Translator Andrew Schelling

Born in 1953, raised in the townships west of Boston, Andrew Schelling first encountered India’s art in the Coomaraswamy collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Moving west he spent the 1970s and 1980s in Northern California: studied Sanskrit, learned his craft among urban poets of the Bay Area, and explored mountain landscapes. In 1990 he moved to Colorado to teach poetry and Sanskrit at The Naropa Institute (now University).

Among his twenty-some books are a recent poetry title, Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers, and a new edition of Songs of Mirabai. Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture, published in 2017, is an ideogram of linguistics, folklore, old time storytelling, and cattle rustling. The book has become something of an underground classic, both a history and a field guide to bioregional thought. His eight or ten books from India’s peerless love poetry are an effort to keep Thoreau’s “crackle of wild mustard” alive in North American ears. Schelling lives in the middle mountains of Colorado between the High Plains and the Indian Peaks.