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
