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

"We are all struggling; none of us has gone far." Perhaps not, but the world presented in these poems of a Bhakti, devotion is a different, further, place, one of struggle yet, but also of ecstatic love. Kabir is a poet from India Fourteenth century, while Bly a poet of our time. He tries to bring this home with specifics for our age, for example, "a loaded gun" rather than "deadly weapon" . These are not translation, but are Robert Bly's "versions". Divided into 4 sections "The Gardener is Coming", "The Wanting Creature", "The Bride Want Her Lover", and "The Guest is Inside You". There are some startling lines in these poems; for example: if you can't find where your soul is hidden, for you the world will never be real. When you're trying to find a hardwood forest, it seems wise to know what a tree is. There is a moon in my body, but I can't see it. This short book is rich, the short introduction gives a setting of Kabir, while the poems themselves are nicely illustrated for example "Krishna with Flute", help to give an otherworldly effect. The afterward by John Hawley, helps to locate Bly, and proposes a connection from Thoreau to Bly.

Beautiful translation of one of my favorite mystic poets! Robert Bly's translation of Kabir allows us to experience this mystic poet in a personal way without losing any of the beauty of the poetry. Really enjoyed this book.

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.

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.

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.