Posts filed under 'yoga'

The Dance of Śiva

August 9, 2023 | in Essays, Retellings | by Kanya Kanchana

Śiva moves in dance, in sculpture, in painting, in poetry, in ritual, in physics . . . And still he is not done. What are we to do?

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Kanya Kanchana follows the whirling story of Śiva through dance, science, and myth.

“A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.”

– Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

There was sound and the sound was colossal. From within the pulsing sound, from the heart of the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, a single beat could be heard—ḍam. Incantatory, the beat started to repeat—ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam. The beat was coming from the ḍamaru, a small handheld drum. There was a god and he was dancing. He was Śiva and he shook all the worlds.

His matted locks flew wild. Gaṅgā, the holiest of rivers who was nestled in them, swelled in spate, tried in vain to keep him cool. The lambent crescent moon that adorned them, intoxicating soma, now glinted crazily. Vāsukī, the great serpent coiled around his blue, kālakūṭa-holding throat, reeled. Śiva’s locks were a forest (jaṭa, matted locks; aṭavī, forest, as the asura king Rāvaṇa sings).

Once upon a time, another forest: a forest of cedars (devadāru, wood of the gods, Cedrus deodara), into which Bhikṣāṭana Śiva, the mendicant, wanders naked, deep in despair for the sin of having killed Brahmā, his outheld palm an escutcheon, Brahmā’s skull still stuck to it somewhat like an alms bowl. The illustrious sages in the forest are not pleased to see this beautiful beggar who drives their women mad with desire. They send a tiger to shred him to bits; he flays the tiger and wears its bloody skin around his waist. They throw venomous serpents at him; he wraps them around himself as sinuous ornaments. They send a demon dwarf, the malign Muyalaka. Śiva steps on him and breaks his back. And then he dances. He dances until it dawns on them that he is none other than Śiva.

Classic Texts in Translation: David Buchta on the Bhagavad Gītā

April 3, 2019 | in Interviews | by Nina Perrotta

It’s the fact that it’s been this vibrant text for millennia that makes it such an important text for us to read today.

Today’s post is the first installment in our new blog series, “Classic Texts in Translation,” in which we speak with scholars and experts about the challenges of translating canonical texts from around the world. In today’s interview, Assistant Blog Editor Nina Perrotta talks with Professor David Buchta of Brown University about the Bhagavad Gītā, an ancient Sanskrit text that forms part of the larger epic poem known as the Mahābhārata. Their conversation touches on the specific difficulties of translating complex philosophical and theological terms from Sanskrit into English, the questions around authorship that make interpreting classical Sanskrit texts particularly challenging, and the reasons that the Bhagavad Gītā has been such an influential text, both within India and around the world, for millennia.

Nina Perrotta (NP): I want to start off by asking you, in a general way, about some of the biggest challenges of translating Sanskrit into English.

David Buchta (DB): Sure. In some ways, it’s a hard question to answer in a general way, just because you’re talking about this language that has such an enormously long history, such a huge library of literature, and such a wide range. This would be the same for Latin or Greek—the kinds of challenges you face in one genre versus another are going to be radically different.

On the one hand, you’ve got these poems that have two meanings simultaneously, and that obviously is going to introduce one whole set of translation challenges. I often say this about Sanskrit: it’s such a highly cultivated language. In other words, the people who used the language cared about it, thought about it, put their time and energy into developing its toolbox. As a result, if you’re a skilled writer, you can, if you want to, be extremely precise and unambiguous, or you can be extremely ambiguous. There are these poems where you can tell seven stories all at once. It just depends on how the words are interpreted, whether the same sequence of syllables is broken into two words or three words, for example. You have these different ways that you can go if you’re skilled enough at using the language.