Il Canto del ladro d’amore

This chapter examines the «Fifty Verses of the Thief» (Caurapañcāśikā), an eleventh–twelfth century poem by the Kashmiri poet Bilhaṇa, first translated into Italian by Giuseppe De Lorenzo in 1925. Composed of fifty stanzas, it recalls the poet’s secret love with a princess, memories that become both a source of joy and the reason for his death sentence. The text is marked by strong sensuality, which differs from Western moralistic interpretations: in India, it is embedded in the broader notion of Kāma, encompassing not only sexuality but also beauty, pleasure, and ritualized experience. The poem turns love into a sacred rite: the lovers’ chamber becomes a mythical space beyond time, where gestures repeat archetypal actions. Bilhaṇa’s sculptural descriptions of the female body reflect the Indian aesthetic tradition, while the intertwining of love and death is treated not tragically, but as part of life’s natural cycle. The Song of the Love-Thief thus illustrates a dual conception—love/pain, life/death—offering a significant contribution to the comparative study of the morphologies of love in world literature.