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.