![]() Unusual for their combination of overt eroticism and devotion to God, these poems are a delight to read. ![]() The translators, who are poets as well as highly respected scholars, render the poems with intelligence and tenderness. Explored, too, are the attempts to contain their explicit eroticism by various apologetic and rationalizing devices. ![]() A foreword provides context for the poems, investigating their religious, cultural, and historical significance. Stones book When God Was a Woman had a profound effect on the emerging Goddess Culture of the 1970s and 80s in the US. This volume is the first substantial collection in English of these Telugu writings, which are still part of the standard repertoire of songs used by classical South Indian dancers. Brazen, autonomous, fully at home in her body, she merges her worldly knowledge with the deity's transcendent power in the act of making love. ![]() That customer, it turns out, is the deity, whom the courtesan teases for his infidelities and cajoles into paying her more money. Written by men during the fifteenth to eighteenth century, the poems adopt a female voice, the voice of a courtesan addressing her customer. ![]() These South Indian devotional poems show the dramatic use of erotic language to express a religious vision. How is it that this woman's breasts glimmer so clearly through her saree? Can't you guess, my friends? What are they but rays from the crescents left by the nails of her lover pressing her in his passion, rays now luminous as the moonlight of a summer night? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |