Lal Ded

[I was passionate]
BY LAL DED
TRANSLATED BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.

But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.

On Lalla
by KAZIM ALI
Lalla, or Lal Ded, was a Kashmiri mystic who lived in the 14th century at the height of Kashmiri Shaivism. Though she was a Hindu and a yogi, even Shah Hamdan, the great Sufi teacher who was her contemporary, recognized her as a saint. The best translations are those of Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote, who worked directly from the old Kashmiri, and who incorporates into his translations the inconsistencies of style and diction and textual variations that stem from the nature of these ecstatic utterances passed down by word-of-mouth over the course of centuries before being assembled into a written canon.