Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India

The translations leap from the eye to the ear, viscerally vernacular, as if newly thought in English. The notes make the most arcane problems vividly clear. And the introductory essays, not just about poetry but about sex, women, love, and gender, are in themselves a major contribution to the study of all of these subjects. A pleasure for anyone to read, and a real eye-opener for anyone who claims to know the culture of ancient India, as well as for those who do not. (Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago)

This book presents new English translations of 150 erotic poems composed in India's three classical languages: Old Tamil, Maharastri Prakit, and Sanskrit. The poems are derived from large anthological collections that date from as early as the first centruy CE to as late as the eight century. In Martha Selby's masterful translations, the poems both stand on their own as poems in English and maintain the flavours of the original verses as reflected in idiom and structure. The poems are grouped according to themes, and annotated whenever a brief gloss is necessary. The book begins with several scholarly essays on the poems and how to read them, their origin, and the languages in which they were composed. This is followed by the poems themselves.