Recognition of Shakuntala

'The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance' - Willis G. Regier, "The Chronicle Review". 'No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience' - "The Times Higher Education Supplement". 'The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot...Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes' - "New Criterion". 'Published in the geek-chic format' - "BookForum". 'Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs' - "Tricycle". 'Now an ambitious new publishing project, the Clay Sanskrit Library brings together leading Sanskrit translators and scholars of Indology from around the world to celebrate in translating the beauty and range of classical Sanskrit literature...Published as smart green hardbacks that are small enough to fit into a jeans pocket, the volumes are meant to satisfy both the scholar and the lay reader. Each volume has a transliteration of the original Sanskrit text on the left-hand page and an English translation on the right, as also a helpful introduction and notes. Alongside definitive translations of the great Indian epics - 30 or so volumes will be devoted to the "Mahabharat" itself - Clay Sanskrit Library makes available to the English-speaking reader many other delights: The earthy verse of Bhartrihari, the pungent satire of Jayanta Bhatta and the roving narratives of Dandin, among others. All these writers belong properly not just to Indian literature, but to world literature' - "LiveMint". 'The Clay Sanskrit Library has recently set out to change the scene by making available well-translated dual-language (English and Sanskrit) editions of popular Sanskritic texts for the public' - "Namarupa". 'This hardback version of Kalidasa's "Shakuntala" is for the erudite as well as the lay reader...Sanskrit is a notoriously difficult language to translate and, since the 18th century, many other translators have grappled with the power of Kalidasa. Somadeva Vasudeva's elegant new translation of "Shakuntala" for Clay Sanskrit Library is the latest of several extant translations, such as the one by Arthur Ryder, translated in 1912...This new translation of Shakuntala presents freshly an evergreen poet in whose work, to quote one of his translators, 'all life, from plant to god, is one' - "LiveMint". This play was one of the first examples of Indian literature to be seen in Europe; it attracted considerable attention (among others, from Goethe), and indeed pained surprise that such a sophisticated art-form could have developed without the rest of the world noticing. A good deal of that surprise will be revived by the hitherto untranslated Kashmirian recension. Kalidasa's "The Recognition of Shakuntala" is a play that scarcely needs introduction. Among the first works of Sanskrit literature translated into European languages, its skilful plot of thwarted love and eventual redemption has long charmed audiences around the world. Shakuntala's story is a leitmotiv that recurs in many works of Indian literature and culminates in the master Kalidasa's drama for the stage. It is co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation.