Sur’s Ocean

Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation

Translated by John Stratton Hawley

ISBN 9780674290174

Publication date: 02/01/2023

“John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us—with subtle occasional rhyme—to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees.”
—Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

An award-winning translation of Hindi verses composed by one of India’s treasured poets.

The blind poet Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his lover Radha into lyrics that are at once elegant and approachable. Surdas’s popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, known collectively as the Sūrsāgar.

This award-winning translation reconstructs the early tradition of Surdas’s verse—the poems that were known to the singers of Surdas’s own time as his. Here Surdas stands out with a clarity never before achieved.

Praise

Surdas, the wildly popular sixteenth-century composer of these poems, reworked well-known stories of Krishna as a child, a butter thief, a cowherd, a heartbreaker, and a charismatic deity into a new oral literary tradition. Translated into a slightly antiquated but colloquial English that passes for contemporary speech while reminding us of the distance between our time and the time in which these poems were sung, John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us—with subtle occasional rhyme—to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees.

—Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Sur’s Ocean is a lovingly crafted and meticulously attentive translation of the superbly beautiful corpus of devotional love poetry associated with the sixteenth-century north Indian poet Surdas. Hawley has given us a Surdas who is both perennial and speaks persuasively to the present.

—Ranjit Hoskote, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Translation and author of Jonahwhale

Author

John Stratton Hawley is an award-winning translator and scholar of religious studies. He has written extensively on the bhakti movement and is the Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University.