He sent a copy to Goethe, who was so enthusiastic about the drama that he sang its praises in two couplets:
If in one word of blooms of early and fruits of riper years,
Of excitement and enchantment I should tell,
Of fulfilment and content, of Heaven and Earth;
Then will l but say Sakuntala and have said all. *
Goethe had the lines printed in the Deutsche Monatsschrift (German Monthly Journal) the same year. Goethe wrote later: “Recalling the enthusiasm with which we Germans welcomed this translation of Sakuntala we can attribute the pleasure it gave us to the prose in which it came to us”. (5)
In Goethe’s correspondence and diaries, it is revealed that it held a special place in Goethe’s heart. (6)
French Scholar Antoine Leonard de Chezy presented Goethe with his French edition of Sakuntalam. In a letter of gratitude to Chezy, Goethe opened up himself before the European world: "The first time I came upon this inexhaustible work, [Sakuntala] it aroused such enthusiasm in me and so held me that I could not stop studying it. I even felt impelled to make the impossible attempt to bring it in some form to the German stage. These efforts were fruitless but they made me so thoroughly acquainted with this most valuable work, it represented such an "epoch in my life", I so absorbed it, that for thirty years I did not look at either the English or the German version. It is only now that I understand the enormous impression that work, made on me at an earlier age."
German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who was also living in Weimar at that time, set Goethe's couplet at the head of his article, On the Eastern Drama (1792). He said about the text, “I cannot find a product of the human mind more pleasant than this, a real blossom of the Orient, the first and most beautiful of its kind.” He also said that India was a holy land he yearned for.
He mentioned Sakuntalam again in 1798: “Since Sakuntala is unfortunately still the only example of her (India’s) perfected culture, one lingers with pleasure over it. We must have more Sakuntalas shortly, for they are the finest contributions to the cultural history of the peoples”. (7)
In 1803, Herder published Forster’s translation of the drama again and added a dedication to which he gave renewed his admiration for Kalidasa. Friedrich Schlegel came to know Forster’s first edition at the Leipzig Fair, and he wrote to his brother and poet August Schelegel about Sakuntala. He went later to Paris to learn Sanskrit and introduced the study of Indology into Germany.
Forster’s work had a very considerable influence on German middle-class society.
Friedrich Rueckert translated the drama directly from Sanskrit into German again in 1855, but it was only published in 1867, after his death.
The publication of Heinrich Heine’s posthumous works in 1869 brought to light that Heine had noticed something very special about Indian drama. In the chapter entitled Thoughts and Ideas he wrote: “Goethe made use of Sakuntalam at the beginning of Faust." (8) Goethe conceived the idea of the Vorspiel auf dem Theater (Prelude) in Faust from the prologue to Sakuntalam. All Sanskrit dramas will have a prayer in the beginning. In Sakuntala, an actor appears first on the stage and prays to Siva. Indian drama was part of a long religious ceremony filling several hours. Then the stage director comes on and informs the heroine that Kalidisa’s drama Sakuntalam is to be performed before an enlightened audience. The stage director then calls on the leading actress to sing a strophe in praise of the prevailing summer.
In Goethe’s prologue, the director comes out on the stage with the poet and the comedian and asks both for their help. He is embarrassed, for his audience is enlightened. The poet thinks only of posterity. The comedian will hear nothing of posterity and wants only to amuse contemporaries. The director demands an impressive spectacle. “Plunge into the fullness of life”, the comedian advises the poet; “everybody lives it, but few know it. And wherever you seize upon it, it is amusing.”
The poet speaks of “the urge towards truth and the joy of deceiving”. The three thus discourse on the deepest problems of art. Kalidasa followed the old Indian custom of composing a short prologue which introduces the audience to the poet and the title of the play. He used it to flatter his audience, composed of just a small group of gentlemen, nobles and Brahmans, higher officials, and perhaps a few wealthy merchants, who gathered on some festive occasion in a comparatively small theatre or the king’s court. The mass of the people was not even speaking chaste Sanskrit. They did not even understand the play. Thus, while the two prologues are different, the fact is that Kalidasa inspired Goethe to experiment with the alienation technique in drama, much much before the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht tried it.
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Forster
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Goethe also became acquainted with Kalidasa’s play Meghadootam, the Cloud Messenger, from H. H. Wilson's translation into English. In 1811 Wilson was appointed First secretary to the newly founded Asiatic Society in Bengal, and in 1813 he published the text and translation of the Meghadootam in Calcutta. In this poem, a spirit banned from its world sends a message through a cloud to his beloved in his homeland. Goethe wrote an epigram on this: (9)
What more pleasant could man wish?
Sakontala, Nala, these must one kiss;
And Megha-Duta, the cloud messenger,
Who would not send him to a soul sister!
In his “Notes to the West-East Divan,” Goethe recorded: “The first meeting with a work such as this is always an event in our lives”. (10)But he also criticised Wilson’s translation as too smooth. In 1826 Wilhelm von Humboldt praised this play for its wonderful description of the beginning of the rainy season when the first clouds come up from the South.
After C. Schuetz published the first prose translation of Sakuntalam in 1859 in Bielefeld, several others followed, some of them in verse.
In 1827 H H Wilson’s English translation of Kalidasa’s drama Urvasi Won by Valour (Vikramorvaseeyam) and a short summary of his third drama Malavika and Agnimitra became known in Europe. Malavika Agnimitram was translated into German by Berlin Indologist A. Weber in 1856. No less a man than prominent German Jew novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger prepared it for the German stage in 1917 under the title, The King and the Dancer.
Vikramorvaseeyam was published in 1814 by Bollensen in a German translation. Rueckert had only included a few translated Verses in his summary of 1834. In 1833 Rueckert also translated a few verses from Kalidasa’s epic poem, The Line of Raghu (Raghu Vamsa)—the section containing Aja’s mourning for his dead wife Indumati. A free metric translation appeared in German done by A. F. Von Schack in 1890 and in prose by O. Walter in 1914.
Kalidasa’s sixth work, The Birth of the War God (Kumara Sambhavam), was translated by Griffith into English in 1879 and by O. Walter into German prose in 1913.
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Herder
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Thus, it took over a hundred years for all six of Kalidasa’s works to reach Germans in translations. In 1921, Indologist Alfred Hillebrandt (1853-1957) first published his work, Kalidasa: An Attempt at a Literary Appraisal, in Breslau. It was written in 1918, during the war.
Studies on Kalidasa
Hillebrandt studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the University of Breslau as a student of Adolf Friedrich Stenzler, then continued his studies at the University of Munich under Martin Haug. In 1883 he became an associate professor at Breslau, where in 1887 he attained a full professorship.
His speciality was Vedic mythology. Varuna und Mitra, ein Beitrag Zur Exegese des Veda (Varuna and Mitra, a contribution to the exegesis of the Veda, 1877) was a prologue to his great work Vedische Mythologie (1891-1902), which was later translated into English and published as "Vedic mythology". Hillebrandt also wrote:
Das altindische Neu- und Vollmondsopfer (The ancient Indian New and Full Moon Sacrifices, 1880), Vedachrestomathie (Vedic chrestomathy, 1885), A section on religious antiquities in Georg Bühler's Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde (Outline of Indo-Aryan Philology and Archaeology, 1897), Alt-Indien, Kulturgeschichtliche Skizzen (Historical Culture Sketches of Ancient India, 1899), and translation of Vishakadatta's play Mudrarakshasam Part-I )
In the study on Kalidasa, he describes the times, works and art of the poet in 166 pages and comes to the conclusion that “Kalidasa can never approach the popularity of our ancient classics amongst us.” Indian Literature is “too far removed from our sensitivity to competing with Homer or with the poet of the Antigone, or to hold permanently the interest of educated persons in the way Shakespeare or Dante does …. We find too little manly strength, too little dramatic élan, too little inner struggle and revolt against fate… We demand deeper problems." (11)
But no one can accept Hillebrandt’s shoddy judgment. Hillebrandt wrote for a narrow circle of educated persons who were searching for a way out of Germany’s post-war misery in world literature. Germany cannot demand a “revolt against fate” etc. from an Indian classical poet. Kalidasa wrote for the peace-loving Indian people, who never wanted a tragedy in theatre, and Sage Bharata prohibited tragedies in Indian theatre in his treatise, Natya Shastra. Except for a couple of tragedies, Indian theatre is generally for happy endings. Germans have to try to understand Kalidasa in his own background-Goethe and Herder had found a great poet in Kalidasa, who loved his fellowmen and gave vent their passions, joys and sorrows vividly, and he had a critical attitude towards the weaknesses of the ruling elite of his time.
Kalidasa‘s world is strange to Europeans. But Germans, and Europe for that matter, need to understand this world. Once through the strange outer boundaries, they quickly find the general human content within. The European world will be poor if they remain confined to their own German or European culture.
The German naturalist, traveller and statesman Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) wrote about Indian poetry and observed that Kalidasa is a masterly describer of the influence which Nature exercises upon the minds of lovers. This great poet flourished at the splendid court of Vikramaditya, and was, therefore, contemporary with Virgil and Horace. Tenderness in the expression of feeling, and richness of creative fancy, have assigned to him his lofty place among the poets of all nations. (12)
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Hillebrandt
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Georg Forster, the Jacobin, wrote in his introduction to his translation of Sakuntalam (1791): “Every country has its peculiarities, which influence the spiritual powers and the organisations of its people. If we compare these varying individualities and separate the general from the local, we shall arrive at the right understanding of mankind... Here an entirely new vista opens up before our feelings and our imagination, an extraordinarily beautiful individuality of the human character... It is necessary to set out clearly how the differences between Indian mythology, history and customs and the Greek, for instance, lend the artworks of that country an unusual form and appearance to us, but also to show how the significant thing about such works is not whether they consist of five or seven scenes, but that the most delicate feelings which the human heart can sense can be just as finely expressed on the Ganges by dark brown people as on the Rhine, the Tiber or the Ilissus by our white races”. (13)
Walter Ruben's Views
Acknowledging this view, Walter Ruben (1899-19820, a renowned German Marxist Indologist studied Kalidasa in detail and produced an important book in German, Kalidasa Die menschliche Bedeutung seiner Werke (Kalidasa and the Human Meaning of His Works -1957). Ruben belonged to the ranks of the great German Indologists such as Max Muller, Hermann Oldenberg, Hermann Jacobi and Heinrich Luders, who devoted their lives to building up intellectual relations between Germany and India. To Ruben, the studies of Indian history and languages were not an end in itself but an endeavour to find things from the point of view of continuity in India’s historical progress through various social formations. (14) Thus, he studied Kalidasa from a historical perspective.
He alludes to Kalidasa's death in Sri Lanka. King Kumaradasa of Ceylon wrote one day on the wall of a courtesan’s room the beginning- of a verse (he was himself a poet) and offered gold as a prize for anyone who completed the verse. Kalidasa did so, but the courtesan, greedy for gold, killed him, buried him and herself took credit for the poem. Of course, the King detected the deception, for he was familiar with Kalidasa’s art.
King Kumaradasa of Ceylon is said to have ascended the throne in 515, and this seems to fit in with Kalidasa’s time, even though dates are often contradictory. Presumably, Kalidasa was already well known in 473, for at that time a poet in Mandasor (which is near Kalidasa’s home) caused an inscription to be carved on the sun temple, some of whose verses are modelled on Kalidasa’s. Others assert that Kalidasa can only have composed one part of his “Line of Raghu” after 455. In this part, he praises the mythical King Raghu on account of a victory he won over the Huns. Th^ oldest victory of an Indian king over the Huns known to us, however, was that of King Skandagupta of the glorious Gupta dynasty, who ascended the throne in 455.
So, Kalidasa would have lived between Skanda Gupta’s time (approximately 455-467) and Kumaradasa’s (515) but was already being imitated in 473. Other Indologists think that Kalidasa had already lived under Samudragupta and (or) Chandragupta II (375-375 or 375— 413), that he praised the victories of these in his works, and also that these two kings had taken the additional name of Vikrama, at whose court Kalidasa is traditionally supposed to have lived.
If these chronological assumptions are correct, Kalidasa lived in the times of the famous Gupta kings, between 320 and 455 which is generally regarded as India’s golden age. In the times of the above-mentioned Chandragupta II — perhaps also in Kalidasa’s time — a Chinese Buddhist, Fa Hsien, lived for about ten years in the Kingdom of the Guptas and left an enthusiastic description of conditions there.
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1. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, New York, Oriental Renaissance, p 53
2. Dorothy Matilda Figueira, Translating the Orient, The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Albany, 1991, p 26
3. Quoted in Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Calcutta 1946, p 175
4. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, p 391-2
5. Walter Ruben, Kalidasa: The Human Meaning of His Works, trans. Joan Becker,
People's Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984, p 2
6. J.W. von Goethe, Werke, Weimar ed.(W.A), Weimar, 1887-1912, cited from Translating the Orient, 215,p 5
7. Ruben, p 1
8. Ibid, p 2
9. Ibid, p 5
10. Ibid, p 5
11. Ibid, p 4-5
12. Quoted in the Introduction, Monier Williams, Sakoontala: or the Lost Ring, Hertford, 1855, x
13. Ruben, p 7
14. Abanti Kumar Sanyal, A Tribute, Walter Ruben, Kalidasa: The Human Meaning of His Works, trans. Joan Becker, People's Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984
15. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, New York, p 51,53
16. Dorothy, Translating the Orient, p 12
17.Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p 31
18. Marie E.D.Meester, Oriental Influence in the English Literature of the Early Nineteenth Century, p10
19. P.V. De Sola, Sir William Jones and English Literature, p 694
20. Moniere Williams, Sakoontala, p xi-xii
21. Ibid, p xiii
22. Ibid, p xii
23. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p 53
* Translation by E.B.Eastwick:
Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its decline,
And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed,
Wouldst thou the earth and Heaven itself in one sole name combine?
I name thee, O Sakuntala! And all at once is said.
© Ramachandran