महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

xxxi] Preface teen syllables to the line. Bhavabhūti uses these metres with consummate skill, as I have tried to show in the Notes, and especially in Appendix 1. The succession of light and heavy syllables and the rhythmic pauses which break the line at irregular intervals give to each of these metres an emotional effect which a Hindu at least can feel and perhaps describe, but which it is absolutely impossible to reproduce in a language where the system of verse-accent is wholly different. The use of prose in translation carries with it, of course, the giving up of rhyme. Both rhyme and metre are apt to lead to useless padding or unwarranted curtailing. Bentley's familiar comment on Pope's Iliad is worth repeating: ‘A very pretty poem, but he must not call it Homer.’ There have been, no doubt, a few ideal translations made by men gifted with true poetic inspiration, but unless the translator is sure that he has this gift, let him beware. Secondly, as to literalness. An attempt, on linguistic or other grounds, to render words radically akin in Sanskrit by words radically akin in English, or to render the same word or phrase in just the same way at every occurrence, is apt to defeat its own end. The word saṁskṛta is indeed equal to con-fectus; but confection as a version of saṁskāra is absurd. Again, the exigencies of the situation sometimes move the trans- lator to render noun by adjective, adjective by adverb, adverb by verb, and so on. In such cases, for the sake of those who are reading the original also, the literal version or the analysis of the compound will be given in the Notes. Once more, it may happen that the ever-varying context shows that the same word has a dozen finely differenced shades of meaning in as many different places. The particle kila, for example, is here rendered in perhaps a dozen different ways. The like holds true for the forms of address. In all this I have tried to heed von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff's precept (Reden und Vorträge³, p. 5) : ‘To give free and origi- nal expression to the thoughts and feelings and moods of the poet because you [the translator] have yourself fully comprehended and experienced them : that—no more, but also no less—is translating.’ Thirdly, as to word-order. It was Bhavabhūti's boast (i. 2) that upon him the Goddess of Speech and Eloquence waited as a submissive hand- maid. And so, we may not assume that with him ‘rhyme was the rudder to sense’, in other words that his diction was determined by exigencies of metre or the like. On the contrary, his word-order is deliberate and almost always artistic; and in the stanzas especially he likes to create a sort of suspense by withholding the principal word, or putting it in only towards the end. In a highly inflected tongue like Sanskrit, the resultant suspending of the sense or the resultant inversion is easily possible and even natural, and I have often tried to reproduce it. But in English the