Kalidasa

This is a translation of three of Kālidāsa’s works. Kālidāsa is regarded as the greatest poet and playwright in Sanskrit literature. Three of his works translated here are Ṛtusaṃhāram, Meghadūtam and Abhijñānaśākuntalam. None of his works have come to us in their original form. Rather what we have are a number of recensions commentaries of his works. This happens commonly in Sanskrit literature. The translator here apparently used the Bengal recensions.
Sanskrit is a highly inflected language and has a free word order, so a translation into English is very difficult. So the translator here frequently uses inversions to be faithful to the style and not just the meaning.

Ṛtusaṃhāram is a work of lyric poetry that describes the experiences of lovers to the change in seasons. Here he juxtaposes the beauty in nature with the beauty of a woman. This gives the poem a strong blend of sensuality and eroticism.

Like this verse set in the rains,

Women adorn their beautiful breasts with nets of pearls,
And drape pale delicate silks round their shapely curving hips;
the fine line of down above the navel rises up
to meet the cool tingling touch of fresh raindrops;
how charming are the folds that furrow their waists!

Followed by autumn,

Prettily girdled by glittering minnows darting about,
Garlanded by rows of white birds on the margins,
With broad curving flanks of sandy banks,
Rivers glide softly like young women rapt in love.

And Frost,

Seeming sensible of the sensuous beauty
of women’s breasts, sad to see them pressed so hard,
the frosty season cries out at dawn, letting fall
dew drops that cling to the tips of blades of grass.

Meghadūtam is also a lyric poem that deals with the theme of separation of lovers and longing. This takes the form of a yaksha banished from his home, asking a cloud to take a message to his wife on mount Alaka. This poem is rich in imagery. This is probably the most famous of his works that spawned a whole new genre of messenger poems.

In the Śyāma-vines I see your body,
Your glance in the gazelle’s startled eye,
The cool radiance of your face in the moon,
Your tresses in the peacock’s luxuriant train,
Your eyebrow’s graceful curve in the stream’s small waves;
But alas! O cruel one, I see not
Your whole likeness anywhere in any one thing.

Abhijñānaśākuntalam is a play written in seven acts and also deals with the theme of separation and longing and ultimate union. This is based on the story of Dushyanta and Sakuntala and has elements of fantastic blended in.

A considerable amount of space here has been dedicated to the historiography of Kālidāsa. Dating Kālidāsa is very difficult as the writer hardly spoke about himself in his works and Indians probably never had the same view of history as in the west. The translator here prefers to place him in 1st century BCE in the court of Vikramaditya of Ujjain. But the most commonly accepted date is around 4th and 5th centuries CE during the reign of Chandragupta II who also adopted the title Vikramaditya and had his capital as Ujjain.
The translator also provided a very long and comprehensive introduction and an appendix explaining the various myths, to help a western reader better understand the metaphors and connotations.

A great translation. I enjoyed reading it.… (mer)

The forthright ardour of a smitten king. Cautious allure making a tripping retreat. Blood boiling, happy enough to shout, more alive than killing demons with Indra. Just for a moment, the sage-raised girl become the soul of mischief, looking back for a second because under your apprehensions you know he's the one. He smells just. Her hair is so. It's really really really gonna happen, of course, because these heroes are charming in a world-is-new way, all clean white teeth, and everything is promised them. When the sage Durvasas comes along to throw a curse into the mix, there's no knife to anyone's guts, no Mantuan crypt--he just wiggles his eyebrows (clean as all the rest, just an irascible old man chasing butterflies) and gives everybody an excuse to fret and gossip and explore the nature of love and duty in irrepressible prose-verse (oh, to read Sanskrit!).

And remember, this is a story about true, romantic love in a world where the king already has two wives and has to leave all the time to fight demons, where he never sees his kid until he's four years old and then the kid's all "you're not my dada!" (The kid is also the personification of India. Indra's charioteer makes fun of Dusyanta for being overawed by the sky god's sweet ride. The comic, the smiling Bollywood or sitcomic even, sits so comfortably within and around the epic here). This is a love story that, with all its ambiguities and little fears teasened out by circumstances only so they can be swept away by passion and happily-ever-after, a post-fallow fruition like all the real stories--this is a love story that can speak to us now, not as a part of our archetypal monogamous-nuclear-family-style romantic heritage (monogamonucleosis?) but against the odds as reflecting the real circumstances of our lives.

I've already alluded to Shakespeare twice. Shit. This play is fuller of sap and mood swings than Romeo and Juliet. It's a lusher, more magnificent cosmic verdation than The Winter's Tale, which I expected this book to recall for me. I didn't expect to think of Much Ado About Nothing--but Sakuntala's fuller of that fascinating mix of the placid and fearsome, the joy of the young and divine that can't quite banish the troubling social and gender dynamics burbling underneath. I can do better than just comparing this to Shakespeare. But I'll have another chance. New seasons will come in their multiplicity, and I'll visit Sakuntala's bower again.… (mer)