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