated in England. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of the volume of poems River and Bridge, the novel Manhattan Music, and, most recently, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience.