Both humour and sexual innuendos are explicit in Toussaint’s ‘original’ version, where the reader cannot fail to appreciate the mot d’esprit that closes the poem: “Mais attendez, cependant! Je crois bien que je vais mourir…” (“But wait, though! I actually think I’m going to die…”). The protagonist’s imminent death – “la mort délicieuse” (“the delightful death”) mentioned in the very title of the stanza, plausibly an allusion to ‘la petite mort’, or orgasm – is not directly mentioned in Powys Mathers’ translation. Here, the protagonist suddenly seems to change her mind as to where the “Washers of the Dead” should go (“… next door!… No… wait”). The more explicitly allusive overtones of the French translation were turned into subtle and slightly enigmatic hints in the English version.

Although both Toussaint and Powys Mathers participated in the project of creating Sapphic atmospheres within Sanskrit erotic poetry, the two translators had distinct approaches to this project. Toussaint’s erotic Orient is pervaded by palpable sexual tensions and titillating images. On the contrary, Powys Mathers defused the eroticism of his French source, thus translating and re-imagining a Sanskritic literary landscape which was as intensively suggestive as it was often mystifying – a veritable liminal space.

For not only is Powys Mathers’ rendering less explicit, it is also less specific with respect to its Oriental setting; in fact, this ‘exotic vagueness’ characterizes most if not all of Powys Mathers’ (second-hand or fake) translations of ‘Eastern’ literary works. The blurred Oriental backdrop of Powys Mathers’ poems must have seemed particularly appealing to the elite of connoisseurs who could afford the expensive luxury editions of Eastern Love – a non-erudite, yet high-end readership in search of benign and familiar otherness.

Indian-sounding proper names, which abound in Toussaint’s translations, were usually left out by Powys Mathers: thus, “Nirâmi” appears only in the French version, and so does “Çivâ” (Shiva), which was ‘domesticated’ into a more generic “God” in Powys Mathers’ poem. Only the proper name “Harivansa” remains as an indicator of the non-Western atmosphere of the English stanza. In contrast with Toussaint’s overt fascination with the exotic for the exotic’s sake, Powys Mathers’ Orient tends to be more indefinite and rarefied – and thus more easily assimilated to a literary landscape that is as foreign as it is paradoxically familiar.

What renders Toussaint’s and Powys Mathers’ forgeries more interesting than mere curios is the tacit fusion of ‘Western’ and ‘Oriental’ poetic traditions that informs them. As they infused their French and English faux Sanskrit stanzas with an exquisitely modern and Western erotic aesthetic (based on the reception of the classical poet Sappho), they rewrote the history of Sanskrit erotic poetry in relation to that of its classical Greek counterpart. For the sake of modern audiences in search of familiar otherness, Toussaint and Powys Mathers brought the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ classics closer: so close that Amaru could be reimagined as a follower and imitator of the classical poet Sappho – thus a classical author himself, whose work was worthy of imitation, transcreation and pseudo-translation. For Powys Mathers and Toussaint, the borders between the Sanskritic and the classical Greek erotic traditions were only there to be crossed. Yet the crossing was done somewhat surreptitiously, through an act of (pleasurable) literary deceit.