Books like The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir

Not all that long ago, in another review, I wrote that I preferred the Rabindranath Tagore translation to this one. I take it back. I was a fool to say so. Revisiting Bly’s translation recently, after more than two decades, I was struck by its clarity, its passion, its vivid and compelling voice.I chose Tagore because—in philosophical seriousness and bibilical gravity—I imagine his translation more closely reflects the original. But, knowing nothing of the language, who am I to say? Besides, two of my favorite translations are Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat and Ezra Pound’s Sextus Propertius, and from what everyone tells me, they aren’t close to the original at all.No, the inescapable responsibility of the translator of poetry is to use his materials to create real poetry in his own language. Here—and elsewhere, too, in his translations from the Spanish—Bly does this as well as any translator ever has. In addition, he creates a Kabir who speaks with an intense and immediate voice that transforms these spiritual insights into something both urgent and essential.But perhaps I should let Kabir—that is, the poet Robert Bly’s persona Kabir—speak of what is—and is not—essential:\ 2.I don’t know what sort of God we have been talking about.The caller calls in a loud voice to the Holy One at dusk.Why? Surely the Holy One is not deaf.He hears the delicate anklets that ring on the feet of an insect as it walks.Go over and over your beads, paint werid designs on your forehead,wear your hair matted, long and ostentatious,but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God?5.Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds and millions of stars.The acid that tests gold is here, and the one who judges jewels.And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside. 9.Knowing nothing shuts the iron gates; the new love opens them.The sound of the gates opening wakens the beautiful woman asleep.Kabir says: Fantastic! Don’t let a chance like this go by!\