Böcker av Andrew Schelling

For thousands of years, the Indian subcontinent has proved a fertile ground for the world's most captivating erotic love poetry, and the genius of its devotional writing harnesses great energy and mystical insight. It is in fact often hard to tell whether the poets are offering poems of spiritual longing using the garments of love poetry or writing erotic pieces in the guise of devotion. Perhaps, in a land where erotic sculptures routinely ornament its many temples and gods are known for their explosive sexuality, this question has little meaning to these remarkable writers. In their devotional traditions, eroticism and mysticism seem inseparable.This collection spans 2,500 years and includes work originally sung or recited by well-known bards: Kabir, Mirabai, Lal Ded, Vidyapati and Tagore. There are also poems from the Upanishads, ancient Sanskrit poetry and Punjabi folk lyrics. The poets have largely emerged from the ranks of the dispossessed: leather workers, refuse collectors, maidservants, women and orphans. Their vision is of a democratic society in which all voices count. Often they faced persecution for speaking candidly, or daring to speak of spiritual matters at all. The notes include profiles of these legendary lives. Several of these poets simply vanished, absorbed into a deity, or disappeared in a flash of purple lightning. A few produced miracles-most of them are surrounded by clouds of mystery. Andrew Schelling has drawn on the work of twenty-four translators, including A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Deben Bhattacharya, Dilip Chitre, Gieve Patel, Ezra Pound and Robert Bly to build the finest anthology of India's erotic and spiritual poetry ever assembled for the general reader.

The poets of classical India regarded love as the first and deepest of passions. Translator and scholar Andrew Schelling perfectly encapsulates the history and passion of eighth-century India in this collection."A single stanza of the poet Amaru," declared a ninth-century poetry critic, "may provide the taste of love equal to what's found in whole volumes." Graceful and yet remarkably playful, intensely passionate, and at times hinting of divine transcendence, the poems translated here offer poignant glimpses into the many faces of erotic love. This collection, known in Sanskrit as the Amarushataka ("One Hundred Poems of Amaru"), was compiled in the eighth century and remains to this day one of India's finest collections of love poetry. Legend connects the poetry's authorship to King Amaru of Kashmir, while present-day scholars generally consider it an anthology of the verses of many poets.

"e;Tracks Along the Left Coast more than accomplishes its self-appointed task of celebrating de Angulo's legacy."e; -Rain TaxiCalifornia, with its scores of native languages, contains a wealth of old time storiesa bedrock literature of North America. Jaime de Angulos linguistic and ethnographic work, his writings, as well as the legends that cloak the Old Coyote himself, vividly reflect the particulars of the Pacific coast. Born in Paris of Spanish descent, he came to America to become a cowboy, and he didas well as a doctor, a linguist, ethnomusicologist, and writer. His poetry and prose uniquely represented the bohemian sensibility of the twenties, thirties and forties, and he was known for his reworkings of coyote tales and shamanic mysticism. So vivid was his writing that Ezra Pound called him the American Ovid, and William Carlos Williams claimed that de Angulo was one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered.Jamie de Angulo arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the 1906 earthquake, and soon after he began medical school, almost on a whim. But the practical application of medicine did not interest him, and he set off on a life long career as a non-conformist cowboy-academic and keen ethnographer of the hundreds of Native Californian tribes that still lived along the Pacific coast. De Angulo spent nearly three decades in a focused effort to understand the California languages that were rapidly disappearing, carrying on their lives beneath the overlay of Spanish and English. He visited Native Americans on their landsfrom sagebrush flats to redwood grovesand collected what could be salvaged of their languages, believing that to reach an understanding of a single ordinary sentence might disclose a whole method of knowing the world, a metaphysic different than an English speakers and equally subtle.De Angulo found the phonetic scripts used by linguists too esoteric, and the odd or specialized symbols meant that standard printing houses lacked the ability to reproduce them. His whole life he argued for a script that could be done on a regular typewriter, one that an ordinary publishing house could typeset. Using his fonetik script so much led him to cast a wry look at English too, with its obsolete spellings he considered pointless and burdensome. His letters to colleagues and friendsamong them Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Poundbegan to discard unpronounced letters in words: thoroly and wud.At the end of his life, broadcasting from Pacifica Radiothe worlds first listener-supported stationde Angulo brought together much of what he had gathered in his ethnographic travels and recorded roughly100 programs of Old Time Stories. He recited Native Californian stories, sang songs, and transmitted a way of looking at life that was based on medicine power and mythputting it all into a great, singular work. A work that is very hard to come by, and even hard to define.In each retelling, through each storyteller, stories are continually revivified, and that is precisely what Andrew Schelling has done in Tracks Along the Left Coast, weaving together the story of a life with the story of the land and the people, languages, and cultures with whom it is so closely tied.