Surdas: Sur's Ocean, Poems from the Early Tradition.

• Author: Lutgendorf, Philip

Surdas: Sur's Ocean, Poems from the Early Tradition. Edited by KENNETH E. BRYANT; translated by JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY. Murty Classical Library of India, vol. 5; Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xlviii + 1010. $35.

Into Sur's Ocean: Poetry, Context, and Commentary. Translated with commentary by JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY. Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 83; Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. xvii + 1029. $95.

It is not just a matter of apposite translation that the titles of both of these volumes--each weighing in at more than a thousand pages--contain the word "ocean." Their subject is the copious body of sixteenth-century lyric poetry in the premodern Hindi dialect of Braj bhasa attributed to the legendary poet-saint Surdas ("servant of the sun," or "Sur" for short, as both he and the authors generally style him). This corpus came, by the mid-seventeenth century, to be called Sursdgar--literally, "Sur's ocean"--and proliferating manuscripts with this title swelled, like a body of water fed by ever-growing streams, to include thousands of pads or songs--nearly ten thousand by the close of the nineteenth century (Sur's Ocean; hereafter SO, p. xii). Bryant and Hawley have chosen to present, through critically edited text, elegant and indeed lapidary translation, and copious commentary, only a fraction of such compendia, albeit one drawn (as they convincingly argue) from near its headwaters. Yet although they offer a mere (!) 433 poems, culled principally from seven early manuscripts dated to within a half century of the poet's probable demise in the second half of the sixteenth century (they consulted, for comparison, a score of others of slightly later provenance), their labors and achievements, as reflected throughout these two volumes, can deservedly be called "oceanic." If this is not the whole of the Sursagar as present-day Krsna devotees conceive of it, it is certainly as magisterial and painstaking a reconstruction of "the early Sur tradition" as we are ever likely to see. Surveying the breadth and depth of these volumes, my initial response was simply one of awe, and having now taken a long and satisfying plunge into them (though I cannot claim to have fully explored every one of their 433 estuaries), adbhuta remains the dominant rasa in my mind/heart (man)--although (to shift metaphors) most of the other principal "flavors" in the smorgasbord of Indian aesthetic categories are amply served up here as well.

Given that (almost exactly) the same translations appear in both books, why are there two of them? The volume in the Murty Classical Library of India series (hereafter "MCLI"), which was the first to appear, pairs, in that series' usual format, each translation by Hawley on the right-facing page with the Devanagarl text of the corresponding pad from the...