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from Love: the rhythms of the interior world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2010
Towards the end of the nineteenth century The Times carried a review of Edwin Arnold's verse translations of Indian Poetry. There we could read: ‘Nothing could be more graceful and delicate than the shades by which Krishna is portrayed in the gradual process of being weaned by the love of “Beautiful Radha, jasmine-bosomed Radha”, from the allurements of the forest nymphs, in whom the five senses are typified.’ And the Standard comments on the same book: ‘The poem abounds with imagery of Eastern luxuriousness and sensuousness; the air seems laden with the spicy odours of the tropics.’
In 1925 the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski completed his opera King Roger, set in the Sicily of the twelfth century. This setting is not arbitrary in terms of the composer's own interests, for here at the court of Palermo he could find a meeting of Europe and the East, of Christian and Arab culture, which mirrored his own musical pursuits. In the opera, a strange and bewitching young man turns up at the royal court and greets the king with the following words: ‘I greet you well, and in the great name of love!’ When the king asks him where he comes from he replies: ‘I come from smiling southern stars. Far are the lands whither my steps have led me. I offered my prayer for you in white Benares; and here I bring you greeting from the lotus of Indra.
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