Songs of Kabir

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590173794
Pages: 144
Publication Date: April 5, 2011

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's new translation of Kabir brings the poetry of the great 15th-century Indian poet and holy man to life in English for the first time. Not that others haven't tried: Pound, Robert Bly and, most notably, Rabindranath Tagore in 1915, with a version consisting of thees, thous and thines, delivered in a sandalwood-scented prayer-book-ese that would not have been out of place atop a teak sidetable at one of Mme. Blavatsky's legendary seances. But it is Mehrotra who has succeeded in capturing the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir's poetry.....One of the more beautiful moments in this beautifully translated and conceived book comes, fittingly, on the last page of the volume in the commentary, of all places, following the final poem in the collection, one that begins: "I won't come / I won't go / I won't live / I won't die" and ends: "I'm nothing / says Kabir / I'm not among the living / Or the dead."
— August Kleinzahler, The New York Times Book Review

Kabir's famed iconoclasm, speed of thought, slashing paradoxical style, metaphorical zest and rhetorical brilliance have rarely been rendered into English better than in Mr. Mehrotra's versions.
— Chandrahas Choudhury, The Wall Street Journal

This is a lovely book of translations of the poetry of Kabir, a truly visionary egalitarian thinker of the fifteenth century whose songs remain very alive in the folk tradition of north India. In bringing Kabir to an English-speaking audience, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has made a major contribution to the global reach of that inspiring vision.
—Amartya Sen

As Rumi is to the Sufis, so Kabir is to five centuries of Indians, less an individual author than a bullet exploding through their collective poetic gene pool. Pound tried his hand at Kabir, as did Bly and Milosz, but only Arvind Krishna Mehrotra captures the true voice of his anonymity—at once ecstatic and wry.
—Richard Sieburth

In Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's welcome new translation, Kabir's songs emerge as totally fresh, full of wild energy and intensity, and both mocking and reverent.
—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

Kabir was a poet for whom the sacred was inseparable from the satiric, the erotic, the sardonic, and the absurd, and he comes alive at last in English in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation that is simultaneously a work of long scholarship and a jazz performance of the Kabir tradition.
—Eliot Weinberger