Songs from the Garden of Kama

Laurence Hope, Songs from the Garden of Kama, London: William Heinemann, 1909

vi, pp 113 tipped-in plates, with several landscape photographs illustrated from photographs by Mrs Eardley Wilmot ; hardcover, with gilt cover motif on the front board and titles to spine
10.2 x 7.8 x 0.7 in (26 x 20 x 2 cm)

The Garden of Kama is a book of lyric poetry published in 1909 and written by Adela Florence Nicolson under the pseudonym Laurence Hope. It was illustrated by Byam Shaw. The poems in the book were falsely given as translations of Indian poets by a man, as she thought the book received much more attention that they would likely have done if she had published them under her own name. Also false was the assertion that the poems in the book were products of Indian culture - they were original works; none was actually a translation.

The poetry in this volume was characteristic of all of Nicolson's poems, making liberal use of the imagery and symbols from the poets of the North-West Frontier of India and the Sufi poets of Persia. The poems are typically about unrequited love and loss.

The book was initially praised upon its released by many prominent poets, Thomas Hardy among them, although some reviewers were uncertain about the authenticity of the translations. James Darmesteter, Professor of Persian at the prestigious College de France, Paris, embarrassingly documented the images used by the supposed frontier bards as being symbols of the latent Sufi nature of their songs. they were later exposed as being original works from the West, although partly inspired by the Sufi.

The book was later published in America in 1927 as India's Love Lyrics.

The life and poetry of Adela Nicolson have inspired a wide range of adaptations, beginning with British composer Amy Woodforde-Finden's musical settings of four of the lyrics from The Garden of Kama to music. The most popular of these was Kashmiri Song.

Her father was employed in the British army at Lahore, and thus she was brought up by her relatives back in England. She left for India in 1881 to join her father. Her father was editor of the Lahore arm of The Civil and Military Gazette, and it was he who in all probability gave Rudyard Kipling (a contemporary of his daughter) his first employment as a journalist. (Source: Wikipedia)

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