The Song of Love & Longing : Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda

Description

The Song of Love & Longing: Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda presents a fresh English translation of Jayadeva’s celebrated 12th-century Sanskrit classic, Gita Govinda, one of the great works of Indian devotional and love poetry.

At its heart is the passionate relationship between Krishna and Radha—a story of attraction, desire, separation, jealousy, longing, reconciliation, and ecstatic union. Jayadeva transforms human erotic love into a profound spiritual metaphor: the longing of Radha for Krishna becomes the longing of the human soul for the divine.

Inderjeet Mani’s translation seeks to preserve the musicality, sensuality, rhythm, and emotional intensity of the original while bringing its language and imagery to contemporary English readers. The result is a poem that feels both ancient and strikingly modern—sensuous yet spiritual, erotic yet devotional, intimate yet universal.

A particularly compelling feature of Mani’s version is its presentation of Radha as a woman of desire, agency, and choice. She is not simply the beloved of Krishna but a fully realized figure whose longing, anger, vulnerability, and power drive the emotional drama of the poem.

The translation has been praised by poets and scholars for its lush lyricism, sonic energy, erotic charge, and accessibility, while also helping English-language readers reconnect with a major work of India’s literary and spiritual heritage.

A book of love poems, The Song of Love & Longing is ultimately a celebration of desire itself—as passion, poetry, devotion, separation, and the eternal human search for union.

Inderjeet Mani’s translation of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda is delicious and lush, sexy and ecstatic, erotic and spiritual, and a welcome new version of this classic of world literature. Mani’s working up of the original’s lyric bliss and sonic elation suffuses this lovely text with a galvanic charge of lust and despair as we join with the god and suffer from our separation. Be careful when picking up this book. It is electric!

— Prof. Tony Barnstone, Whittier College, poet, translator, and author of 21 books

The iambs run sweet in Inderjeet Mani’s masterful version of the Gita Govinda story. Here, the Dark Lord prances along and the queen among milkmaids replies with her own force, her own valiant gaze and choice. This is a Radha for the 21st century, we can accept on her own terms, her own agency. His Gita Govinda will delight and arouse as readers enjoy its classical meters and absolutely riveting and modern love story.

— Indran Amrithanayagam, poet, editor, and translator, award-winning author of 22 books

By ably and sensitively translating the 12th Century Gita Govinda … Professor Mani has done a great service to both lovers of literature, and to those within the Indian tradition who are trapped in the English language and long to get closer to their heritage in a meaningful, enjoyable way.

— Renuka Narayanan, author and columnist on religion and culture