Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

We all have our various standards in choosing spiritual poetry. My own approach is decidedly non-academic; the test for me is whether it resonates inside me. (A tuning fork will begin to resonate when another with identical pitch is struck near it. I read widely in spiritual literature, and wait until I begin to feel that "tuning fork" or God-Self inside resonate with the God-Self that is outside.)

I have read this book many times and still tears fill my eyes to the point that I can't see. I have heard Kabir's metaphors quoted by other spiritual teachers - for example, the fish swimming in the ocean that believes it is thirsty - but never knew the source. Now I have a whole book of metaphor and poetry from someone who apparently experiences life as I do:

"When my friend is away from me, I am depressed; nothing in the daylight delights me, sleep at night gives no rest, who can I tell about this?...."

Robert Bly has written a short section in the back of the book titled "Some Rumors About Kabir," which is written in an accessible way--his language is never inflated or difficult. This is quite appropriate considering the opinion Kabir himself expressed regarding "religious academics" who have an outward religious appearance while having "deep inside, a loaded gun." I especially like the story of how Kabir blasted the 1500 meditators for refusing Mirabai's female presence at their gathering. "You know what I see in this hall?" Kabir asks. "1500 male egos!"

I have learned that not all poetry attributed to Kabir was actually authored by him. Apparently there was a practice in which later poets would write poems and attribute them to Kabir. My other Kabir books (those with hundreds of pages) have plenty of poems in them that do not resonate. For me, a very high percentage of the Robert Bly translations resonated.

"What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through. If you have not lived through something, it is not true" (Poem 28)

Roberty Bly wrote in his afterward that he did not translate some of Kabir's poems for which he did not have correlative experiences. He also wrote "I love his poems, and am grateful every day for their gift." Perhaps it is this honesty, and genuine appreciation as a like-hearted seeker, that makes this little book of 44 poems so powerful.

This is a great book of poetry written in very accessible language. You will like it!

When I discovered the Kabir Book, it was like a breath of fresh air. Is this a spiritual book? Sure, yes. But it is also hilariously funny and entertaining, if you ask me.

Finding Kabir was great. This ancient sage skewers all kinds of religious dogmas and funky practices. It is comforting to know that he pursued his path and still snickered at stern, narcissistic people who shaved their heads and wore uncomfortable burlap. Kabir's sarcasm and satire is especially timely in light of recent corrupted interpretations of yoga, Buddhism, Sufism and other spiritual/religious approaches.

In essense, Kabir offers something of a "Newage Treatment Plant." If you like metaphysics without a bunch of gunk polluting it, then Kabir is for you.

I have one concern. Robert Bly states that he has changed the wording and content of poems to make them understandable to a contemporary audience. I've heard that much is lost and possibly even corrupted with such a translation. I'm not sure where Kabir ends and Bly begins.

When I was younger I lived in an ashram for 5 years. Our holy book was the Guru Granth Sahib. It mainly contains the writings of the 10 Sikh Gurus. However, among the non-guru writings were those of Kabir. Ironically, I enjoyed his the most. We had a practice of maintaining a continuous reading of the holy book. That meant I would often end up reading for two hours in the middle of the night. That vigil was sometimes hard, but I would always feel joyful when reading Kabir's passages. Sometime after I left the ashram, Robert Bly released this work. I found that it captured the essence of Kabir's spirit. Whenever I read it, it touches a space in me that expands my spirit. This is a very special book that I have given to many friends.

Since receiving it as a gift from my father -- poet Anthony Piccione -- I have held onto, referred to, cherished, shared, and respected this collection of Kabir translations by Robert Bly. I even used it as part of my syllabus when I taught writing.

Few translators work with such power and such humility. There is pure celebration in these poems that calls us back to the true source of love and spiritual wholeness: ourselves.

It's a gift Kabir knew we needed to rediscover. Bly knows it, too, or these translations would never resonate the way they do.

Kabir's poems have been translated into English by many people.
Read any one of them. But don't read this contamination, this desecration of Kabir's beautiful poems. Bly isn't translating from any original language. He translates from an English translation that he himself considers "hopeless" into his own version of them. What can he hope to accomplish by this? Aside from the fact that the translations he works from were done by Rabindranath Tagore and he is unable to appreciate what are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful poems ever, how many times removed from the truth (to paraphrase Plato) is he trying to get? He admittedly violates chronology by replacing "a deadly weapon" with "a loaded gun". He should just have used that gun to shoot his manuscript to shreds. To all aspiring poets, never ever do to another man's work what Robert Bly has done here to Kabir and Tagore.

With no disrespect to Mr. Bly intended or implied, I must say that in creating his "versions" of Kabir's poems, he has interpolated his own limited understanding of their meaning and in so doing, has trivialized them. Kabir was no mere philosopher, whose work may be pulled apart and analyzed, toyed with and rehashed with impunity. He was a Master, whose words are chosen carefully to drive an important message home: "What you are seeking is within you". Remarkably iconoclastic for his time, he pulled no punches and made no excuses for his views on religion, ritual, beliefs and superstitions. He unabashedly sings the glory of his own experience and enthusiastically recommends it to one and all. Even to translate his words into another language is risky enough, although their power has managed to shine through. But to fabricate one's own "versions" is to make the arrogant assumption that one is on the same level as Kabir, and thus able to diddle with the Master's words without changing their value, import or meaning. I have always found Kabir's songs both inspiring and challenging. Far from incomplete or irrelevant to my time, they require no updating or commentary, but demand that I become conscious and find the Truth within me, as he has done himself. I don't get the feeling he would ever muck with my poems; I don't get the feeling he would appreciate my mucking with his. Mr. Bly has done a service in exposing Kabir's work to the western mainstream, but not an unqualified one, for in doing so, he has placed his own perception, like sticky little fingerprints, all over it.

Few major achievements of world literature are as little known to Americans as the great ecstatic poetry of the Hindus and Sufis, as exemplified by the work of the 15th century master, Kabir. Kabir has been translated into English only once before, in a collaboration between the British scholar of mysticism, Evelym Underhill, and the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Unfortunately, Tagore's Victorian English was simply not equal to Kabir's directness, spontaneity, and irreverent humor. While a creditable scholarly accomplishment, the translation did not make the joyous vigor of Kabir available to contemporary Americans.

Working from the Underhill-Tagore translation, Robert Bly has done more than retranslate the words into American diction. An accomplished poet himself, he has essentially breathed life back into Kabir's work. "American readers will be surprised by several qualities of these poems," Bly predicts. "For one thing, they have humor -- something unheard of in the religious poetry of the West. For another, they reject the idea of a heavy split between body and soul (Kabir says: 'We mustn't give it a name, lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul'), and celebrate the natural unity of the psyche."

Most Western religious poetry has been written within the orthodox church, and has been essentially uncritical of its basic tenets; opposition to church dogma has been left largely to secular critics. In contrast, Kabir stands apart from Hindu and Moslem conventions -- but without insisting that their ground is any less religious than his. In intensely spiritual poetry he challenges the orthodox holy men with such near-playful queries as: "Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what?"

To Kabir a holy man is first of all a man -- and then perhaps incidentally holy. He revels in exposing their absurdities when and where he finds them. Probably no Western critic of the guru cults which have proliferated among us in recent years could get away with the fun Kabir has at the expense of the Yogis -- when he catches them being simple-minded: "The Yogi comes along in his famous orange; but if inside he is colorless, then what?"

One thing is certain. You do not have to become convinced of the cultural significance of these long-neglected poems to justify reading and re-reading this collection. They stand on their own outside any historical or cultural context. They amaze and delight. And in the ever-present moment, whether you have never experienced an ecstatic moment or whether you simply await the next one to unfold from within your awareness, who knows: just may one of these poems it be.

If there was ever such a thing as blasphemy, this would be it.

I have always hated it when classic Urdu and Sanskrit literature have been translated into English for the Western reader, and I have particularly despised the end-result when the translator himself is Western. This sort of poetry just does not read as poetically or deeply in English. In Sanskrit and Urdu, the words leap off a page with double or triple meanings and possibilities - indeed, the work of Kabir in his original language are jumping with various intentions and nuances that bear repeated reading. However, in English, they lack the depth and appear dull and lifeless.

Despite this obvious shortcoming, Kabir's poems translated in English do have some effect - though as one reviewer put it, the effect is at times comical - though not the fault of the poet, let me insist. The horrendous translation work done by Robert Bly should be read to be believed. Readers who have been amazed by Kabir's poems in their original language will be amazed here for totally different reasons.

Even more laughable are Bly's [...] attempts at cooking up a biography. Its obvious that this author has done minimal research. And considering that the word 'probably' features more than a dozen times in the introduction, you wonder if the author believes if Kabir really existed or not. Bly's explanations are even more bizarre - ranging from the this-may-have-happened to the oh-by-the-way-this-may-have-happened-instead variety are numbingly irritating, and by the end of it, you may well want to throw this away and get the definitive Kabir book translated by Rabindranath Tagore instead.

If you're a real Sufi lover or Kabir fan, you'd think twice before investing in [a book] such as this. Everything about this book made me mad. I have also read the other Kabir book called 'Cabir', which made me realize that when you're not really sure about anything about the person about whom you're writing, its better not to write about him at all. All these biographies are insipid and tired efforts. I'd advise the translators to desist from doing anymore translation work of the great Indian poets. Its cruel and despicable.

Not at all recommended. There are much better Kabir translations on the Web, so check those out instead.

I've known and loved this book for years. A couple of the reviewers below really rake Bobby Bly over the coals for his translation -- unfairly, I think. First, Robert confesses right up front to the fact that he's not really translating, since he doesn't read or speak Kabir's language. Instead, he's meditating on the old English translations done by Rabindranath Tagore, and then putting them into modern, colloquial English. That's really "transliteration", not translation. Is that fair? Well, it's basically what Coleman Barks has done with Rumi (at Bly's instigation, by the way), and I'd hate to have missed Coleman's versions of Rumi. Coleman admits he can't do Rumi justice, or Rumi's beautiful original Persian. How can you possibly capture the music of the original, the multiple meanings and subtle cultural connotations? You can't. Having tried to translate some Chinese poetry, I can tell you, all you can hope to do is capture something of the spirit, something real but intangible. Coleman has done that with Rumi, and Bly has done that with Kabir. If you think of this book less like an exact translation, and more like a wonderful conversation between a great poet of the past and a great poet of today you'll see what's actually going on here.

I would imagine that Kabir's poetry is probably too complex for one single, authoritative translation or "transliteration" -- so my response to some of the very negative/critical reviews here is that, yeah, Bly's take on the poetry may be not to your taste, but why slam him for it? it's another voice -- and it is a very sincere and respectful voice -- added to the mix of scholarship and interpretation and response that may help the English-speaking person access the poetry and experience the power and insight of Kabir. I don't think ANY sincere voice ought to be shouted down and shut out of the conversation around this fascinating poet.

Robert Bly's versions of Kabir -- in a thin little pamphlet, not even a book yet -- was my introduction, so very many years ago, to mystical, for lack of a better word, poetry. So many of its lines will spring to my mind throughout the years... very memorable... as to complaints about the stripped-down language, simple english can be as nuanced and rife with meaning as more formal english... an obvious example: check out the King James Bible for instances where, in passages of pretty simple language, a whole world of meaning unfolds... I was lucky-- maybe, god, like 25 or 30 years ago -- to be in a packed auditorium to hear Bly read from this stuff. the spirit that filled the room was so palpable, moving, absolutely unforgettable. I don't remember Mr. Bly, I couldn't even tell you what he looked like or what his voice sounded like -- but I do remember the poetry. So I think he must have been doing a pretty good job.

If you love poetry, read this book -- if you aren't a fan of poetry written in sort of minimalist English, you may not like all of it -- you may not like it at all -- but I can almost guarantee there will be a line or two that will stay with you...