Читать книгу Gita Govinda - Jayadeva - Страница 17

Eventually, the best judgment of the poem might be the one it gave itself. The undying attraction of the poem lies precisely in its ambiguity, in its ability to enchant audiences of very different kinds. It is a mark of great art that no one goes away from it empty-handed. Vaishnava adepts continue to seek spiritual illumination from its metaphors; but ordinary seekers of literary beauty also continue to be enchanted by its ability to turn language itself into a song, and by its celebration of ordinary love. It makes us wonder if the joys of the other world are more wondrous than the joys of the world in which we live transiently, and in which we enjoy the love of youth even more transiently. It makes Radha and Krishna strangely double signs—of both the divine and the human: readers can be attracted to both their divinity and their human perfection, the perfection of their love, of their separation, of their longing, and of their union. The poet gave them an irreducibly ambiguous status, their love is perpetually poised between the different perfections of their godliness and their unforgettable humanity. In love human lives are touched by the divine, this is the invariable core of its message, though generations might endlessly dispute exactly what it intended—to turn the lover into god, or god into the lover.

Sudipta Kaviraj