In most depictions of the Indian poet and mystic Mirabai, her eyes are either closed in contemplation or turned toward Krishna, the god/beloved who is the subject, addressee, and preoccupation of her poems. I say “depictions” because there are no real portraits of this sixteenth-century figure, just a few paintings that have come to be considered representative of her and many popular images that imagine her. These images often show her in simple white or saffron clothing, playing musical instruments, her expression one of bliss and serenity.
The Mira I find in her poems, on the other hand, is sometimes blissful, devoted, and self-negating, but not all the time. The poems give us a Mira who is indignant at the absence of her lover/god; a Mira who desires Krishna with overt eroticism; a Mira who calls out religious hypocrisy; a Mira who throws shade, speaks in folksy proverbs, gets dramatic, complains to her friends.
The poems are traditionally sung, and perhaps best known in South Asia as song. Here, too, we see different shades of this iconic figure. Classical and Bollywood renditions tend to present her as mournful and contemplative. The “folk” versions, which are probably closer to what Mira herself would have been singing, emphasize the mystical, repeating and drawing out the refrain so that the song unfurls slowly, bringing the listener along into a meditative space. In these versions, Mira’s anger and her humor, her eroticism and her philosophizing sometimes come through, too. These are sung by traditional musicians as well as by ordinary people at Krishna temples, Sufi shrines, or anywhere.
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I spent many years thinking about Mira before I finally ran out of excuses and began to do the thing that has always been calling to me, which was to make new English translations of the poems. The reasons it took me so long are many. I felt hesitant as an outsider to the language (which I learned in college) and the tradition. I liked many of the existing translations, though none of them felt quite right to me. I thought that maybe the textual Mira could never touch the musical one anyway—pointless to try. And yet, this thought kept coming back to me: that the sharp, complex Mira I saw in the poems hadn’t been brought into English yet, at least not as much as I wished.
I had made attempts back in college, which were…dutiful. I was trying to create sentences and lines that were as close a match as possible to the sentences and lines of the Braj Bhasha originals. I used a regular rhyme scheme and lines of similar length and number. But I could immediately see that my versions were not an improvement on the existing ones, and I put them away. When I returned to the task, decades had passed and no new translations of note had appeared, and I thought I would just attempt one again, and see.
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While writing this I was interrupted by a student coming to my office to talk about poetry. We ended up talking about not only poetry, but also AI (sigh) and imperfection and the deep satisfactions of sitting in a room with other humans thinking and writing together. We were really talking about what it means to engage in the difficult and revelatory work of putting thoughts and experiences into language. Or maybe I should say, having thoughts and experiences through language, which might be my working definition of the process of writing, and also the process of translation. Translators are obsessed with getting it right, but to even attempt to translate is to give up on perfection. Every translation is fundamentally wrong, inaccurate, an alteration of an already compete and perfect original. Translation is a therefore a practice of the messy specificity that makes us human—nowadays, a quite revolutionary act.
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When I tried to translate Mira again, I had a different idea of what was needed. I wanted to give English-language readers access to Mira’s full range of tone and emotion, as well as her religious context; to make poems that were as exciting to me as the originals were; and to find a way to at least gesture at the musical forms where these poems have always lived.
Choosing to give these considerations priority over rhyme scheme and visual appearance was liberating. I kept the meaning of each line intact, but let the lines open and breathe a little, with midline breaks and slashes, and sometimes indented line breaks. This kind of spacing felt roughly analogous to the pauses and deliberations I heard in sung versions. I also decided to take that first line, which is usually sung as the refrain, and let it move through the poem—not an exact repetition, which becomes too heavy on the page, but a repetition in alternate translations or fragments, italicized to visually mark their slight difference from the surrounding lines.
As soon as I figured out how I wanted to carry across the form, I began to feel more comfortable letting some of the diction of the translations become slangy or informal, matching the colloquial, vernacular language of the poems. Though Mira’s cultural status is that of a revered figure, the voice that comes through in the poems is often irreverent and personable, and I wanted the translations to convey that. I gave the poems my own titles because they are known only by their first lines in the original Braj Bhasha. All the titles have Mira’s name in them, a sort of bookend to the internal signature of “Mira says” that closes each poem.
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In “Mira Threatens a Bird,” we meet a Mira on the verge (yes, the great Almodovar film comes to mind, and in fact that would have been a great title for this poem). The speaker of this poem is so enraged about the absence of god/Krishna that she is ready to murder some songbirds, just for reminding her of her beloved. It’s a slightly shocking situation, and I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that those lines are missing from many sung renditions, such as the one recorded by Bollywood playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. Without them, the poem becomes a much gentler thing. But it’s that one-step-too-far quality that also makes the poem so startling and memorable; so Mirabai. She takes a standard conceit of devotional poetry—nature mirroring the seeker’s longing for god—and pushes it to its very limit. By the end of the poem, she has become like the birds herself, wandering the forest, “calling love, love.”
Mira often addresses Krishna directly in the poems, using various names and epithets. In the last line of this one, she calls him “Antarjami,” which translates literally as “Inner-knower” or “Inner-controller” and references Krishna as an omniscient, cosmic divinity. I’ve translated it as “Lord of the Interior,” which I hope carries at least a few of the connotations I see here: Krishna as ruler of hearts, seer of souls, and conductor into parts unknown.
