Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India - Tapa dura

This work presents English translations of 150 erotic poems composed in India's three classical languages: Old Tamil, Maharastri Prakit, and Sanskrit. The poems are derived from large anthological collections that date from as early as the first century CE to as late as the eighth century. In Martha Selby's translations, the poems both stand on their own as poems in English and maintain the flavors of the original verses as reflected in idiom and structure. The poems are grouped according to themes, and annotated whenever a brief gloss is necessary. The book begins with several scholarly essays on the poems and how to read them, their origin, and the languages in which they were composed. This is followed by the poems themselves.

Martha Ann Selby is Assistant Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.