Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India

by Martha Ann Selby (Translator)

Like red earth and streaming rain,
our loving hearts merged
all by themselves.
Captured in these centuries-old verses are the intoxication of new love, the romance of courtship, and the longing of separated lovers. Here are the voices of older women advising their younger friends, the words of messengers conveying secrets between lovers, and the musings of lovers to themselves. Culled from large anthologies that date from as early as the first century CE to as late as the eighth, Martha Ann Selby's masterful translations allow the poems to stand on their own in English while still maintaining the flavors of the original verses as reflected in idiom and structure. The book's 200 erotic poems are composed in India's three classical Old Tamil, Maharastri Prakit, and Sanskrit, and grouped according to themes, with annotations provided whenever a brief gloss is necessary. After opening with several informative essays on the poems and how to read them, their origin, and the languages in which they were composed, the book proceeds with the delicate images,
voices, and emotions of the verses themselves.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Martha Ann Selby is associate professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Reviews

[Bill]

5 stars is from me subjectively and biased. This was an introduction important to me of Tamil poetry. Heartfelt, often physical, highly erotic, heart-on-sari, these poems are rich but simple in their delivery. It's often one line that serves as the bullet.

The commentary is summary enough. It does the job. It includes lesser poems and that is helpful to get perspective.

[Jessie B.]

An interesting collection

[tasneem]

Martha presumes a lot about our culture for someone who isn't Indian. She speaks over Indian voices in several places.

The poetry is good though.

[Henry Dennen]

Beautiful poems, read it for my literature of love class.

[Ramaprasad KV]

This is a collection of translated verses from Samsktra, Prakrta and Tamizh. It contains some wonderful verses from Amarushatakam, Hala's Gaha Sattasayi, Tamizh Sangam poems and several other anthologies such as Subhashitavali, Subhashita Ratnakosha etc. I found the translations quite good, but on the flip side they have not included the original verses.

The lengthy foreword gives a good overview about how this genre of poetry was pan-Indian and also indicates some of the Sangam poetry was influenced by Prakrta poetry and probably vice versa too.