Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

About the Author
R. Parthasarathy is professor emeritus of English at Skidmore College. He is the editor and translator of The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India (Columbia, 1993).

Reviews
The book succeeds very well at giving the reader a firm sense of the literary sensibility that informs Sanskrit erotic verse. It has both a breadth of reference and a cosmopolitan spirit. -- Whitney Cox, University of Chicago



Book Information
ISBN 9780231184380
Author R. Parthasarathy
Format Hardback
Page Count 216
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press