Translator’s Note

When we talk about Sanskrit texts in world literature, only a few find frequent (albeit well-deserved) mention, like Mahabharata, Meghadootam, etc. There exists, however, an endless body of work suffering in obscurity or worse, entirely lost to us. Aryasaptashati is one such text. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been translated into any western language, and its translation into Indian languages are also far and few. This is especially sad because its fall from recognition has been an act of historical negligence. Taken on its merits as a work of literature such as the unparalleled rhythm of its verses, classically established and novel imagery and the variety of themes, it can very well become a part of a global classical canon, given the audience.

Aryasaptashati falls within a larger genre of Saptashati (or Satsai in some Sanskrit-derived languages). The word literally means a collection of seven hundred. Here, the seven hundred are standalone verses, arranged alphabetically, which are all written in the Arya metre. Arya, meaning the respectable or revered one, is a poetic metre which is unlike most in Sanskrit Prosody both in structure and rhythm. While nearly all other major Sanskrit metres are syllabic in nature, Arya counts the total weight of the syllables: a short syllable carries one unit of poetic weight, and a long syllable carries two. A verse is divided into lines of two “steps” each, wherein the first and third steps have twelve units, the third one eighteen, and the fourth one, fifteen. The subsequent rhythm is rather unique, being relatively more uneven and filled with many short syllables, which lends Arya popularity in lyric poetry. The long, unequal lines with many short syllables and extensive use in lyric poetry strongly reminded me of the elegiac couplet of Greek and Latin, which led me to choose it for my translations.

Creating a selection from verses as varied as these proved most difficult thematically; the seven hundred verses contain within themselves the length and breadth of human experience. There’s no uniting theme or narrative: one verse may be about the two lovers, the next a moral lesson about choosing the right company and another devoted to a deity.

The largest chunk is romantic in nature displaying every shade of love , even including aesthetic expressions of infidelity. Such verses are classified in the Shringaar Rasa, which is regarded as chief among the nine rasas (flavours) of Sanskrit Aesthetics. Shringar, literally meaning adornment, is the rasa of romantic or erotic love, and the variety of emotion stemming out of such love. Another interesting aspect is the character of the “messengers,” the speakers of the poems who convey messages between separated lovers, telling the lovers the other's condition or even his or her own advice in their matter. No seven individual poems to cover the entire thematic range of the text. I decided to focus on a single theme, that of separated lovers.

Read together, these verses paint a beautiful image of the parting, sorrow and waiting. In verse 211 for example, first of the following selection, the maiden values whatever little time she gets with her lover, and to keep her spirits up, she repeats to herself everything that her lover told her, integrating it in her everyday life and every manner of expression. Note that the use of the second person in this verse indicates that someone is letting the beloved of this behaviour of the maiden. It's her friend, the above-mentioned messenger, who has come to give the lover the maiden’s news, and take news for her in turn.

There are plenty of other themes in the text taken in its entirety. This by no means should indicate to the reader that this is what the text is limited to, but it is in my opinion an appropriate window to understand the magnificence of Govardhanacharya’s imagery.

Translating Sanskrit into a European language such as English comes with its fair bit challenges, the chief of them being cultural context. Certain images, certain metaphors and certain suggestions work only when a larger context is known. Aryasaptashati is filled with hundreds of breathtaking verses that when read without context would make little to no sense. Here, I have tried to limit only myself to verses that when taken literally can be understood universally. However, I do wish to some day translate a larger portion of the text, providing necessary footnotes.

To make up for these challenges, however, Sanskrit also affords the translator certain advantages, the chief of them being a lack of any word order. For the uninitiated, reading sanskrit poetry can be completely baffling as the structure of the language allows the poet to almost completely disregard any word order. In fact, one of the first things that a reader of Sanskrit poetry is required to learn is to understand a verse in regular subject-object-verb prose, a process called as anvaya. Returning to 211, for example, the words translated as “the maiden,” sa bala, appear somewhere towards the end of the first line and at the very end respectively. The freedom from having to adapt a word is greatly beneficial for the translator, without any need to fit square pegs in round holes.