The Time Before Death by Kabir, Translated by Robert Bly

I don't believe Robert Bly has taken great poetic license with his translation of this poem by Kabir.  I find his wording of the last line, the punch line, to be very rhythmically satisfying.

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
     before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
     City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next
     life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
     Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
     it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
     does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.




This translation is available in The Kabir Book

The Time Before Death by Kabir, Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

As a youth, I read the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five.  In this novel, there was a race of beings called Tralfamadorians, who perceived time in the same way as we perceived space.  When they looked at a human being, they saw a many-legged creature with a baby's legs at one end, and an old man's lets at the other end.  I mention this because this is the first part of another two-post exercise, giving a Kabir poem in the 1915 Rabindranath Tagore translation, and then giving it in the 1993 Robert Bly translation.  I consider such an exercise to be a Tralfamadorian presentation of the poem.

O FRIEND!  hope for Him whilst you live, know whilst you live, understand whilst you live: for in live deliverance abides.

If your bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death?

It is but an empty dream, that the soul shall have union with Him, because it has passed from the body:

If He is found now, He is found then,

If not, we do but go to dwell in the City of Death.

If you have union now, you shall have it hereafter.

Bathe in the truth, know the true Guru, have faith in the true Name!

Kabir says: "It is the Spirit of the quest which helps; I am the slave of this Spirit of the quest."

Again, this poem can be found in the book Songs of Kabir, free from Amazon on Kindle.