Two Poems by Bhartrihari, translator Louis Hunt (March 2026)

 

Two Poems by Bhartrihari

1.

Her speech is honey
but her heart is poison.
Drink only from the lips
but strike the poisoned heart
with helpless fists.

 

2.

How can the proud fullness of her breasts, 
her trembling eyes and brow, her lips 
swollen with passion’s urgent sap,
fail to disturb me?
 
But why does this streak of hair,
adorning her waist like a string of letters
inscribed by the flower-armored god of love,
torment me even more?

 

  

 

Bhartrihari (ca. 4th–5th centuries CE) was an Indian poet writing in Sanskrit about whom nothing certain is known. Some traditional sources suggest he was a Buddhist monk, others that he was a king who abandoned his throne for the life of a renunciant. Some have suggested that the poet Bhartrihari is the same Bhartrihari who wrote the Vakyapadiya, a work on the philosophy of language. The editor of the critical edition of the poems, D.D. Kosambi, called Bhartrihari, on the basis of a perhaps overly literal reading of the poems, “a hungry Brahmin in distress.” The truth is that Bhartrihari is known to us only through the medium of his poetry. He is the author of the Shatakatraya (The Three Hundreds), a collection of three thematically focused “centuries” of epigrammatic verses treating worldly wisdom, erotic love and renunciation respectively. Some of the poems traditionally ascribed to Bhartrihari may be later accretions but the core of the Shatakatraya reveals a poet with perhaps the most individual voice in Sanskrit literature.