Scroll’s 2018 feature gathers five poems by Lal Ded in English translations by Andrew Schelling. Its framing of her poetry through erotic and spiritual longing offers a way into the selection—not a claim that every poem expresses erotic desire in the same way, or a complete account of Lal Ded’s work.
Who was Lal Ded?
Lal Ded, also known as Lalleshwari or simply Lal, was a Kashmiri mystic of the fourteenth century. Her verses are associated with Shaiva ideas of liberation, and she is revered among both Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir. Details of her life come partly through later recollection and tradition, so familiar stories about her marriage, family, or public life should be read as tradition rather than settled biography.
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I, Lalla: The Poems Of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics) | $18.45 | Buy on Amazon |
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Lalla Awakens: Nondual Poetry of Lal Ded | $5.95 | Buy on Amazon |
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Lal Ded - The Mystic Poet of Kashmir | $11.99 | Buy on Amazon |
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Lal Ded | $11.51 | Buy on Amazon |
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The Poems of Lal Ded: Fourteenth Century Poet | $19.99 | Buy on Amazon |
What is a vakh?
Lal Ded’s short poems are commonly called vakhs. The word can be rendered in English as a verse, saying, or verse-teaching. One scholarly account describes the form as four lines, each with four stresses. That compact shape can make a vakh feel at once like a poem and a concentrated spiritual utterance.
Her poetry is often read through images of loss, shame, and joy: experiences that can carry spiritual meaning while also opening onto questions of gender and self-transformation. In Scroll’s selected poems, the pairing of erotic and spiritual longing is an interpretive lens. It invites readers to notice where bodily desire, intimacy, or yearning touches the search for spiritual realization, without treating all five poems as variations on one theme.
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Five poems in Andrew Schelling’s translations
The Scroll feature, published on February 6, 2018, presents five poems in translations by Andrew Schelling. The wording and lineation in this selection belong to Schelling’s renderings; other translators may make different choices about imagery, rhythm, and emphasis. Read the poems as a particular English encounter with a transmitted body of work, not as interchangeable versions of a fixed English text.
The feature’s title foregrounds erotic and spiritual longing, but the poems’ force lies in the variety of ways a short utterance can hold experience and spiritual insight together. That frame is useful as an invitation to read closely, not as a definitive description of every vakh attributed to Lal Ded.
Why translations and attribution need care
Lal Ded’s poems passed through a complex history of transmission. Counts of vakhs circulating under her name vary among educational and editorial sources, and no single total should be treated as the settled number of securely authored poems. A poem’s wording, arrangement, and attribution may depend on the version or edition being consulted.
When comparing English versions, keep the translator and edition in view. A rendering may preserve the compactness of the vakh, or give greater weight to the movement and idiom of contemporary English poetry. Those differences are interpretive choices, not proof that one English version is the definitive text.
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A useful next collection is I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd, translated from Kashmiri by Ranjit Hoskote and published as a 2011 Penguin Classics edition. It includes an introduction and notes, offering more context alongside a broader selection of poems. The collection is distinct from Schelling’s translations in the Scroll feature; readers comparing them should treat each as its own translation and editorial presentation.
For a more focused study of textual questions, the resource list also identifies Jawahar Lal Bhat’s Lal Ded Revisited, a scholarly study noted for its attention to textual analysis and transmission.
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