Flight of Love

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 send 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 Vedantedesika, 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 Vedantedesika's Sanskrit sandesa within the wider comparative context of South Indian and Sri Lankan literatures. He traces thesignificance of messenger poetry in the construction of sacred landscapes in pre-modern South Asia and explores the ways the piece re-envisions the pan-Indian story of Rama and Sita, rooting his protagonists in a turbulent emotional world where separation, overwhelming desire, and anticipated bliss, are written into the livingparticularized 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. Equally the work of a scholar and a poet, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian studies, comparative religion, andIndian literatures.

The Flight of Love, with its exploration of South Indian messenger poems, is a solid effort to show the significance of Sanskrit and Indian literature and the role it plays in the cultures, religions, and sacred spaces found amongst one of the largest and oldest human populations. Hopkins's book shows that simple messenger poems hold larger meaning by his connections of verses to the landscape of Tamil Nadu with powerful imagery and emotion., an excellent introduction to this poem and its wider genre for a non-specialist reader, but also offers some interesting reflections for a scholar or translator working on South Asian literature., 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., Steven Hopkins brings alive the experience of anubhava, enjoyment, so central to the reading practices of the Srivaisnava 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., 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.

Steven P. Hopkins is Professor of Religion and Coordinator of Asian Studies at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedantedesika in Their South Indian Tradition and An Ornament for Jewels: Love Poems for the Lord of Gods by Vedantedesika, which was awarded the 2010 South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize forTranslation.