Print Price: $81.50

Format:
Hardback
304 pp.
5.5" x 8.25"

ISBN-13:
9780190495183

Publication date:
May 2016

Imprint: OUP US

The Flight of Love

A Messenger Poem of Medieval South India by Venkatanatha

Translated with Commentary by Steven P. Hopkins

After a sleepless night spent longing for his absent wife Sita, Rama, god-prince and future king, surveyed his army camps on a clear autumn morning and spied a white goose playing in a pond of lotus flowers. Seeing this radiant creature who so resembled his lost beloved, he began to plead with the bird to give her a message of love and fierce revenge.

This is the setting of the Hamsasandesa A Message for the Goose, a sandesa or "messenger poem" by the medieval saint-poet and philosopher Venkatanatha, a seminal figure for the Srivaisnava religious community of Tamil Nadu, South India, and a master poet in Sanskrit and Tamil. In The Flight of Love, Steven P. Hopkins situates Venkatanatha's Sanskrit sandesa within the wider comparative context of South Indian and Sri Lankan literatures. He traces the significance of messenger poetry in the construction of sacred landscapes in pre-modern South Asia and explores the ways the Hamsasandesa re-envisions the pan-Indian story of Rama and Sita, rooting its protagonists in a turbulent emotional world where separation, overwhelming desire, and anticipated bliss, are written into the living particularized bodies of lover and beloved, in the "messenger" goose and in the landscapes surrounding them.

Hopkins's translation of the Hamsasandesa into fluid American English verse is framed by a comparative introduction, including an extended essay on translation, detailed linguistic notes, and an expanded thematic commentary that weaves together traditional religious interpretations of the poem with themes of contemporary literary relevance.

Readership : Undergraduates in South Asian Studies or Religion, Scholars of South Asian Languages and Literatures, Scholars of Religious Studies, General readers in World Literatures, those who would also be interested in the Norton Anthologies of World Religions/ World Literatures in Translation.

Reviews

• "Reading this wonderful book really does feel like flying. The translation is peerless, and Hopkins's fine meditation on what it took to get there is a close second. We're lucky to have both."
  
  --John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement
  
  
• "Steven Hopkins brings alive the experience of anubhava, enjoyment, so central to the reading practices of the Srivaisnava ava tradition through a luminous and deeply felt translation of Venkatanatha's Hamsasandesa. His incisive and evocative readings, informed equally by Srivaisnava exegesis and literary theory, cover as vast a territory as the poem's royal goose does on its message of love. The Flight of Love is a book to be savored."
  
  --Archana Venkatesan, author of The Secret Garland: Antal's Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli
  
  
• "As a faithful, yet eminently readable, translation of a beautiful work of Sanskrit poetry, The Flight of Love is an unqualified success. Hopkins adeptly captures the lyricism, mood, and idiom of the original and, through his insightful commentary and notes, brings out its social, historical, linguistic, religious, and aesthetic significance. The introduction itself is a valuable resource for learning about the genres of Sanskrit poetry and the history of South India and Hinduism in the medieval period."
  
  --Deven M. Patel Author of Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia