[11/17/25] Vidyā / Schelling, Andrew (tr.): Old Time Love Song Magic

Old Time Love Song Magic is two books in one. The first collects Andrew Schelling’s translations of the thirty-odd existing poems by Vidyā, who may have been the earliest woman to write poetry in Sanskrit. Vidyā’s poetry, which comes to us from around 8th century India, is love poetry, and like all good love poetry, it spans a wide spectrum of feeling, from arousal to playfulness to despair. These poems are gracefully attentive to a natural world that spans the centuries with immediacy. Schelling’s translations draw on an intimacy with the deep past, his language leaping from the originals and landing hard and true in the present moment.

Schelling has been translating and retranslating Vidyā for decades. The second book draws on the insights and knowledge gained through that process. It contains previous translations of the poems and reflections on Vidyā’s words, references, and environment. These little essays expand the world of each poem and reveal the subtle paths translation invites us to follow, taking us deeper into the work, past rhythms, and desire itself.

Anne Waldman writes: This tantalizing compendium of poetry with commentaries, generously offered by poet Andrew Schelling, arrives at a crucial moment. It is a shimmering reminder, a goad, a puja, a scent of blue lotus, a scold with torrents of rain, a cucumber garden, and crystalline observation that indeed “every kalpa ends in collapse.” Vidyā—the magnificent wise passionate Sappho of India—soars thru 21st century neurotic mind with deft wit, fierce seduction, ordinary and sublime magic. As if the clouds suddenly lifted to reveal a gnosis and antidote to the Kali Yuga’s intensifying samsara and monstrous war on human imagination! As if love and poetry had abruptly fled a toxic planet of woe—yet heard our call. These elegantly honed translations and their codas of scholarship (with meters: the doe, tiger’s play, girl with a garland) bring us back to life. “Friend,/ why doesn’t this heart / break into a hundred/ brittle shards?” Vidyā’s voice answers, It does, and reveals the cosmic runes and mirrors of poetry.

Subhashini Kaligotla writes: Careening between the sensual pleasures of fulfilled love and the humiliating grief of rejection, here is life lived in the body of a medieval woman. But this is hardly female experience filtered through the high arts of male court poets. Vidya emerges, in Andrew Schelling’s frank, refreshingly contemporary translations, their variants, and illuminating commentaries, as a woman of hard-won knowledge: of Sanskrit aesthetics, the erotic arts, the natural world, and soteriology. The pursuit of sexual satisfaction in these ravishing poems is unabashed, electric—“the wild game.”

Biographies: Andrew Schelling lives in the Southern Rocky Mountain. His twenty-five books include poetry, essays, and translation. For many years he has studied Sanskrit and Indian raga, publishing eight collections of translation from India’s early poets as well as editing two anthologies. Recent books include Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers (poetry) and Songs of Mirabai (translated from Hindi). His Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture, an ideogram of linguistics, storytelling, and wilderness, has become something of an underground classic in California. He teaches poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University.

Vidyā, probably the earliest woman to write poetry in Sanskrit, lived in India between the seventh and ninth centuries. No record of her life exists beyond thirty-odd lyric poems, including some of the best love poems in any language. One scholar coined the term “the Sappho of India” for Vidyā, which succinctly catches both her breath-taking mastery of poetry, and the way her writings lie scattered through old anthologies and grammars.