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On Translating Kalidasa
SINCE the different tribes of the human Babel began to study each other’s literature, the problem of poetical translation has constantly defied the earnest experimenter. There have been brilliant versions, successful falsifications, honest renderings, but some few lyrics apart, a successful translation there has not been. Yet it cannot be that a form of effort so earnestly and persistently pursued and so necessary to the perfection of culture and advance of civilisation is the vain pursuit of a chimera. Nothing which mankind earnestly attempts is impossible, not even the conversion of copper into gold or the discovery of the elixir of life or the power of aerial motion, but as long as experiment proceeds on mistaken lines, based on a mistaken conception of the very elements of the problem, it must fail. Man may go on fashioning wings for himself for ever but they will never lift him into the empyrean: the essence of the problem is to conquer the attraction of the earth which cannot be done by any material means. Poetical translation was long dominated by the superstition that the visible word is the chief factor in language and the unit which must be seized on as a basis in rendering; the result is seen in so-called translations which reproduce the sense of the original faultlessly and yet put us into an atmosphere which we at once recognise to be quite alien to the atmosphere of the original; we say then that the rendering is a faithful one or a, success of esteem or a makeshift or a caput mortuum according to the nature of our predilections and the measure of our urbanity. The nineteenth century has been the first to recognise generally that there is a spirit behind the word and dominating the word which eludes the "faithful" translator and that it is more important to get at the spirit of a poet than his exact sense. But after its manner it has contented itself with the generalisation and not attempted to discover the lines on which the generalisation must be crystallised in practice, its extent and its limitations. Every translator has been a law to himself; Page-84 and the result is anarchic confusion. As the sole tangible benefit there has been discovered a new art not yet perfected of translation into prose poetry. Such translation has many advantages; it allows the translator to avail himself of manifold delicacies of rhythm without undergoing the labour of verse formation and to compromise with the orthodox superstition by rendering the word unit yet with some show of preserving the original flavour. But even in the best of these translations it is little more than a beautiful show. Poetry can only be translated by poetry and verse forms by verse forms. It remains to approach the task of translation in a less haphazard spirit, to realise first our essential aim, to define exactly what elements in poetry demand rendering, how far and by what law of equivalent values each may be rendered and if all cannot be reproduced, which of them may in each particular case be sacrificed without injuring the essential worth of the translation. Most of the translations of Kalidasa here offered to the public (see The Hero and the Nymph (Vikramorvasie). Centenary Library Vol. 7, p. 911.) have been written after the translator had arrived at such a definite account with himself and in conscientious conformity to its results. Others done while he yet saw his goal no more than dimly and was blindly working his way to the final solution, may not be so satisfactory. I do not pretend that I have myself arrived at the right method, but I am certain that reasoned and thoughtful attempts of this sort can alone lead to it. Now that nations are turning away from the study of the great classical languages to physical and practical science and resorting even to modern languages, if for literature at all then for contemporary literature, it is imperative that the ennobling influences spiritual, romantic and imaginative of the old tongues should be popularised in modern speech; otherwise the modern world vain of its fancied superiority and limiting itself more and more to its own type of ideas with no opportunity of saving immersions in the past and re-creative destructions of the present will soon petrify and perish in the mould of a rigid realism and materialism. Among their influences the beauty and power of their secular and religious poetry is perhaps the most potent and formative. Page-85
(The
following passage found in the MS. of On Translating Kalidasa is given
here as it stands. It is not certain where it would have been placed if the
author had revised the essay.)
The mere quantities are but the most mechanical and outward part of metre. A
fanciful mind might draw a parallel between the elements of man and the elements
of metre. Just as in man there is the outward food plasm and within it the vital
or sensational man conditioned by and conditioning the food plasm and within the
vital man the emotional or impressional man similarly related and again within
that the intellectual man governing the others arid again within that the
delight of the spirit in its reasoning existence and within that delight like
the moon within its halo the Spirit who is Lord of all these, the sitter in the
chariot and the master of its driving, so in metre there is the quantitative or
accentual arrangement which is its body and within that body conditioning and
conditioned by it the arrangement of pauses and sounds, such as assonance,
alliteration, composition of related and varying letters, and again within it
conditioning and conditioned by this sensational element and through it the
mechanical element is the pure emotional movement of the verse and again within
these understanding and guiding all three, bringing the element of restraint,
management, subordination to a superior law of harmony, is the intellectual
element, the driver of the chariot of sound; within this again is the poetic
delight in the creation of harmonious sound, the august and disinterested
pleasure of the really great poet which has nothing in it of frenzy or rather
has the exultation and increased strength of frenzy without its loss of
self-control; and within this even is the spirit, that unanalysable thing behind
metre, style and diction which makes us feel, "This is Homer, this is
Shakespeare, this is Dante." . Page-86 master of great harmonies; for this intellect is necessary, a great mind seizing, manipulating and moulding all these by some higher law of harmony, the law of its own spirit. But such management is not possible without the august poetical delight of which I have spoken, and that again is but the outflow of the mighty spirit within, its sense of life and power and its pleasure in the use of that power with no ulterior motive beyond its own delight.
The choice of metre is the first and most pregnant question that meets a translator. With the growth of Alexandrianism and the diffusion of undigested learning, more and more frequent attempts are being made to reproduce in poetical versions the formal metre of the original. Such attempts rest on a fundamental misconception of the bases of poetry. In poetry as in all other phenomena it is spirit that is at work and form is merely the outward expression and instrument of the spirit. So far is this true that form itself only exists as a manifestation of spirit and has no independent being. But just as the body of a man is also soul, has in each of its cells a portion of spirit, so it is with the mechanical form of a verse. The importance of metre arises from the fact that different arrangements of sound have different spiritual and emotional values, that is to say, tend to produce by virtue of the fixed succession of sounds a fixed spiritual atmosphere and a given type of emotional exaltation, and the mere creative power of sound though a material thing is yet near to spirit, is very great on the material but ascending in force through the moral and intellectual, it culminates on the emotional plane. It is a factor of the first importance in music and poetry. In these different arrangements of syllabic sound metre forms the most important element, at least the most tangible. When we speak of the Homeric hexameter we are speaking of a certain spiritual force working through emotion into the material shape of a fixed mould of rhythmical sound which obeys both in its limiting sameness and in its variations the law of the spirit within. Every poet who has sounded his own consciousness must be aware that management of metre is the gate of his inspiration and Page-87 the
law of his success. There is a double process, his state of mind and spirit
suggesting its own syllabic measure, and the metre again confirming, prolonging
and re-creating the original state of mind and spirit. Inspiration itself seems
hardly so much a matter of ideas or feelings, as of rhythm. Even when the ideas
or the feelings are active, they will not usually run into the right form, the
words will not take their right places, the syllables will not fall into a
natural harmony. But if one has or succeeds in awaking the right metrical mood,
if the metrical form instead of being deliberately created, creates itself or becomes,
a magical felicity of thought, diction and harmony attends it and seems even
to be created by it. When the metre comes right, everything comes right. Ideas
and words come rapidly and almost as rapidly take their places, as in a
well-ordered assembly where everyone knows his seat. When the metre has to be
created with effort, everything else has to be done with effort, and the result
has to be worked on over and over again before it satisfies. Page-88 the hexameter ?At first it would seem so. But the issue here is complicated by the hard fact that some arrangement of quantities or of accents has very seldom the same spiritual and emotional value in two different languages. The hexameter, however skillfully managed in English , has not same value as the Homeric, the English Alexandrine does not render the French; the terza rima in Latinised Saxon sounds entirely different from the noble movement of the Divina Commedia, the stiff German blank verse of Goethe and Schiller is not the golden Shakespearean harmony. It is not only that there are mechanical differences, a strongly accentuated language hopelessly varying form those which distribute accent evenly, or a language hopelessly varying from those which distribute accent evenly, or a language of ultimate accent like French from one of penultimate accent like Italian or initial accent like English , or one which courts elision from one which shuns it, a million grammatical and syllabic details besides fundamental differences of sound –notation; beyond and beneath these outward differences is the essential soul of the language from which they arise, and which in its turn depends mainly upon the ethnological type always different in different countries because the mixture of different root races in two types even when they seem nearly related is never the same. The Swedish type for instance which is largely the same as the Norweigian is yet largely different, while the Dnaish generally classed in the same Scandinavian group differs radically from both. This is that curse of Babel, after all quite as much a blessing as a curse, which weighs upon no one so heavily as on the conscientious translator of poetry; for the purpose translator, being more concerned to render precise the idea than emotional effects and the subtle spiritual aura of poetry, treads an immeasurably smoother and more straightforward path. For some metres at least it seems impossible to find adequate equivalents in other languages. Why has there never been a real rendering of Homer in English ? It is not the whole truth to say that no modern can put himself back imaginatively into the half- savage Homeric period; a mind with a sufficient [fund] of primitive sympathies and sufficient power of imaginative self-control to subdue for a time the modern in him may conceivably be found. But the main, the insurperable obstacle is that no one has ever found or been able to create an Page-89 English metre with the same spiritual and emotional equivalent as Homer’s marvellous hexameters.
That transmeterisation is a false method, is therefore clear. The
translator’s only resource is to steep himself in the original, quelling that in
him which conflicts with its spirit, and abide on the watch for the proper
metrical mood in himself. Sometimes the right metre will come to him, sometimes
it will not. In the latter case effort in this direction will not have been
entirely wasted; for spirit, when one gives it a chance, is always stronger than
matter and he will be able to impose
something of the desired spiritual atmosphere even upon an unsuitable metrical
form. But if he seizes on the right metre, he has every chance, supposing him
poetically empowered, of creating a translation
which shall not only be classical, but shall be the translation.
Wilful choice of metre is always fatal. William Morris’ Homeric translation
failed hopelessly, partly because of his affected "Anglosaxon"
diction, but still more because he chose to apply a metre good enough possibly
for the Volsungsaga to the rendering of a far more mighty and complex spirit. On
the other hand Fitzgerald might have produced a very beautiful version in
English had he chosen
for his Rubaiyat some ordinary English metre, but his unique success was his
reward for discovering the true equivalent of the quatrain in English. One need
only imagine to oneself the difference if Fitzgerald had chosen the ordinary
English qua- train instead of the rhyme system of his original; his Rubaiyat
will in spite of the serious defects of unfaithfulness remain the final version
of Omar in English, not to be superseded by more faithful renderings, excluding
therefore the contingency of a superior poetical genius employing the same metre
for a fuller and closer translation. Page-90 feeling and harmonious flow of Kalidasa’s prose to use blank verse throughout varying its pitch according as the original form is metrical or prose and the emotion or imagery more or less exalted. In epic work the licence of metrical variation is not quite so great, yet there are several metres considered apt to epic narrative, and Kalidasa varies them without scruple in different cantos, sometimes even in the same canto. If blank verse be, as I believe it is, a fair equivalent for the anustubh, the ordinary epic metre, how shall one find others which shall correspond as well to the "thunderbolt" Sloka (indravajra) or the "lesser thunderbolt" Sloka, (upendravajra), the "gambolling-of-the-tiger" Sloka (śārdūlavikridita) and all those other wonderful and grandiose rhythmic structures with fascinating names of which Kalidasa is so mighty a master? Nor would such variation be tolerated by English canons of taste. In the epic and drama the translator is driven to a compromise and therefore to that extent a failure; he may infuse good poems or plays reproducing the architecture and idea-sense of Kalidasa with something of his spirit, but it is a version and not a translation. It is only when he comes to the Cloud-Messenger that he is free of this difficulty, for the Cloud- Messenger is written throughout in a single and consistent stanza. This mandākrāntā or "gently, stepping" stanza is entirely quantitative and too complicated to be rendered into any corresponding accentual form. The arrangement of metrical divisions is as follows: spondee-long, dactyl, tribrach, two spondee-shorts, spondee; four lines of this build make up the stanza. Thus
samaskta/ bhistripu/ravija/yo giya/te/kinna/ribhih,/ nirhadi/te mura/ja iva/cet kanda/resu dhva/nih syat/ sangitar/tho nanu/pasupa/testatra/bhvi sa/magram./
Page-91 unvarying to represent the eternal swell and surge of Kalidasa’s stanza. Fortunately, by an inspiration and without deliberate choice, Kalidasa’s lines, as I began turning them, flowed into the form of triple rhyme and that necessarily suggested the terza rima. This metre, as I have treated it, seems to me to reproduce, with as much accuracy as the difference between the languages allows, the spiritual and emotional atmosphere of the Cloud Messenger. The terza rima in English lends itself naturally to the principle of variation in recurrence which imparts so singular a charm to this poem, recurrence in especial of certain words, images, assonances, harmonies, but recurrence always with a difference so as to keep one note sounding through the whole performance underneath its various harmony. In terza rima the triple rhyme immensely helps this effect, for it allows of the same common rhymes recurring but usually with a difference in one or more of their company. It is a common opinion that terza rima does not suit the English language and cannot therefore be naturalised, that it must always remain an exotic. This seems to me a fallacy.. Any metre capable of accentual representation in harmony with the accentual law of the English language, can be naturalised in English. If it has not yet been done, we must attribute it to some initial error of conception. Byron and Shelley failed because they wanted to create the same effect with this instrument as Dante had done; but terza rima in English can never have the same effect as in Italian. In the one it is a metre of woven harmonies suitable to noble and intellectual narrative; in the other it can only be a metre of woven melodies suitable to beautiful description or elegiac sweetness. To occasional magnificence or sublimities it lends itself admirably, but I should doubt whether it could even in the strongest hands sustain the burden of a long and noble epic of the soul and mind like the Divina Commedia. But it is not true that it cannot be made in English a perfectly natural, effective and musical form. It is certainly surprising that Shelley with his instinct for melody did not perceive the conditions of the problem. His lyric metres and within certain limitations his blank verse are always fine, so fine that if the matter and manner were equal to the melody, he would have been one of the Page-92 few great poets instead of one of the many who have just missed being great. But his Triumph of Life is a metrical failure. We feel that the poet is aiming at a metrical effect which he has not accomplished. The second question, but a far simpler one, is the use of rhyme. It may be objected that as in the Sanskrit there is no rhyme, the introduction of this element into the English version would disturb the closeness of the spiritual equivalent by the intrusion of a foreign ornament. But this is to argue from a quantitative to an accentual. language, which is always a mistake. There are certain effects easily created within the rich quantitative variety of ancient languages, of which an equivalent in English can only be found by the aid of rhyme. No competent critic would declare Tennyson’s absurd experiment in Boadicea an equivalent to the rushing, stumbling and leaping metre of the Attis with its singular and rare effects. A proper equivalent would only be found in some rhymed system and preferably I should fancy in some system of unusually related but intricate and closely recurring rhymes. Swinburne might have done it; for Swinburne’s work, though with few exceptions poor work as poetry, is a marvellous repertory of successful metrical experiments. I have already indicated the appropriateness of the triple rhyme system of terza rima to the Cloud-Messenger. English is certainly not a language of easy rhyming like the southern tongues of Europe; but given in the poet a copious command of words and a natural swing and felicity, caeta rather than curiosa, it is amply enough provided for any ordinary can upon its re- sources. There are, however, two critical superstitions which seriously interfere with the naturalness and ease rhymed poetry demands, the superstition of the perfect rhyme and the superstition of the original rhyme. It is no objection to a rhyme that it is imperfect. There is nothing occult or cryptic in rhyme, no divine law compelling us to assimilate two rhymed endings to the very letter such as the law of the Vedic chant by which a single letter mispronounced sterilises the Mantra. Rhyme is a convenience and an ornament intended to serve certain artistic purposes, to create certain sound-effects, and if the effect of a perfect rhyme is beautiful, melodious and satisfying, an imperfect rhyme Page-93 has sometimes its own … effect far more subtle, haunting and suggestive; by limiting the satisfaction of the ear, it sets a new chord vibrating in the soul. A poem with an excessive proportion of imperfect rhymes is unsatisfactory because it would not satisfy the natural human craving for regularity and order, but the slavish use of perfect rhyme only would be still more inartistic because it would not satisfy the natural human craving for liberty and variety. In this respect and in a hundred others the disabilities of the English language have been its blessings; the artistic labour and the opportunities of calling a subtler harmony out of discord have given its best poetical literature a force and power quite out of proportion to the natural abilities of the race. There are of course limits to every departure from rigidity but the degree of imperfection admissible in a rhyme is very great so long as it does not evolve harshness or vulgarism. Mrs. Browning’s rhymes are bad in this respect but why? Because "tyrants" and "silence" is no rhyme at all, while "candles" and "angels" involves a hideous vulgarism; and in less glaring instances the law of double rhymes generally requiring closer correspondence than single, is totally disregarded. But it is also no objection to a rhyme that it is "hackneyed". The right use of imperfect rhymes is not to be forbidden because of occasional abuse. A hackneyed thought, a hackneyed phrase there may be, but a hackneyed rhyme seems to me a contradiction in terms. Rhyme is, no part of the intellectual warp and woof of a poem, but a pure ornament, the only object of which is to assist the soul with beauty; it appeals to the soul not through the intellect or imagination but through the ear. Now the oldest and most often used rhymes are generally the most beautiful and we ought not to sacrifice that beauty merely out of an unreasoning impatience of what is old: common rhymes have a wonderful charm of their own and come to us laden with a thousand beautiful associations. The pursuit of mere originality can only lead us to such unpardonable extravagances as "’haunches stir" and "Manchester". Such rhymes any poet can multiply who chooses to prostitute his genius to the amusement of the gallery, or is sufficiently unpoetic to prefer the freedom of barbarous uncouthness to that self denial which is the secret of grace and beauty. On the other Page-94 hand if we pursue originality and beauty together, we end in preciosity or an artificial grace, and what are these but the spirit of Poetry lifting her wings to abandon that land or that literature for a long season or sometimes for ever? Unusual and peculiar rhymes demand to be sparingly used and always fur the definite object of setting in relief common rhymes rather than for the sake of their own strangeness. The question of metre and rhymes being satisfactorily settled there comes the crucial question of fidelity, on which every translator has to make his own choice at his own peril. On one side is the danger of sacrificing the spirit to the letter, on the other the charge of writing a paraphrase or a poem of one’s own under the cloak of translation. Here as elsewhere it seems to me that rigid rules are out of place. What we have to keep in mind is not any rigid law, but the object with which we are translating. If we merely want to render, to acquaint foreign peoples with the ideas and subject matter of the writer, as literal a rendering as idiom will allow will do our business. If we wish to give a poetical version, to clothe the general sense and spirit of the writer in our own words, paraphrase and unfaithfulness become permissible; the writer has not intended to translate, and it is idle to criticise him with reference to an ideal he never entertained. But the ideal of a translation is something different from either of these. The translation seeks first to place the mind of the reader in the same spiritual atmosphere as the original; he seeks next to produce in him the same emotions, the same kind of poetic delight and aesthetic gratification, and lastly he seeks to convey to him the thought and substance of the poet in such I words as will create, as far as may be, the same or a similar train of associations, the same pictures, or the same sensuous impressions. This is an ideal to which one can never do more than approximate, but the nearer one approximates to it, the better the translation. How it shall be done, depends upon the judgment, the sympathetic instinct of the poet, the extent to which he is imbued with the association of both languages and can render not merely word by word but shade by shade, not only signification by signification, but suggestion by suggestion. There is one initial stumbling-block which can never be quite got over; the mytho- Page-95
logy, fauna and flora of Indian literature are
absolutely alien to Europe. (We are in a different world; this is no peaceful
English world of field or garden and woodland with the cheerful song of the
thrush or the redbreast or the nightingale warbling in the night by some small
and quiet river, the lark soaring in the morning to the pale blue skies; no
country of deep snows and light suns and homely toil without spiritual presences
save the borrowed fancies of the Greeks or shadowy metaphysical imaginations
of the poet’s brain that haunt thought’s aery wildernesses, no people homely,
matter-of-fact, never rising far above earth or sinking far below it. We have
instead a mother of gigantic rivers and huge sombre forests under a burning sun
or a magical moon- light; the roar of the wild beasts fills those forests and
the cry of innumerable birds peoples those rivers; and in their midst lives a
people who have soared into the highest heavens of the spirit, experienced the
grandest and most illimitable thoughts possible to the intellect’ and sounded
the utmost depths of sensuous indulgence; so fierce is the pulse of life that
even trees and inanimate things seem to have life, emotions, a real and
passionate history, and over all move mighty presences of gods and spirits who
are still real to the consciousness of this people.) Page-96 because these words have colour and meaning and beauty to them, they must also convey the same associations to their reader. This is a natural but deplorable mistake; this jargon is merely a disfigurement in English poetry. The cultured may read their work in spite of the jargon out of the unlimited intellectual curiosity natural to culture; the half-cultured may read it because of the jargon out of the ingrained tendency of the half-cultured mind to delight in what is at once unintelligible and inartistic, But their work can neither be a thing of permanent beauty nor serve a really useful object; and work which is neither immortal nor useful what self-respecting man would knowingly go out of his way to do? Difficulties are after all given us in order that we may brace our sinews by surmounting them; the greater the difficulty, the greater our chance of the very highest success. I can only point out rather sketchily how I have myself thought it best to meet the difficulty; a detailed discussion would require a separate volume. In the first place, a certain concession may be made but within very narrow and guarded limits to the need for local colour, a few names of trees, flowers, birds etc., may be transliterated into English, but only when they do not look hopelessly outlandish in that form or else ,have a liquid or haunting beauty of sound; a similar indulgence may be yet more freely permitted in the transliteration of mythological names. But here the licence ends; a too liberal use of it would destroy entirely the ideal of translation; what is perfectly familiar in the original language must not seem entirely alien to the foreign audience; there must be a certain toning down of strangeness, an attempt to bring home the association to the foreign intelligence, to give at least some idea to a cultured but not orientally erudite mind. This may be done in many ways and I have availed myself of all. A word may be rendered by some neologism which will help to convey any prominent characteristic or idea associated with the thing it expresses; blossom of ruby may, for instance, render bandhoula, a flower which is always mentioned for its redness. Or else the word itself may be dropped and the characteristic brought into prominence; for instance, instead of saying that a woman is lipped like a ripe bimba, it is, I think, a fair translation to write, "Her scarlet mouth is a ripe fruit and red". This device Page-97 of expressingly declaring the characteristics which the original only mentions, I have frequently employed, in the Cloud-Messenger, even when equivalent words exist in English, because many objects known in both countries are yet familiar and full of common associations to the Indian mind while to the English they are rare, exotic and slightly associated or only with one particular and often accidental characteristic.(It is an unfortunate tendency of the English mind to seize on what seems to it grotesque or ungainly in an unfamiliar object; thus the elephant and peacock have become almost impossible in English poetry, because the one is associated with lumbering heaviness and the other with absurd strutting. The tendency of the Hindu mind on the other hand is to seize on what is pleasing and beautiful in all things and turn to see a charm where the English mind sees a deformity and to extract poetry and grace out of the ugly. The classical instances are the immortal verses in which Valmikie by a storm of beautiful and costly images and epithets has immortalised the hump of Manthara and the still more immortal passage in which he has made the tail of a monkey epic. ) A kindred method, especially with mythological allusions, is to explain fully what in the original is implicit; Kalidasa, for instance, compares a huge dark cloud striding northwards from Crouncharundhra to "the dark foot of Vishnou lifted in impetuous act to quell Bali", syamha pado baliniyamanabhyudyatasyeva visnoh. This I have translated,
When starting from the dwarf-shape world-immense With Titan-quelling step through heaven he strode." It will be at once objected that this is not translation, but the most licentious paraphrase. This is not so if my original contention be granted that the business of poetical translation is to reproduce not the exact words but the exact image, associations and poetical beauty and flavour of the original. There is not a single word in the translation I have instanced which does not represent something at once suggested to the Indian reader by the words of the text. Vishnou is nothing to the English reader but some monstrous and bizarre Hindu idol; to the Hindu He is God Himself, – the word is therefore more correctly represented in English by "highest God" than by Vishnou; syamah padah is closely represented by "dark like the cloudy foot", so the word cloudy being necessary both to point the simile which is not apparent and Page-98 natural to the English reader as to the Indian and to define the precise sort of darkness indicated by the term syamah; "Balli" has no meaning or association in English, but in the Sanskrit it represents the same idea as "Titan"; only the particular name recalls a certain theosophic legend which is a household word to the Hindu, that of the dwarf- Vishnou who obtained from the Titan Bali as much land as he could cover with three steps, then filling the whole world with himself with one stride measured the earth, with another the heavens and with the third placing his foot on the head of Bali thrust him down into bottomless Hell. All this immediately arises before the mental eye of the Hindu as he reads Kalidasa’s finely chosen words. The impetuous and vigorous term abhyudyatasya both in sound and sense suggests images, the sudden starting up of the world-pervading deity from the dwarf shape he had assumed while the comparison to the cloud reminds him that the second step of the three referred to is that of Vishnou striding "through heaven". But to the English reader the words of Kalidasa literally transliterated would be a mere artificial conceit devoid of the original sublimity. It is the inability to seize the associations and precise poetical force of Sanskrit words that has led so many European Sanskritists to describe the poetry of Kalidasa which is hardly surpassed for truth, bold directness and native beauty and grandeur as the artificial poetry of an artificial period. A literal translation would only spread this erroneous impression to the general reader. It must be admitted that in the opposite method one of Kalidasa’s finest characteristics is entirely lost, his power of expressing by a single simple direct and sufficient word ideas and pictures of the utmost grandeur of shaded complexity; but this is a characteristic which could in no case be possible in any language but the classical Sanskrit which Kalidasa did more than any man to create or at least to perfect. Even the utmost literalness could not transfer this characteristic into English. This method of eliciting all the values of the original of which I have given a rather extreme instance, I have applied with great frequency where a pregnant mythological allusion or a striking or subtle picture or image calls for adequate representation, more especially perhaps in pictures or images connected with birds and animals unfamiliar Page-99
or but slightly familiar to the English reader.
(At the same time I must plead guilty to occasional excesses, to reading into
Kalidasa perhaps in a dozen instances what is not there. I can only plead in
apology that translators are always incorrigible sinners in this respect and
that I have sinned less than others; moreover, except in one or two Instances,
these additions have always been suggested either by the sound or substance of
the original. I may instance the line
There is yet another method which has to be applied far more cautiously,
but is sometimes indispensable. Occasionally it is necessary or at least
advisable to discard the original image altogether and replace it by a more
intelligible English image. There is no commoner subject of allusion in Sanskrit
poetry than the passionate monotoned threnody of the forlorn bird who is divided
at night by some mysterious law from his mate, divided if by a single lotus
leaf, yet fatally divided. Such at least was the belief suggested by its cry at
night to the imaginative Aryans. Nothing can exceed the beauty, pathos and power
with which this -allusion is employed by Kalidasa. Hear, for instance, Pururavas
as he seeks for his lost Urvasie, Her body hidden by a lotus-leaf, Lurks near thee in the pool, deemest her far Page-100 And wailest musically to the flowers A wild deep dirge. Such is thy conjugal Yearning, thy terror such of even a little Division from her nearness. Me thus afflicted, Me so forlorn thou art averse to bless With just a little tidings of my love.
And again in the Shacountala, the lovers are thus gracefully warned:
O Chacravaque, sob farewell to thy mate, The night, the night comes down to part you.
Sole
like a widowed bird when all the nests are making, I have indicated above the main principles by which I have guided myself in the task of translation. But there still remains the question, whether while preserving the ideals one may not still adhere more or less closely to the text. The answer to this is that such closeness is imperative, but it must be a closeness of word- value, not oneness of word-meaning; into this word-value there enter the elements of association, sound and aesthetic beauty. If these are not translated, the word is not translated, however Page-101
correct the rendering may be. For instance, the
words salila, āpah and jala in Sanskrit all mean water, but if jala may
be fairly represented by the common English word and the more poetic āpah by
"waters" or "ocean" according to the context, what will
represent the beautiful suggestions of grace, brightness, softness and clearness
which accompany salila? Here it is obvious that we have to seek refuge in
sound-suggestions and verse-subtleties to do what is not feasible by verbal
rendering. Everything therefore depends on the skill and felicity of the
translator and he must be judged rather by the accuracy with which he renders
the emotional and aesthetic value of each expression than brought to a rigid…
for each word in the original. Moreover the idiom of Sanskrit, especially of
classical Sanskrit, is too far divided from the idiom of English. Literal
translation from the Greek is possible though sometimes disastrous, but literal
translation from the Sanskrit is impossible. There is indeed a school endowed
with more valour than discretion and more metaphor than sense who condemn the
dressing up of the Aryan beauty in English clothes and therefore demand that not
only should the exact words be kept but the exact idiom. For instance, they
would perpetrate the following: "Covering with lashes water-heavy from
anguish, her eye gone to meet from former pleasantness the nectar-cool
lattice-path-entered feet of the moon and then at once turned away, like a
land-lotus-plant on a cloudy day not awake, not sleeping." Now quite apart
from the execrable English and the want of rhythm, the succession of the actions
and the connexions of thought which are made admirably clear in the Sanskrit by
the mere order of the words, is here entirely obscured and lost; moreover the
poetic significance of the words prityā (pleasantness) and abhre, implying
here rain as well as cloud and the beautiful force of salilagurubhih (water-heavy)
are not even hinted at, while the meaning and application of the simile quite
apparent in the original needs bringing out In the English. For the purpose of
immediate comparison I give here my own version: "The moon- beams " Page-102 tion. For the better illustration of the method, I prefer however to quote a more typical stanza:
Sabdayante madhuramanilaih kicakah puryamanahSamsaktabhistripuravijayo giyate kinnaribhih, Nirhadi te muraja iva cet kanderesu dhvanih syat Sangitartho nanu pasupatestatra bhavi samagram. Rendered into literal English this is:
In linked troops the Oreads of the hill Are singing and inspired with rushing wind Sweet is the noise of bamboos fluting shrill; Thou thundering in the mountain-glens with cry Of drums shouldst the sublime orchestra fill.
Pagr-103 sing, generally in a circle; to express this in English, so as to create the same picture as the Sanskrit conveys, it was necessary to add "in lovely dances". The word Kinnaries presents a serious initial difficulty. The Purana has, mythologising partly from false etymology, turned these Kinnaras into men and women with horse faces and the description has been copied down into all Sanskrit dictionaries. But the Kinnaries of Valmikie have little resemblance with these Puranic grotesques; they are beings of superhuman beauty, unearthly sweetness of voice and wild freedom who seldom appear on the earth, their home is in the mountains and in the skies; he speaks of a young Kinnar snared and bound by men and the mother wailing over her offspring; and Kekayie lying on the ground in her passion of grief and anger is compared to a Kinnarie fallen from the skies. In all probability they were at first a fugitive image of the strange wild voices of the wind galloping and crying in the mountain -tops. The idea of speed would then suggest the idea of galloping horses and by the usual principle of Puranic allegory which was intellectual rather than artistic, the head, the most prominent and essential member of the human body, would be chosen as the seat of the symbol. Kalidasa had in this as in many other instances to take the Puranic allegory of the old poetic figure and new -subject it to the law of artistic beauty. In no case does he depart from the Puranic conception, but his method is to suppress the ungainly elements of the idea, often preserving it only in an epithet, and bring into prominence all the elements of beauty. Here the horse-faces are entirely suppressed and the picture offered is that of women singing with unearthly voices on the mountain -tops. The use of the word Kinnarie here would have no poetic propriety; to the uninstructed it would mean nothing and to the instructed would suggest only the ungainly horse-face which Kalidasa here ignores and conflict with the idea of wild and divine melody which is emphasised. I have therefore translated "the Oreads of the hills"; these spirits of the mountains are the only image in English which can at all render the idea of beauty and vague strangeness here implied; at the same time I have used the apparently tautologous enlargement "of the hills", because it was necessary to give some idea of the Page-104 distant, wild and mystic which the
Greek "Oreads" does not in itself quite bring out. I have moreover
transposed the two lines in translation for very obvious reasons. The first line
demands still more careful translation. The word sabdayante means
literally "sound, make a noise", but unlike its English rendering it
is a rare word used by Kalidasa for the sake of a certain effect of sound and a
certain shade of signification; while therefore rendering by "noise" I
have added the epithet
"shrill" to bring it up to the required value. Again, the force and
sound of purya-manah cannot
be rendered by its literal rendering "filled", and anila,
one of the many beautiful and
significant Sanskrit words for
wind, - vayu,
anila, pavana, samira, samirana, vata, pra- bhanjana, marut, sadagati, -
suggests powerfully the breath and flowing
of wind and is in the Upanishad used as equivalent to Prana, the breath or
emotional soul; to render adequately the word "inspired" has been
preferred to "filled" and the epithet "rushing" added to
wind. Kicakah puryamanah anilah in
the original suggests at once the sound of the flute, because the flute is in
India made of the hollow bamboo and the shrillness of the word kicakah assists.
The last two lines of the stanza have been rendered with great closeness,
except for the omission of nanu and the substitution of the
epithet ‘sublime’ for pasupateh. Nanu is a Sanskrit particle which
sometimes asks a rhetorical question but more often suggests one answered; the
delicate shades suggested by the Sanskrit particles cannot be represented in
English or only by gross effects which would be intolerably excessive and
rhetorical. The omission of Pasupati, the name of Shiva as the Lord of Wild
Life, though not necessary, is, I think, justified. He is sufficiently suggested
by the last stanza and to those who understand the allusion, by the reference to
Tripura; the object of suggesting the wild and sublime which is served in
Sanskrit by introducing this name is equally served in English by the general
atmosphere of wild remoteness and the insertion of the epithet ‘sublime’. Page-105 poem, – more perhaps in the longer ones, – I have slipped into words and touches which have no justification in the original. This is a literary offence which is always condemnable and always committed. In mitigation of judgment I can only say that it has been done rarely and that the superfluous word or touch is never out of harmony with or unsuggested by the original; it has sprung out of the text and not been foisted upon it. The remarks I have made apply to all the translations but more especially to the Cloud-Messenger. (This translation was never published. About it Sri Aurobindo once wrote: "I did translate the Meghadut, but it was lost by the man with whom I kept it." (Vol. 26, p. 236) In the drama except in highly poetical passages I have more often than not sacrificed subtlety in order to preserve the directness and incisiveness of the Sanskrit, qualities of great importance to dramatic writing, and in the epic to the dread of diffuseness which would ruin the noble harmony of the original. But the Cloud- Messenger demands rather than shuns the careful and subtle rendering of every effect of phrase, sound and association. The Meghadutam of Kalidasa is the most marvellously perfect descriptive and elegiac poem in the world’s literature. Every possible beauty of phrase, every possible beauty of sound, every grace of literary association, every source of imaginative and sensuous beauty has been woven together into a harmony which is, without rival and without fault; for amidst all its wealth of colour, delicacy and sweetness, there is not a word too much or too little, no false note, no excessive or defective touch; the colouring is just and subdued in its rich- ness, the verse movement regular in its variety, the diction simple in its suggestiveness, the emotion convincing and fervent behind a certain high restraint, the imagery precise, right and not. over- done as in the Raghuvamsha and yet quite as full of beauty and power. The Shacountala and the Cloud-Messenger are the ne plus ultra of Hindu poetic art. Such a poem asks for and repays the utmost pains a translator can give it; it demands all the wealth of word and sound effect, all the power of literary beauty, of imaginative and sensuous charm he has the capacity to extract from the English language. At the same time its qualities of diction and verse cannot be rendered. The diffuseness of English will not thus lend itself to the brief suggestiveness of the Sanskrit Page-106 without being so high-strung, nervous and bare in its strength as to falsify its flowing harmony and sweetness; nor to its easy harmony without losing close-knit precision and falsifying its brevity, gravity and majesty. We must be content to lose something in order that we may not lose all.
The prose of Kalidasa’s dialogue is the most unpretentious and admirable prose in Sanskrit literature; it is perfectly simple, easy in pitch and natural in tone with a shining, smiling, rippling lucidity, a soft carolling gait like a little girl running along in a meadow and smiling back at you as she goes. There is the true image of it, a quiet English meadow with wild flowers on a bright summer morning, breezes abroad, the smell of hay in the neighbourhood, honeysuckle on the bank, hedges full of convolvuluses or wild roses, a ditch on one side with cress or forget- me -nots and nothing pronounced or poignant except perhaps a stray whiff of meadow-sweet from a distance. This admirable unobtrusive charm and just observed music (Coleridge) makes it run easily into verse in English. In translating one has at first some vague idea of reproducing the form as well as the spirit of the Sanskrit, rendering verse stanza by verse stanza and prose movement by prose movement. But it will soon be discovered that except in the talk of the buffoon and not always then Kalidasa’s prose never evokes its just echo, never finds its answering pitch, tone or quality in English prose. The impression it creates is in no way different from Shakespeare’s verse taken anywhere at its easiest and sweetest:
Your lord does know my mind. I cannot love him, Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble, Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth; In voices well divulged, free, learned and valiant; And in dimension and the shape of nature, A gracious person; but yet I cannot love him. He might have took his answer long ago. (Twelfth Night, Act I, Sc.5) Page-107 Or
again, still more close in its subtle and telling simplicity: Vi. Above my fortunes, yet my state is well I am a gentleman.
I cannot love him; let him send no more; Unless perchance you came to me again To tell me how he takes it. (Twelfth Night, Act I, Sc. 5. )
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