Songs of Kabir by Kabir and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

This is poetry from India.

Songs of Kabir by Kabir translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is published by NYRB Classics. This is a Book originally written in Hindi. This was published in 2011.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781590173794E12.

Songs of Kabir, by Kabir and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra from Hindi, brings Hindi-language poetry from India into English through Kabir’s devotional bite, aphoristic brilliance, and the old song tradition made startlingly immediate. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is the pressure of a voice that has already changed the weather around it. I would read it for song, devotion, paradox, and the wild clarity of mystical address, not as a fixed lesson about India. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Songs of Kabir belongs in the translated poetry library because it gives readers one of Hindi and Bhakti poetry’s essential crossings into English.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.