So much of what a reader expects to find beautiful is by way of second-hand knowledge. One may hear, “Tagore is better in Bengali,” and respond with “Bharati has never successfully been translated from Tamil into English.” We exchange inadequacies, whole libraries of what we will never be able to experience. Translation is risk, and to read a translation is a matter of trust. We surrender ourselves to a translator’s talent — as great or as scarce as it may be.

Kalidasa was, in the common imagination, the greatest poet and playwright of the Sanskrit language, and over the centuries a diverse range of translators have rendered his work into various languages. In a recent English one, the poet Mani Rao, has written, “Today, if most people know the storylines of Kālidāsa’s famous works Śākuntalam and Meghadūtam , not as many have actually read them, even in translation.”

Penguin India’s new Kalidasa series is another attempt to bridge this gap. The series includes Srinivas Reddy’s translation of the play Malavikagnimitram , and both of Kalidasa’s epics — Kumarasambhavam , translated by Hank Heifetz, and Raghuvamsam , translated by AND Haksar.

Composed of 1,557 verses divided into 19 cantos, Raghuvamsam outlines the travails and triumphs of Rama’s antecedents and descendants over several generations. Although not explained by Haksar, Kalidasa must have drawn his inspiration from Puranic genealogies of the Ikshvaku dynasty.

Considering that it dates to 5th century CE, the text does not bear ready comparison to most other Ramayanas. But it augments the canon through providing a dynastic context to the particular tale we are familiar with — of princes in exile, a kidnapped princess and a battle to protect the hero’s reputation (after which the heroine’s is carelessly sullied) — through renderings by the “original” Valmiki, the poets Kamban and Tulsidas, filmmakers from Doordarshan’s studios to Nina Paley to G Aravindan and hundreds of under-acknowledged oral traditions.

Haksar’s introduction covers very little ground overall on the work’s intricacies, focusing exclusively on Kalidasa’s reputation and a cursory overview of the text and his translation methodology. He writes of translating into free verse, and rearranging stanzas for readability, but does not explain the baffling reason why his English rendering is often in a stiff, lull-inducing passive voice.

So ungainly is Haksar’s facility with storytelling, and so sparse his introduction, that once again one goes by hearsay. One has read elsewhere, for instance, that the 13th canto is lovely. And so one pays special attention, forcing the ennui away in order to seek beauty.

We read: as Rama brings Sita back from a vanquished Lanka, he recalls an anguish that echoes that of King Aja, one of Rama’s ancestors, whose beloved wife Indumati perishes suddenly when a celestial garland falls on her during a pleasure stroll.

“This is the same land where I found/ while searching for you, on the ground/ an anklet which lay silent there,/ as if in grief at being parted/ from the lotus bud, your foot.” This is Rama at his most romantic, who in the very next canto instructs his brother to trick the pregnant Sita into exile under the pretext of fulfilling her own desire for a healing reverse journey, in this case to “once more visit/ the sylvan groves on Ganga’s banks/ where she knew the hermit girls/ whose spread of grains the wild beasts ate.”

And we wonder: in the hands of another translator, would beauty have revealed itself more readily? It’s everywhere in pockets, for Kalidasa is Kalidasa still, even if badly translated. And other translators have done justice to his reputation. For instance: Hank Heifetz’s Kumarasambhavam , the companion volume to Raghuvamsam in this series, is utterly luminous.

The dynasty of Raghu begins with the repressed King Dilipa, who regards matrimony “as but for the sake of progeny”, trickles through a lineage of kings and ends finally on the hyper-sexual King Agnivarna, who despite spending all his time among queens and concubines, begets no progeny. The king takes ill suddenly and is cremated in secret. His chief wife is (mysteriously) pregnant. She takes the throne with “that root” within her, and we hear no more of queen or country.

Is this where the Ikshvaku dynasty ends — foiled by simple patriarchy? Other interlocuters suggest that the work is either incomplete or further cantos have been lost, but Haksar tells us nothing. Once again, a better translator’s rendition would have left the reader curious, dismayed at the abruptness, questioning Kalidasa. Instead, what a pity it is that one simply feels relieved to be freed to move on.

Sharanya Manivannan is a Chennai-based poet and writer

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