How to Love in Sanskrit: Poems
edited and translated by Anusha Rao & Suhas Mahesh
2024

This is a delightful little book of poetry, with 218 poems from a variety of authors across millennia, originally written in Sanskrit (more or less), and selected as representations for how love was and is conceived of in that language. An innate part of poetry is that it involves evocative language of metaphors and references and it’s fascinating to see what comparisons are impactful in other cultures. For example: a lot of British poetry will refer to the coldness of a scornful lover or the warmth of a loving relationship; in contrast, a lot of this poetry from India talks about the burning heat of abandonment or the cool soothing presence of a lover.

I’m not much of a poetry reader, but I bought this book specifically for the introduction which discussed the process of translating the poems, and I wish that had been more extensive, or even (oh how I wish!) a matching description of the process for each individual poem. Part of the introduction used a single poem as an example and went through the stages of: 1. what it was in the original (which I couldn’t read at all), 2. what it was in the direct literal translation (which was oddly disjointed as such types of translations always are), 3. what it meant in the conceptual translation (which made more sense), and 4. finally what these translators created as the end result (which was delightful!)

These poems are mostly quite short and often quite funny, and the translators have made them very accessible.