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On Translating Kalidasa
THE
life and surroundings in which Indian
poetry moves cannot be rendered in the terms of English poetry.
Yet to give up the problem and content oneself with tumbling
out the warm, throbbing Indian word to shiver and starve in the
inclement atmosphere of the English language seems to me not
only an act of literary inhumanity and a poor-spirited confession
of failure, but a piece of laziness likely to defeat its own object.
An English reader can gather no picture from and associate no idea of beauty
with these outlandish terms. What can he understand when he is told that the atimukta creeper is flowering in the
grove of kesara trees and the mullica or the...is sending out its
fragrance into the night and the chacravaque¹ is complaining to
his mate amid the still ripples of the river that flows through the jambous? Or how does it help him to know that the scarlet
mouth of a woman is like the red bimba fruit or the crimson bandhoul
flower ? People who know Sanskrit seem to imagine that 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 sepa-
¹cakravāka.
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rate 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
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.¹
A kindred method, especially with mythological allusions, is to explain fully
what in the original is implicit; Kalidasa, for instance, compares
¹It 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 Valmiki 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.
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a huge dark cloud striding northwards from Crouncharundhra
to "the dark foot of Vishnou lifted in impetuous act to quell
Bali", śyāmah pādo baliniyamanābhyudyatasyeva visnoh. This
I have translated,
"Dark like the cloudy foot of highest God
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; śyāmah pādah
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 natural to the English reader as to the Indian and to define the precise sort of darkness indicated by the term
śyāmah;
Ball 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
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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 or 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 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,
A flickering line of fireflies seen in sleep,
Kalidasa says nothing equivalent to or suggesting "seen in sleep",
but I had to render somehow the impression of night and dim
unreality created by the dreamy movement and whispering assonances of the lines
alpālpabhāsam khadyotālīvilasitanibhām vidyudunmesadrstim
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with its soft dentals and its wavering and gliding liquids and sibilants. Unable to do this by sound I sought to do it by verbal
expression, in so far made a confession of incompetence, but in
a way that may perhaps carry its own pardon.)
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,
Thou wild-drake when thy love,
Her body hidden by a lotus-leaf,
Lurks near thee in the pool, deemest her far
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.
Fable as it is, one who has steeped himself in Hindu poetry can
never bring himself wholly to disbelieve it. For him the melancholy call of the bird will sound for ever across the chill dividing
stream and make musical with pity the huge and solemn night.
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But when the Yaksha says to the cloud that he will recognise her
who is his second life by her sweet rare speech and her loneliness
in that city of happy lovers, "sole like a lonely Chacravaque with me her
comrade far away", the simile has no pathos to an English mind and even when explained would only seem "an artificiality common to the court-poetry of the Sanskrit age". I
have therefore thought myself justified by the slightness of the
allusion in translating
"Sole like a widowed bird when all the nests are making",
which translates the idea and the emotion while suggesting a
slightly different but related image.
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 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 [regard] 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
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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...."
This I maintain though not literal is almost as close and
meets without overstepping all the requirements of good translation. For the better illustration of the method, I prefer however
to quote a more typical stanza:
Śabdāyante madhuramanilaih kīcakāh. pūryamānāh,
Samsaktābhistripuravijayo gīyate kinnarībhih,
Nirhādī te muraja iva cet kandaresu dhvanih syāt
Sangītārtho nanu paśupatestatra bhāvī
samagram.
Rendered into literal English this is:
The bamboos filling with winds are noising sweetly, the
Tripour-conquest is being sung by the glued-together Kinnaries,
if thy thunder should be in the glens like the sound on a drum —
the material of the concert of the Beast-Lord is to be complete
there, eh?
My own translation runs,
Of Tripour slain in lovely dances joined
And linkèd troops the Oreads of the hill
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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.
The word Tripura means the "three cities", refers to the three
material qualities of sattwa, rajas and tamas, light, passion and
darkness, which have to be slain by Shiva the emancipator before
the soul can rejoin God; but there is no reference here to the
theosophic basis of the legend, but possibly to the legend itself,
the conquest of the demon Tripura by Mahadeva. There was no
means of avoiding the mythological allusion and its unfamiliarity had simply to be accepted. Tripuravijayo gīyate, "of Tripour
slain are singing" requires little comment. Samsaktābhih, meaning "linked close together in an uninterrupted chain" is here rendered by "joined in linked troops"; but this hardly satisfied
the requirement of poetic translation, for the term suggests to
an Indian a very common practice which does not, I think, exist
in Europe, women taking each other's hands and dancing as they
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 Valmiki 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 horse and by the usual principle of Puranic allegory
which was intellectual rather than artistic, the head, the most
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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
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 śabdāyante 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 pūryamānāh cannot be rendered by its literal rendering "filled", and
anila, one of the many beautiful and significant Sanskrit words
for wind, — vāyu, anila, pavana, samīra, samīrana, vāta, prabhañjana, marut, sadāgati — 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. Kīcakāh. pūryamānāh anilaih 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
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word kicakāh 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 paśupateh. 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'.
This analysis of a single stanza — ex uno disce omnes —
will be enough to show the essential fidelity which underlies the
apparent freedom of my translation. At the same time it would
be disingenuous to deny that in at least a dozen places of each
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. 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 Meghadūtam 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,
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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 richness, 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 overdone 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
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.
*
In Kalidasa another very serious difficulty meets the unhappy translator beyond the usual pitfalls. Few great Sanskrit
poems employ the same metre throughout. In the dramas where
metrical form is only used when the thought, image or emotion
rises above the ordinary level, the poet employs whatever metre
he thinks suitable to the mood he is in. In English, however, such
a method would result in opera rather than in drama. I have
therefore thought it best, taking into consideration the poetical
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
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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 (Indravajrā) or the "lesser
thunderbolt" Sloka (upendravajrā), "the gambolling-of-the-tiger"
Sloka (śārdūlavikrīdita) 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. In casting about for a metre
I was only certain of one thing that neither blank verse nor the
royal quatrain stanza would serve my purpose; the one has not
the necessary basis of recurring harmonics; in the other the
recurrence is too rigid, sharply denned and 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
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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.
*
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.¹
Or again, still more close in its subtle and telling simplicity:
¹Twelfth
Night, Act I, Sc. 5.
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O1. What is your parentage?
Vi. Above my fortunes, yet my state is well.
I am a gentleman.
O1. Get you to your lord,
I cannot love him; let him send no more;
Unless perchance you came to me again
To tell me how he takes it.¹
There is absolutely no difference between this and the prose of
Kalidasa, since even the absence of metre is compensated by the
natural majesty, grace and rhythmic euphony of the Sanskrit
language and the sweet seriousness and lucid effectiveness it
naturally wears when it is not tortured for effects.
¹Twelfth Night, Act I, Sc. 5.
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