Sur’s Ocean

Surdas, the wildly popular sixteenth-century composer of these poems, reworked well-known stories of Krishna as a child, a butter thief, a cowherd, a heartbreaker, and a charismatic deity into a new oral literary tradition. Translated into a slightly antiquated but colloquial English that passes for contemporary speech while reminding us of the distance between our time and the time in which these poems were sung, John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us—with subtle occasional rhyme—to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees. -- Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Sur’s Ocean is a lovingly crafted and meticulously attentive translation of the superbly beautiful corpus of devotional love poetry associated with the sixteenth-century north Indian poet Surdas. Hawley has given us a Surdas who is both perennial and speaks persuasively to the present. -- Ranjit Hoskote, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Translation and author of Jonahwhale
Surdas’s poems are a continuation of the tradition of Krishna stories, the cosmography that has, in its many versions and variations, defined the spiritual life of the Indian subcontinent... Reading Surdas’s songs in this new translation, I am reminded, again, of how the figure of Krishna is one of the greatest achievements of the Indic imagination. -- Sumana Roy * Book Post *