What could a message mean to a cloud? Kalidasa travels West

摘要

This article concerns the issue of cultural re-framing of a work from a distant time and place. I look at two translations of Kalidasa's poem Meghaduta, “The Cloud Messenger.” The first, published by Horace Wilson in 1814, was a highly assimilative translation but was very intelligently framed in Wilson's introduction and extensive annotations to make the poem legible to readers of the Greek and Roman classics while bringing out cultural difference. My second example, by the American translator Leonard Nathan in 1976, is a much better translation but actually a less successful cultural re-framing, as Nathan's introduction and notes play down the poem's violence and eroticism in order to give the poem a quasi-New-Critical balance and harmony. In discussing these translations, I ask how they work for readers with no knowledge of Sanskrit or of ancient Indian culture, using the translations to suggest ways in which readers can negotiate radical cultural/temporal difference.