By Mary Karr
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Poetry's roots in sacred song are undeniable. Native American hunters around a fire praised the Great Spirit for sending buffalo. In other cultures, tillers of the soil begged a cloudless sky to split open and loose down rain. I would rank Robert Bly's translations of Kabir -- a 15th-century Indian ecstatic poet raised Muslim and infused with wisdom from both the Sufis and Hindus -- up there with the Hebrew Psalms and the Song of Solomon. In this poem, Kabir refers to the soul as "my inner lover":
I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such
rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
birds and animals and the ants --
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in
your mother's womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely
orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself,
and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten
what you once knew,
and that's why everything you do has some weird
failure in it.
When I read this poem as a young woman who didn't believe she had a soul, I felt it pierce me with its psychological acuity. Kabir lists "birds and animals and the ants" in a way that draws the eye from the soaring sky to the earth's crawly, exoskeletal creatures. In doing so, he connects a vague, blank heaven and the tiny, miraculous particular. He inspires us to re-observe the world. In the pagan, pantheistic world view, when we disconnect from nature, we unplug from the divine source. In the Judeo-Christian view, when we orphan ourselves from God, we go dark. In the psychological model, when we try to wall off our true selves or pasts, we forget who we are. Kabir always turns us to the god inside us, as in this poem:
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine
rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around
your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me
instantly --
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
Bly doesn't apologize for not knowing the Hindi of the originals or the Bengali translation that inspired the Victorian English he cribbed from. "If anyone speaking Hindi would like to help me," he writes, "I'll do them over." These translations could be more accurate, maybe, but hardly more powerful.
(These poems are from "The Kabir Book" by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1971, 1977 by Robert Bly. © 1977 by the Seventies Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon).
Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."
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