Meghadutam Read online

  KALIDASA

  MEGHADUTAM

  The Cloud Message

  Translated from the Sanskrit by Srinivas Reddy

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Translator’s Preface

  MEGHADUTAM

  I. Journey

  II. Message

  Glossary

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  Also by the Same Author

  Malavikagnimitram

  Translated by Srinivas Reddy

  Lowering her eyes to the tiled floor,

  where her big toe caresses a flower,

  her curved body

  is more beautiful than her dance.

  Believed to be Kalidasa’s first work, Malavikagnimitram is the love story of King Agnimitra and the court dancer Malavika. The tale unfolds through humorous palace interludes, vivid descriptions of fine arts and the cunning machinations of court players. Even in this early work, Kalidasa’s characteristic penchant for romance, art and natural beauty is evident at every delightful turn of the plot. He transforms a simple tale of forbidden love into an engrossing courtly drama filled with beauty, humour and wit. Srinivas Reddy’s engaging translation captures to perfection the joyous vigour of the young dramatist’s voice.

  Drama/HB

  Also by the Same Author

  Kumarasambhavam

  Translated by Hank Heifetz

  She with her beautiful face at once was in the power

  of Siva and of drunkenness, taking her shyness away,

  both eagerly drawing her towards the bed

  and both now turned into kindled desire.

  The greatest long poem in classical Sanskrit by the greatest poet of the language, Kumarasambhavam celebrates the love story of Siva and Parvati, whose passionate union results in the birth of their son, the young god Kumara. Beginning with a luminous description of the birth of Parvati, the poem proceeds in perfectly pitched sensuous detail through her courtship with Siva until the night of their wedding. It plays out their tale on the immense scale of supreme divinity, wherein the gods are viewed both as lovers and as cosmic principles.

  Composed in eight scintillating cantos, the verses of Kumarasambhavam continue to enchant readers centuries after they were first written. Hank Heifetz’s sparkling translation brings to life the heady eroticism and sumptuous imagery of the original.

  Poetry/HB

  Also by the Same Author

  Raghuvamsham

  Translated by A.N.D. Haksar

  How great was the dynasty

  descended from the Sun,

  and how slight the capacity

  of what I comprehend?

  Foolishly do I wish to cross

  the ocean in a small canoe.

  Long considered as Kalidasa’s greatest work, Raghuvamsam is an epic poem in classical Sanskrit. It recounts the legendary tales of the Raghu dynasty, whose scions include the divine hero of the Ramayana. In this majestic mahakavya, Kalidasa invokes the whole gamut of literary flavours, ranging from the erotic and the heroic to the tragic and comic, the horrific and peaceful. The forbears and the descendants of Rama are also brought to life. Within these pages we see the ideal couple, Dilipa and Sudakshina, their son Raghu’s valour and generosity, the tragic love of Aja and Indumati, the travails of Dasaratha, the feats of Kusha and Atithi, and finally, the dynasty’s downfall with Sudarshana and Agnivarna.

  Composed in nineteen cantos, this mesmerizing, lyrical and very accessible new translation of Raghuvamsam will continue to enthrall readers with its insights into ancient India, its land, people and seasons, and its social and cultural values that are still relevant today.

  Epic/Poetry/HB

  Also by the Same Author

  Abhijnanashakuntalam

  Translated by Vinay Dharwadker

  Who can she be,

  With her physical beauty

  Obscured by silken sheaths like veils,

  Standing among these ascetics

  Like a fresh sprig

  Sprouting in the midst of yellow leaves?

  Kalidasa’s most famous play refashions an episode from the Mahabharata, magnificently dramatizing the love story of Shakuntala, a girl of semi-divine origin, and Dushyanta, a noble human king. After their brief and passionate, but secret, union at her father’s forest ashram, Dushyanta must return to his capital. He gives Shakuntala his signet ring, promising to make her his queen when she joins him later. But, placed unawares under a curse, he forgets her—and she loses the ring that would have enabled him to recognize her. Will the lovers be reunited?

  The world’s first full-length play centred on a comprehensive love story, The Recognition of Shakuntala is an undisputed classic of the ancient period. Vinay Dharwadker’s new translation is the definitive poetic rendering of this romantic-heroic comedy for the twenty-first-century stage. His absorbing commentary and notes give contemporary readers an unparalleled opportunity to savour the riches of a timeless text.

  Epic/Poetry/HB

  for Amma and Nanna

  Translator’s Preface

  The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Prior to 1982 the Jnanpith Award used to be presented to an Indian writer in recognition of a single outstanding work. In 1970 Vishwanatha Satyanarayana, one of the most prolific Telugu writers of modern times, was honoured with this award for his Ramayana Kalpavrukshamu, a retelling of the Rama story. Given his vast oeuvre filled with hundreds of bold and original writings, why did the committee single out yet another version of the Ramayana, a translation so to speak, for such praise? The poet himself addresses this issue in his introduction.

  If you ask, ‘Why yet another Ramayana?’

  I’d say that in this world, for all times

  everyone eats the same food every day,

  but the taste of it is one’s own.

  Everybody’s life is their own,

  we all make our own way,

  and each one’s experience is one’s own.

  I worship the same Rama as everyone else

  but the devotion in my poetry is my own.

  Ninety per cent of crafting a poem

  rests with the creativity of the poet.

  The wise and learned know these emotions to be

  a thousand times greater than any bold new story.1

  Satyanarayana’s views are forthright and unequivocal: the worth of a poem lies almost exclusively in the imaginative spirit of the poet (kavi pratibha). In fact, literary originality in India was never measured by a poet’s choice of subject but rather by the idiosyncratic manner in which a poet could tell a known story anew. This is why we encounter numerous poems in the later period that praise stylistic novelty and innovation,2 and hardly (if any) verses bemoaning a poet’s recourse to weathered themes. It is like the unfolding of a raga in classical music, wherein rasikas rarely savour a new raga or an unconventional tala, but instead delight in the fresh individuality that a consummate artiste brings to bear in the expansion of a traditional raga. The same may be said of sculpture, dance, or any other branch of classical Indian art, all of which share a common stock of source materials and aesthetic conventions.

  This practice of refashioning and reinterpreting an established motif strikes me as deeply personal—an endeavour arising naturally from a poet’s self-conscious embrace of his or her own subjective creativity. In other words, innovations in classical Indian literature sprang directly from individuals—from the emotions, experiences and intentions of distinct poetic voices. In a certain sense, this view of premodern Indian authorship may explain why there has been no clearly defined conceptualization of translation from within the Indian literary tradition. Writing was writing, and both poets and critics seem t
o have made no distinction between an ‘original’ work and a ‘translation’.

  To put things another way, the scope of what an idea like translation might mean in India would have to encompass a much wider purview than the conventional understandings of source text, target text, equivalencies, etc. Even standard notions of defining what a language is, or how it functions and interacts with other languages, are put to the test when we consider how Indians have so naturally (and perhaps unselfconsciously) negotiated multilingualism for millennia. Indeed it is this dynamic, polyglottic milieu that has played the most critical role in the development of South Asia’s rich literary diversity and intertextuality. Today we might see many of these great works as translations, but the tradition itself never viewed them as such. Translation in India was—and very much still is—inherent in countless moments of everyday speaking and writing. Its inseparability from these actions is perhaps why it was never theorized as an independent concept. Translation in India is part and parcel of living; it is survival.

  Meghadūtam in Translation

  English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation;

  every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation,

  every alleged great age is an age of translations.3

  Ezra Pound

  Perhaps the most translated text in all of Indian literature is the Meghadūtam of Kalidasa. This simple story of a banished yaksha who petitions a cloud to send a message to his distant lover can be found all over the world in scores of languages, formats and styles. At one point during my research I thought to compile a list of all the published translations of the poem. The list grew quickly enough but then it didn’t stop. Slowly but surely new versions continued to surface. One of my favourites was Gustav Holst’s The Cloud Messenger from 1912, a forty-minute composition for chorus and orchestra based on Holst’s own translation of the poem. It is not enough to say that this text has travelled far and wide; it has in fact spawned a whole tradition of translation, one I’m sure will continue long after today.

  Within the Indian poetic tradition, Kalidasa’s celebrated text gave rise to a distinctive new literary genre, the dūta-kāvya. Indeed, dūta-kāvyas (messenger poems) are also known as sandeśa-kāvyas (message poems), just as Meghadūtam is often referred to as Meghasandeśam in south India. The present translation’s title is based on this southern reading.

  Despite the fact that novelty was not his intention, Kalidasa unwittingly introduced a wholly original poetic form to the Sanskrit tradition. But instead of an exacting root text to be translated in the conventional sense, the Meghadūtam in India functioned more like a structural blueprint, a thematic template for countless imaginative retellings. One of the most famous is Vedantadesika’s Haṃsasandeśa, a Sanskrit text written from a South Indian perspective in which a goose acts as a messenger between Rama and Sita. Later, vernacular poets from all across India would take to the dūta-kāvya form with great enthusiasm and local flair, leading Bronner and others to characterize this ‘vast corpus of courier poems [as] perhaps the richest and most vital of South Asia’s premodern literary genres.’4

  With regard to English translations of Meghadūtam, the long list spanning over two centuries presents a rich and complex history that reflects changing tastes, conventions and aesthetics, not to mention the naturally evolving contours of the English idiom. From H.H. Wilson’s pre-Victorian 1813 version in rhymed iambic pentameter to Ashok Kumar Jha’s free verse translation of 2014, along with the many others in between, the Meghadūtam in English has taken on a remarkable variety of avatars. The present translation, based on Kale’s 1969 edition of the Sanskrit text, owes much to the commentators, scholars and translators of the past but, as Satyanarayana says, the devotion and emotion imbued within this text are my own, and I can only hope that there is something special in the way I have told it.

  I believe we can read the trope of a messenger carrying tidings between separated lovers as a metaphor for translation. The whole poem is a carrying over: a transmission initiated by a lovelorn yaksha, entrusted to a messenger cloud and dutifully delivered to a waiting lover. And even though the message is from the yaksha, it is the cloud who is the bearer of his true meaning, the real protagonist of the story, the translator. The cloud is the one who truly lives the long journey from Ramagiri in the south to Alaka in the Himalayas, all along imbibing the beauty and wonder of the landscape, the people, the flora and the fauna. The cloud drinks it all in and imbues the yaksha’s message with his own deep emotions and experiences. Towards the end of the poem, just when the cloud finally begins to deliver the message, he assures the yaksha’s wife that he has kept the message safe in his heart (hṛdaya nihita). It is as if the cloud was claiming both fidelity and feeling, the spirit and the letter of the yaksha’s heartfelt words. In the following verse he states that carrying news between a husband and wife is almost like uniting them (saṅgamāt kiñcit ūnaḥ), suggesting in a sense that a translation is nearly the real thing, almost a new original. It is in these ways that the translator’s long and winding journey is much like that of the cloud’s.

  The cloud’s travels map out a geography that is neither sacred nor profane, mythical nor historical, but holistically perceived, with the potential to describe the great god Shiva in one stanza and the lovemaking of courtesans in the next, all with no loss of emotive congruity or narrative flow. This may seem unexpected, even jarring, to a reader unfamiliar with the tradition, but this composite understanding of the phenomenal world is fundamental to the entire Indian poetic worldview. By integrating seemingly diametric extremes, and by reading such poems with an open mind towards these voices from the past, we may return to an older, precolonial aesthetic paradigm that made no such categorical distinctions. And while there are plenty of mythical elements that permeate the text, much of the terrain described is real, and many of the sacred shrines and holy rivers can still be visited today, where ancient resonances continue to be heard, seen and felt.

  Metre and Rhythm

  As a process, translation is a nitty-gritty job, one fraught with countless decisions, negotiations, sacrifices and rewards. And while there is much to explore in this regard, I will comment only on prosody, or more generally, rhythm, a key aspect of translation that is often undervalued, or even neglected altogether. As the exceptional writer Hank Heifetz has stated, ‘Expressive rhythm is the most essential formal characteristic of good writing. A number of other virtues contribute to the quality of poetry or prose but, without a sense of expressive rhythm, the writing itself will be pedestrian.’5 This notion of expressivity is crucial as there is no expedient method to convert the quantitative metres of Sanskrit into the qualitative measures of English prosody. The best one can do is to experience the rhythmic contours of the original, internalize them deeply and reshape them in the target language based on feel rather than metrics.

  The whole of Meghadūtam is composed in the distinctive metre known as Mandakranta, or the Slow Approach. Immortalized by the poem, this metre has become synonymous with Kalidasa and his iconic work. Most subsequent dūta-kāvya poets deployed this metre, perhaps out of reverence, or possibly because its distinctive lilt intrinsically lends itself to the central theme of viraha, or love in separation. The sustained use of this metre throughout the work creates an almost hypnotic sense of cadence. The repeating pattern of measured pauses and accents remains unchanged in line after line, and yet, in the hands of a master wordsmith like Kalidasa, each verse sounds fresh, even unique in its moulding of word and meaning to rhythm.

  The majority of Sanskrit metres are quantitative in nature, being formed by an almost inexhaustible combination of short and long syllables. The Mandakranta verse form consists of four repeating lines of seventeen syllables arranged in a fixed pattern. In addition yatis, or metrical pauses, appear after syllables four and ten. Below is a schematic of the metrical form along with the famous first verse from Meghadūtam.

  L L L L , S S S S S L ,
L S L L S L L

  − − − − , ◡ ◡ ◡ ◡ ◡ − , − ◡ − − ◡ − −

  kaścit-kāntā viraha-guruṇā svādhikārāt pramattaḥ

  śāpenâstam gamita mahimā varśa-bhogyeṇa bhartuḥ

  yakṣaścakre janaka-tanayā snāna-punyodakeṣu

  snigdhat-chāyā taruṣu-vasatim rāmagiryāśrameṣu

  A servant of Lord Kubera, stripped of his power

  for failing in his duty,

  Was cursed by his master to endure a hard year

  apart from his beloved,

  Banished to roam the dark and shady groves of

  holy forest ashrams

  On Rama’s Mountain, where Sita once bathed

  and blessed the waters.

  To translate these quantitatively fixed patterns directly into fluid English verse is near impossible, and thus a translator is challenged to adopt new strategies and parameters to capture the uninterrupted rhythmic pulse of the original. Though every poem in the Sanskrit is roughly the same length, accurate English translations reveal a much wider variability. This demands more leeway, greater flexibility on the part of the translator to authentically accommodate meaning, emotion and rhythm. After much experimentation and deliberation I arrived at a form that was firm yet pliable. Each line of the Sanskrit text becomes a pair of lines in English translation, with the second line indented and always shorter. The precise line length for each poem, however, was left open. In this way, an individual poem could be unique and structurally coherent in and of itself, while simultaneously contributing to the work’s overall consistency by maintaining a stable eight-line structure.