Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works | Page 6

in Europe as he
deserves, he is the only Sanskrit poet who can properly be said to have
been appreciated at all. Here he must struggle with the truly Himalayan
barrier of language. Since there will never be many Europeans, even
among the cultivated, who will find it possible to study the intricate
Sanskrit language, there remains only one means of presentation. None
knows the cruel inadequacy of poetical translation like the translator.
He understands better than others can, the significance of the position
which Kalidasa has won in Europe. When Sir William Jones first
translated the Shakuntala in 1789, his work was enthusiastically
received in Europe, and most warmly, as was fitting, by the greatest
living poet of Europe. Since that day, as is testified by new translations
and by reprints of the old, there have been many thousands who have
read at least one of Kalidasa's works; other thousands have seen it on
the stage in Europe and America.
How explain a reputation that maintains itself indefinitely and that
conquers a new continent after a lapse of thirteen hundred years? None
can explain it, yet certain contributory causes can be named.
No other poet in any land has sung of happy love between man and
woman as Kalidasa sang. Every one of his works is a love-poem,
however much more it may be. Yet the theme is so infinitely varied that
the reader never wearies. If one were to doubt from a study of
European literature, comparing the ancient classics with modern works,
whether romantic love be the expression of a natural instinct, be not
rather a morbid survival of decaying chivalry, he has only to turn to
India's independently growing literature to find the question settled.
Kalidasa's love-poetry rings as true in our ears as it did in his
countrymen's ears fifteen hundred years ago.
It is of love eventually happy, though often struggling for a time
against external obstacles, that Kalidasa writes. There is nowhere in his
works a trace of that not quite healthy feeling that sometimes assumes
the name "modern love." If it were not so, his poetry could hardly have
survived; for happy love, blessed with children, is surely the more

fundamental thing. In his drama Urvashi he is ready to change and
greatly injure a tragic story, given him by long tradition, in order that a
loving pair may not be permanently separated. One apparent exception
there is--the story of Rama and Sita in _The Dynasty of Raghu_. In this
case it must be remembered that Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, and
the story of a mighty god incarnate is not to be lightly tampered with.
It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of Kalidasa's subject that his
women appeal more strongly to a modern reader than his men. The man
is the more variable phenomenon, and though manly virtues are the
same in all countries and centuries, the emphasis has been variously
laid. But the true woman seems timeless, universal. I know of no poet,
unless it be Shakespeare, who has given the world a group of heroines
so individual yet so universal; heroines as true, as tender, as brave as
are Indumati, Sita, Parvati, the Yaksha's bride, and Shakuntala.
Kalidasa could not understand women without understanding children.
It would be difficult to find anywhere lovelier pictures of childhood
than those in which our poet presents the little Bharata, Ayus, Raghu,
Kumara. It is a fact worth noticing that Kalidasa's children are all boys.
Beautiful as his women are, he never does more than glance at a little
girl.
Another pervading note of Kalidasa's writing is his love of external
nature. No doubt it is easier for a Hindu, with his almost instinctive
belief in reincarnation, to feel that all life, from plant to god, is truly
one; yet none, even among the Hindus, has expressed this feeling with
such convincing beauty as has Kalidasa. It is hardly true to say that he
personifies rivers and mountains and trees; to him they have a
conscious individuality as truly and as certainly as animals or men or
gods. Fully to appreciate Kalidasa's poetry one must have spent some
weeks at least among wild mountains and forests untouched by man;
there the conviction grows that trees and flowers are indeed individuals,
fully conscious of a personal life and happy in that life. The return to
urban surroundings makes the vision fade; yet the memory remains,
like a great love or a glimpse of mystic insight, as an intuitive
conviction of a higher truth.

Kalidasa's knowledge of nature is not only sympathetic, it is also
minutely accurate. Not only are the snows and windy music of the
Himalayas, the mighty current of the sacred Ganges, his possession; his
too are smaller streams and trees and every