Kabir, the famous 15th century Hindi poet has written over 5000 poems mainly couplets. Many popular literary personalities like Rabindranath Tagore, Ezra Pound, charlotte Vaudeville, Robert Bly and Linda Hess have translated his poems into various languages over the years. A recent addition to these translations is the works of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra published by Hachette India under the title ‘Songs of Kabir’.
The Kabir collection consists of families of text with three distinct traditions viz. the Rajasthani / western tradition, Bijak / eastern tradition and the Punjabi tradition based on the Adi Granth the holy book of the Sikhs. A no. of texts has been attributed to Kabir and it is not clear which ones have actually been written by him.