A New York Review Books Original
The poems of Kabir are among the literary and spiritual treasures of the world. He was born in Benares into a low-caste Hindi family of weavers who had recently converted to Islam, and is said
to have lived for 120 years. Kabir's authorship has traditionally been assigned to a whole body of devotional songs that go beyond the usual divisions of caste and creed, challenging social
division and freely mingling Muslim and Hindu motifs, to advocate and celebrate individual unity with the divine. The songs of Kabir offer a poetry of passion and paradox, full of earthy
metaphors, riddling questions, and ecstatic riffs.
Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur'an
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven.
In these translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India's finest contemporary poets, a timeless poet comes alive for our time, while distinguished scholar of religion Wendy Doniger
contributes a preface that places Kabir's achievement in its historical context.
