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Rating: 
Summary: Could have been written yesterday
Review: A friend gave me a copy of this book, as I was looking for some poetry to set to music. I was inspired by the Barbara Stoller Miller translation of the Gita Govinda, pub by Columbia Univ., and my friend thought that this book pushed the envelope just a litte bit further. The forward and introduction are very informative and make this centuries old poetry come alive in a relevant and contemporary way. The poems themselves are very, very old and Schelling's translations make them shimmer with life. If you've ever researched or read other translations of Sanskrit poetry, you will be thrilled with these translations. As it turns out, I've received permission to use three of the poems in the book to set to music (in their original Sanskrit language). This book offer a potent and eggshell fragile look at the range of emotions relating to love, romance and romantic longing. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Could have been written yesterday
Review: There has been for several years a readily available book of Tamil erotic poetry The Interior Landscape which made the poetry of Southern India accessible. Now Andrew Schelling has provided a readily available text for Northern India. While the vast majority of these lyric poems are written in strictly metered quartrains, Schelling does a marvelous job of rendering the poems in free form - depending upon the images and sounds rather than the meter to translate the poetry into English (as opposed to the early stiff quatrain translations that encouraged no one to read Sanskrit/Prakrit poetry). The selection of poetry is not "representative" of the anthologies but represent the translator's personal choice around the theme of eroticism. The translator's affinity for the selected poems shows in the excellent translations - faithful to the original text [yes I have read them in their original form] yet solid as English poetry.
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Summary: A beautiful, sad, joyous book of the human condition
Review: This is a wonderful little book of poetry. The poems of love, physical intimacy, desire, melancholy, longing and rejection in this collection date back over a millennia. A thousand years make these poem as poignant as ever. The poems in this collection are fleeting intimate glimpes into who we are as humans.
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Summary: beautiful and evocative poetry
Review: This is beautiful poetry from ancient India. It is rich and sensual, evocative and erotic, and not always in the overtly sexual way of the Kama Sutra. It engages life, society, and importantly, nature in all its lost beauty in India, the fragrant jasmine vines, the kadamba and ankota tree, the thunderstorm that releases a sudden coolness on a warm summer evening, the white cranes that cross the darkening sky. Then there is the secret rendezvous, the furtive gesture, the passionate love-making, the loss of youth, the immortal desire for fulfillment, the traveller and his betrayals, the gods engaged in their own love-making, Shiva and Parvati as the divine couple. These are timeless themes made more poignant by our desire for them today.
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