Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Two. On Literature
The Poetry of Kalidasa
On Translating Kalidasa [7]
The prose of Kalidasa’s dialogue is the most unpretentious and admirable prose in Sanscrit literature; it is perfectly simple, easy in pitch and natural in tone with a shining, smiling, rippling lucidity, a soft, carolling gait like a little girl running along in a meadow and smiling back at you as she goes.
There is the true image of it; a quiet English meadow with wild flowers on a bright summer morning, breezes abroad, the smell of hay in the neighbourhood, honeysuckle on the bank, hedges full of convolvuli1 or wild roses, a ditch on one side with cress and2 forget-me-nots and nothing pronounced or poignant except perhaps a stray whiff of meadowsweet from a distance.
This admirable unobtrusive charm and just observed music (Coleridge) makes it run easily 
into verse in English.
In translating one has at first some vague idea of reproducing the form as well as the spirit of the Sanscrit, rendering verse stanza by verse stanza and prose movement by prose movement.
But it will soon be discovered that except in the talk of the buffoon and not always then Kalidasa’s prose never evokes its just echo, never finds its answering pitch, tone or quality in English prose.
The impression it creates is in no way different from Shakespeare’s verse taken anywhere at its easiest and sweetest
Your lord does know my mind: I cannot love him:
Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth;
In voices well divulged, free, learned and valiant;
And in dimension in3 the shape of nature
A gracious person; but yet I cannot love him.
He might have took his answer long ago4.
Or again still more close in its subtle and telling simplicity
Ol. What is your parentage?
Vi. Above my fortunes, yet my state is well.
I am a gentleman.
Ol. Get you to your lord;
I cannot love him: let him send no more;
Unless perchance you come5 to me again
To tell me how he takes it6.
There is absolutely no difference between this and the prose of Kalidasa, since even the absence of metre is compensated by the natural majesty, grace and rhythmic euphony of the Sanscrit language and the sweet seriousness and lucid effectiveness it naturally wears when it is not tortured for effects.