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Versions of Kabir

When the late Robert Bly’s English translations of 15th –century Indian poet-seer Kabir’s poems were first published in the 1970s they caused something of a stir. They didn’t much resemble the earlier translations in English by Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill with their staid Victorian diction. In fact, Bly didn’t refer to them as translations at all, but as “versions.” Discarding a plethora of “thous” and “thees” and taking a more direct approach, his versions brought Kabir’s poems into the present day.

Tagore’s translations have their strengths, and they served Bly well as a literal reference. But they barely captured the subversive aspect that makes Kabir so much more than a religious poet (like Mirabai, he’s generally considered a saint in India). Intense, mystical, and beyond dogma, he refused to repeat spiritual truths that he hadn’t experienced himself. He debunked the idea that the soul unites with the ecstatic upon death, for instance, as in this line, per Bly:

“What you call ‘salvation’ is found in the time before death.”

Believed to be the son of a Moslem weaver, Kabir was likely familiar with Sufi texts and, it’s said, was initiated as a young man by Ramananda, an ecstatic Hindu holy man. This cross-pollination of faiths may have prepared him to internalize the underlying wisdom they share. Love in the here and now is what inspires Kabir, an ecstatic love that has him reeling, as in the great circle dances of the bhakti devotees of his day. It comes through clearly in Bly’s words when Kabir says:

“If anyone needs a head, the lover leaps up to offer his.”

And here:

“How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy,

he sings in his own little boat.”

Speaking about Bly’s versions with journalist Katy Butler (Poetry as Path), Hindi scholar Linda Hess commented that, “If you want to look at things from a scholarly point of view, they aren’t translations. But you should forget the scholarly point of view and see Bly’s work as picking up an oral tradition and transmitting it, giving his versions with real insight.”

The immediacy of these poems is just as evocative today as it was when they were first published over fifty years ago, and Bly’s contribution to the revival of interest in ecstatic poetry can’t be overstated.

The Kabir Book: Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Versions by Robert Bly, Beacon Press, 1971, 1977

Kabir: Ecstatic Poems, by Robert Bly, Beacon Press, 2004

Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, edited by Robert Bly, Harper Collins, 1995 (anthology)