Bhartrihari

Bhartrihari is the traditional name of a Sanskrit poet-grammarian said to have been a king of Ujjain who renounced the throne for a hermit's life; little about him is securely known, and the dating is uncertain, usually placed somewhere between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. His name is attached to the Shatakatraya, three centuries of epigrams on love, worldly wisdom and renunciation.

The poems given here are from Paul Elmer More's A Century of Indian Epigrams (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), described on its title page as 'chiefly from the Sanskrit of Bhartrihari'. It is a free verse adaptation, not a literal translation: More selected from the traditional collection and, as he says in his introduction, added stanzas from other sources. The epigrams keep More's numbering.