Meghadutam

About the Book

The Meghaduta of Kalidasa, taken to be a lyrical gem on its discovery in the West, continues to be a classic. Contrary to the opinion in India which lauds this text as the culmination of a poetic use of words for their music in a conventional sense, the poem can now be taken to be a wonderful amalgamation of the use of the hard and the soft words in a use of diction and phraseology. It is, however, in the picturesque quality of his images apprehended in wonderful structural design that the poem comes to achieve its unequalled unity of effect. Born of the compelling impact of a single mood captured variously in both the sections of the poem, this work of art remains distinguished for ever for readers down the ages to the present. As simple prose translations of the poem fail to approximate its effect for obvious reasons, an attempt has been made here to apprehend something of the beauty of the poem in Sanskrit in a translation into English in vers libre. Such an attempt, it is hoped, comes half way to meet the expectations of the modern reader of poetry, who does not know Sanskrit in particular, to lead him to respond to one of the most beautiful poems ever written. It may augment further authentic response to a classic in our study of literature in the global context as well.

About the Author

Beginning with his doctoral dissertation on Oriental Influences in T. S. Eliot (1988), in the seventies Dr. A. K. Jha was led to a variety of texts in translation from the Indian literature in Sanskrit and Pali. A creative extension of his academic interests over four decades has taken him to rendering into English Kalidasa’s great classic Meghadutam in vers libre. Among other posts and assignments he came to have in his long career, he was Professor of English in the Department of English, B. R. A. Bihar University, Muzaffarpur in India and the Faculty of Arts, Taiz University in Yemen. He was also a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla between 1985 and 1987. His publications include a number of essays and articles on various topics in different languages such as Kabir in Tagore’s Translation, Lochan-Vimarsh and the Dhvanyalok, besides his translation of a Sahitya Akademi monograph on Nammalwar, the Tamil poet-saint, translated from English into Maithili.