In the Garden of Loneliness presents the reader with a translation into English of one of the masterpieces of Modern Hindi literature. This masterpiece is Jayshankar Prasad’s ANSU. The imagery throughout this long poem (190 stanzas) is of a desperate love, felt by the poet, for a sweetheart who has somehow left him or deserted him. The setting is in a beautiful garden, made desolate by the absence of the beloved. As the introduction indicates, the desperation of separation (Viraha) can be mythologized into a universal longing of the soul for God or of the modern person’s quest for contact with the Spirit beyond the existential loneliness of the materialism of the contemporary world-view. The verses in Ansu ‘tears’ ‘1933), abstracted from personal life, speak of that knowledge and that suffering. They are the result of mixture of biography and allegory if one wishes to descend deeper in search for philosophical value. The expression of feelings experienced during many poignant moments fill the entire book, unfolding themselves in the framework of pure poetic reality. They are melodious, touching, and sensitive, and honor the memory of that great love and its beauty.
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