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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

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 and Best Translated Book Award

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 Sur's Ocean is a lovingly crafted and meticulously attentive translation of the superbly beautiful corpus of devotional love poetry associated with the sixteenth-century north Indian poet Surdas. Hawley has given us a Surdas who is both perennial and speaks persuasively to the present. -- Ranjit Hoskote, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Translation and author of <i>Jonahwhale</i>

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John Stratton Hawley is an award-winning translator and scholar of religious studies. He has written extensively on the bhakti movement and is the Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University.

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