Author: G R Nandargikar
Publisher: New Bharatiya Book
Year: 2001
Language: multilingual
Pages: 285
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187418346
Description
Meghaduta is the best and the unrivalled of Kalidasa’s poetical productions, nay the most favorite of the books read all over India. This critical edition presents Sanskrit expressions without sacrificing it to the beauty of English phraseology.
There are already some translations of the 'Cloud Messenger" in English in which the rendering is happy so far as English is concerned, but they do not, in many places, do justice to the beautiful pathos of the sentiments and expressions in which the poem, like all other poems of Kalidasa, abounds. The results of the labors of European scholars to reveal the beauties of oriental poetic and dramatic literature, are to a certain extent, marred by the fact that they try to adorn the Hindu beauty with a foreign garb worn exactly after a foreign fashion.
Many editions of the poem have been published and given to the public by some learned Pandits and scholars and of Calcutta and other parts of the country, but it would not be far from the truth to speak of those editions that the only object of their editors seems to have been rather to give the most readable and the least difficult version of the poem and the commentary of Mallinatha than to attempt to find on by scrupulously sticking to the rules of sound criticism and to the patient collation of codices of the poet himself or his scholast Mallinatha.
By those who have in their mind’s eye the appreciation for the studies of Sanskrit and although codices of it about in every part of the country, and printed or lithographed transcripts of the work are not few, no critical edition of the entire poem has to my knowledge yet been published, at least in India, founded upon manuscripts carefully collected.
Contents
Abbreviations
Preface
Critical Notice
A Short Dissertation on Kalidasa
Notes
Appendix A
Appendix B