English Translations of Manikkavacakar by Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Priya Sarukkai Chabria (Translator)

 

Manikkavacakar’s Creation Hymns 

From  Tiruvacakam / Sacred Utterances translated from Classical Tamil

 

3.1-5

wobbling spheres round       into the elemental cosmos

                                                                                                   immeasurable

                                                       wonder beyond wonders
here our planet

                                     floats


impossible to sing these worlds’ profuse beauties



try this for scale:
earth

          in its disk of stars

                                   a dust mote

                                                       dancing

                                                         among millions more

                                                                               in a shaft of light

that falls through a window of your home            the sunbeam Siva



3.124

solitary one


you

imbue immense earth with five qualities:

smell   taste   tactility   shape   rotations’ sound Omkara                    


permeate water’s four:

smell   taste   touch   sound                 

                                 
fire’s three:

touch   sound   smell                                                                                        


air’s elated two:

touch    sound                                                                                                  


you are the expanding charge

of space



rhapsodies      cinder            before reaching you

life’s oceans proliferate       because of you

even gods in deepest dream     can’t reach you

yet this aimless cur –   me --  you consecrate

lauds    lord     lauds              atomize



4.15-25



sperm-seed breaks
egg into life


the invisible throbs
vaguely visible


struggle
to survive uterine heat


eyes form
to remove darkness


organs pulse
their shapes


hear
the mother’s heartbeat


filtered sounds
from the world beyond


struggle
to survive the womb’s squeeze


struggle   push
break free from home


baby rests
in mother’s bed


(each one’s a seed almost invisible)
our bed’s a roaring ocean of tears --

struggle

                for grace

                                 break free





2.37 -42




ancient changelessness                 who creates change

invisible towering one                   seed of everything

outstripping wonder’s stretch      yet encoding every atom

limitless

before

language arose           beyond

the silence of it uttermost ends         beyond

knowledge’s reach            beyond

imagination            beyond

timelessness              but this too



yet snares himself in the bhakta’s net

 

 

Translator’s Note: Written by revered 9th century mystic, Manikkavacakar ‘whose words are rubies’, these poems are still sung, and considered equal to the Vedas by Tamil Shaivas.   A bhakti poet, Manikkavacakar mainly sang in the Chidambaram temple, where Siva is said to be manifest as akasha, etheric space, the fifth element in Hindu cosmology. The Chidambaram rahasyais an empty cave-like room that devotees peer into before viewing the idol in the main sanctum. Perhaps this accounts for the spaces between phrases in my translations and its floatingness, where each word is a spinning world, spinning in wonder, spinning into smoke. Mystics thought words evaporate before they reach Siva.

First published in Reliquiae Journal, May 2020. Republished with permission from the translator.