Some people praise me, some talk trash. I just sing about god.
My road is the road where the saints walk, and I’m taking it.
—Mirabai
The sixteenth-century poet and saint Mirabai has long been an iconic figure in India. Tagore famously named his daughter after her and praised her as a figure of female liberation; Gandhi referenced her in speeches on nonviolence and anti-colonialism—her songs were sung in his ashrams. Today her poems continue to be sung by Bollywood singers, folk musicians, and ordinary people. In Blue Like My Beloved, the poet-translator and scholar Chloe Martinez—who spent decades studying, absorbing, and translating Mirabai’s work—has compiled a selection of Mirabai’s poetry that includes her greatest hits alongside lesser-known poems. The collection spans the range of Mirabai’s moods and themes in a vibrant poetry of intimacy and visionary perception that burns with a lasting brilliance akin to that of Rumi or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Mira sang because she could not help singing. Her songs well forth straight from the heart.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Mirabai’s poems are the most quoted and her life story the best known of all the North Indian saints.
— Wendy Doniger, The Hindus
Mira becomes the voice of the oppressed people just as the bhaktas [devotees] become Mira through their singing.
— Parita Mukta, author of Shards of Memory
‘Be all in, body and soul,’ Mira advises, clear-sighted in her fidelity to Krishna. Blue Like My Beloved captures the world of Mirabai with such poignancy and attentiveness that we, as readers, fall tenderly into its lyricism, its unabashed ferocity, and the delight of watching Mira ‘serve her beloved Mountain Lifter.’ Yet she is herself a lifter of mountains—of Hari, of the deepest wisdom that frees her to teach us, who struggle to love, how to dwell inwardly with the fervor of sentient ardor. Martinez’s translation is illuminating in the way it both preserves and modernizes the power of Mira’s devotional lyrics to their deepest radiance. What a gift this translation is!
— Prageeta Sharma
Rarely does a book of translations bring to life a unique voice from a distant time and place. The task requires scholarship of the highest order, decades of engagement with the text, and unusual poetic skill. Chloe Martinez, with all of these in hand, gives us the poems of Mirabai, the famous sixteenth century bhakti saint of India, who turned her back on royal life and aristocratic marriage to hit the road and devote herself entirely to the love and worship of Lord Krishna. A unique figure among the bhakti poets, Mira’s songs and poems embody her single-minded devotion to her divine beloved Krishna—Lifter of Mountains. Martinez’s deft translation makes Mira’s blend of spiritual diction and street talk, ecstasy and desperation, snark and grief, land here in English with beauty and bite.
