I guess after reading The Poet X, I felt like I needed more poetry? I'm not sure that I'd ever heard of Kabir before, but I was drawn in by this striking NYRB edition. I was delighted to find myself called into these poems. Not as ecstatic or lusty as Rumi -- but just as wild, disdainful of human divisions like caste and conflicting religious traditions, just as delighted to use the absurd to mock our rational understanding.

Delightful always to find a voice calling to you across centuries and cultures with such clarity. I am sure much credit goes to the translator. ( )

Em 1945, num de seus Cantos Pisanos, Ezra Pound recordou seus anos em Londres: “Thus saith Kabir: ‘Politically’ said Rabindranath.”
Sobre Kabir, os fatos são poucos, muitas as lendas. Ele nasceu em Benares (hoje Varanasi) e viveu no século XV. Através de seus poemas ficamos sabendo que era um tecelão, tendo a família, talvez, se convertido ao Islã para escapar de sua baixa casta no sistema social hindu. Em vários poemas, Kabir fala contra as castas, como faz também, com veemência, contra práticas muçulmanas. É definitivamente um poeta místico. Para ele, toda a existência é divina. Ame as árvores se quiser saber alguma coisa sobre a floresta. Ame as pessoas se quiser saber algo sobre Deus. Cada manifestação particular pode tornar-se uma janela, uma porta. Não seja obcecado demais pelas palavras: supere a palavra e dirija-se cada vez mais para o existencial. ( )

I downloaded this free Kindle edition with some trepidation, expecting what I paid...nothing. Instead, as I became fascinated with Evelyn Underhill’s erudite and detailed introduction to this edition, translated by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, I realised I’d stumbled on a gem.

The introduction is essential to gaining a deeper understanding of the lyrical, mystical poems that follow. Reading it again after one has read the SONGS OF KABIR deepens both the enjoyment of the introduction itself and the songs.

But it’s in the ecstasy of Kabir’s spiritual experiences as he struggles to share his transcendent experience of the Divine that make this book so excellent. As do the Psalms of King David, Kabir’s works range across human emotions, from the depths of despair to the heights of an overwhelming love.

Kabir’s faith and love of a Divine Being he experienced personally, in his ordinary life as a weaver, could not be boxed by traditional religions, and his impatience with rituals and rules that increase the distance between man and the Divine is clear (“…The Kazi is searching the words of the Koran, and instructing others: but if his heart be not steeped in that love, what does it avail, though he be a teacher of men? The Yogi dyes his garments with red: but if he knows naught of that colour of love, what does it avail though his garments be tinted?...” [Poem LIV]

The real heart of these poems – what speaks most clearly to the reader across the centuries – is Kabir’s passion and adoration of the Divine Presence in his daily life. Not for this mystic the lonely mountaintop and isolation from the real world. The SONGS OF KABIR clearly reflect the inspiration and joy of a man who had discovered an essential Truth and who carried his God within his heart:

“Living in bondage, I have set myself free: I have broken away from the clutch of all narrowness. Kabir says: I have attained the unattainable, and my heart is coloured with the colour of love.” [Poem XLVIII]

Kabir was, indeed, a free spirit who had discovered the meaning of Love. ( )

Another work by Tagore