KalidasaRezensionen

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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.

Written in 400 A.D., this drama is an absolutely lovely combination of prose and poetry, humans and gods, and spirituality and sensuality. It really is all about love, is it not? Such a pleasure!

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.

Let us muse on perfect beauty, an image cast before us by the poet, an image that can only make the heart sing. This beauty is not skin-deep, but informed by a spiritual upbringing and a strong sense of righteousness, compassion, and propriety. Yes, the king, musing with us, is taken by this beauty, this perfect body and soul, so much so that his jester and his general enjoy some great laughs and good times at the expense of the poor regal sap. Yet somehow, despite the ernest ridiculousness of his passion, a deeper bond is forged between the king and the beauty.

Unfortunately, duty calls the king, and Sakuntala, the beauty, while lost in her love, fails in her duties to a visiting sage and is cursed by that sage; the irony (for curses are always ironic) being that as she failed to properly recognize the sage, her beloved shall fail to recognize her. Her failure shall lead to more; the beautiful tapestry shall unravel, and we must call on the commoners and the gods to weave it back together.

From these twisted together circumstances, rival duties and deeply felt emotions, the story of the birth of Bharata is crafted. Bharata is the ultimate ancestor of the warring factions in the Mahabharata and, in a deeply symbolic sense, the father of India. Bharata is a bastard born of the mixing of castes, the violations of duties, and the trickery of people and gods - what other culture has such a proudly sullied heritage?

Kalidasa writes with great humor, some bawdy, some sublime, as he runs his characters through a series of conflicting duties and hapless missteps that are more fundamental to the identities of the characters than even Romeo and Juliet. It is a work that reaches across the Millennia to speak to me in a way otherwise done, in drama, only by four Greeks. For the first Europeans to discover Sakuntala, the play raised fundamental aesthetic questions, rending the old Aristotelian based classifications by drawing out dramatic tension in a way neither comedy nor tragedy attempted. We will not see such sophisticated humor on the European stages, certainly, for almost 1000 years after Sakuntala, and, then, we see it only sparingly and occassionally.

Reading Sakuntala today is a uniquely engaging experience, since the interpretation of the recognition of Sakuntala so entwines both our European and the Indian traditions. There is a morass of difficult but fascinating questions about how we relate to and understand literature bound up in the simplicity and beauty of this story. For me, a western reader, the story may not naturally be in my literary dna; references to particular dieties, old stories, and occassionally concepts require explication, and the structure of the work itself, with it's tendancy to pause to let us take in a scene full of symbolism, full of references, and laden with emotion challenges a tendancy in Western drama to just keep getting on with it. Thus, there are ways in which this play challenges the way I look at and think of drama just as much as many modern works (isn't Godot nothing but a pause?), or many works that hide in the forgotten branches of the Western cannon. There is an almost operatic element that has been purged from Western drama, and that we studiously ignore in staging the Greeks. There are also ways in which this play speaks quite directly to "our" cannon: we see the chorus, the theatrical asides, the jester so beloved by the Elizabethans. The pondering of this play thus involves all the questions of similiarty and difference among cultures, questions of cultural identity and fusion, of universality and locality, of this, of that, of whatever and all else - no end to the pesky yet necessary and inevitable questions.

Still, don't we have to set some of those questions aside, still the cacophony in our heads, and just read, and enjoy what is a marvelous tale? And it is, indeed, a marvelous tale. We must find a staging.

“Megha” quiere decir nube y “duta” mensajero. Kalidasa compuso su poema en sánscrito que es una importante lengua de la India. Gran cantidad de textos literarios, religiosos y filosóficos fueron escritos en este idioma. En el poema Meghaduta un hombre manda un mensaje a su amada con una nube al comienzo de la temporada de lluvias. El hombre describe todos los caminos que la nube debe seguir.

Kumārasamm.bhava o El Origen de Kumāra es un poema épico-lírico de Kālidāsa, el más famoso autor de la literatura clásica india, cuya época de actividad se fecha alrededor del año 400 d.C. A lo largo de sus ocho cantos van desfilando los sucesos que conducen a la unión de Śiva y Pārvatī, dos de las más importantes deidades del panteón hindú; el fruto de esta unión habrá de ser Kumāra, el futuro dios de la guerra que logrará derrocar la tiranía del demonio Tāraka. La descripción del Himālaya y de su hija Pārvatī (canto I) dan paso a la asamblea de los dioses -que acuden a Brahmā apesadumbrados por el dominio del malvado demonio- (II), la quema del dios del Amor por haber perturbado la profunda ascesis de Śiva (III), el lamento de Rati, la esposa de Kāma (IV), el severo ascetismo de Pārvatī, que consigue ablandar el espíritu de Śiva (V), la petición de mano (VI), la ceremonia nupcial entre ambos dioses, celebrada en la capital del Himālaya (VII), y finalmente el goce de los placeres sensuales a que se entregan los recién casados, que contemplan la puesta de sol y la llegada de la noche (VIII). Con el elaborado estilo de la poesía kāvya, en el que la ornamentación y el virtuosismo formal predominan sobre el hilo conductor de la narración, Kālidāsa despliega su arte descriptivo a lo largo de 614 estrofas que reflejan los más variados aspectos de la vida y la cultura de la India clásica: teología, naturaleza, mortificación ascética, erotismo... Pero la verdadera protagonista del relato es la joven diosa Pārvatī, la hija de la Montaña, la diosa Madre que personifica la tierra y la fertilidad; el poeta refleja en ella toda la ternura y profundidad del alma femenina, en un retrato similar al de Śakuntalā.

Este poema épico de Kalidasa sobre la «estirpe de Raghú» es la primera vez que se traduce al castellano. Va precedido de una sabia introducción, que nos da a conocer las características de la épica india, nos habla del autor de poema, de los aspectos formales y de los contenidos del Raghúvamça. Tras la traducción de los diecinueve cantos del poema, la edición ofrece un índice‑glosario ilustrativo de términos sáncritos que es preciso comprender para saborear más intensamente el poema, lo que equivale a disponer de profusas notas de lectura.

Kalidasa is considered India's Shakespeare, though in the tradition of Sanskrit/Hindu/Buddhist drama, all of his plays are romances. Sakuntala is a charming, mythic tale of a king who falls in love with a nature maiden -- troubles ensue caused by the curse of angry monk, nymphs and gods come to the rescue and all ends happily. Wonderful contrasts between the natural world and the artistic world of the court. Although reading it can never capture the multi-art (poetry, dialogue, dance, song) performance, it's still a delight. (Review of Barbara Stoler Miller's translation in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF WORLD LITERATURE)

I love the Clay Sanskrit Library. The books are similar to the Loeb Classical Library and if you're a book geek like I am, there's nothing better than this. The Birth of Kumara is one of Kalidasa's major works and outlines the courtship of Kumara's parents -- Shiva and Parvati -- prior to his birth. I'm no Sanskritist, but I still wish they'd include the actual Devanangari scrip in these editions, but I guess the cost of doing so might make the editions cost too much. The language of the text is beautiful and engaging. It's great that these sort of texts -- pretty much ignored in the west -- are now available.

Interesting for including some of Kalidasa's poems not translated by B.S. Miller, who is superior for Kalidasa's major plays

The most recent and accessible version of Kalidasa I have

Fascinating Indian folk tale in a beautiful book package here.½

$64.