The deep layering of Sanskrit narrative has also dictated that we use quotation marks only to announce the beginning and end of every direct speech, and not at the beginning of every paragraph.
CSL Punctuation of Sanskrit
The Sanskrit text is also punctuated, in accordance with the punc- tuation of the English translation. In mid-verse, the punctuation will not alter the sandhi or the scansion. Proper names are capitalized. Most Sanskrit meters have four “feet” (pada); where possible we print the common sloka meter on two lines. In the Sanskrit text, we use French Guillemets (e.g., «kva samcicirsuh?») instead of English quotation marks (e.g., “Where are you off to?”) to avoid confusion with the apostrophes used for vowel elision in sandhi.
SANDHI
Sanskrit presents the learner with a challenge: sandhi (euphonic com- bination). Sandhi means that when two words are joined in connected speech or writing (which in Sanskrit reflects speech), the last letter (or even letters) of the first word often changes; compare the way we pronounce “the” in “the beginning” and “the end.”
In Sanskrit the first letter of the second word may also change; and if both the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the second are vowels, they may fuse. This has a parallel in English: a nasal consonant is inserted between two vowels that would otherwise coalesce: “a pear” and “an apple.” Sanskrit vowel fusion may produce ambiguity.
The charts on the following pages give the full sandhi system.
Fortunately it is not necessary to know these changes in order to start reading Sanskrit. All that is important to know is the form of the second word without sandhi (pre-sandhi), so that it can be recognized or looked up in a dictionary. Therefore we are printing Sanskrit with a system of punctuation that will indicate, unambiguously, the original form of the second word, i.e., the form without sandhi. Such sandhi mostly concerns the fusion of two vowels.
In Sanskrit, vowels may be short or long and are written differently accordingly. We follow the general convention that a vowel with no mark above it is short. Other books mark a long vowel either with a bar called a macron (a) or with a circumflex (a). Our system uses the ________
macron, except that for initial vowels in sandhi we use a circumflex to indicate that originally the vowel was short, or the shorter of two possibilities (e rather than ai, o rather than au).
When we print initial a, before sandhi that vowel was a
’, before sandhi there was a vowel a
When a final short vowel (a, i, or u) has merged into a following vowel, we print ” at the end of the word, and when a final long vowel (a, i, or u) has merged into a following vowel we print ” at the end of the word. The vast majority of these cases will concern a final a or a. See, for instance, the following examples:
What before sandhi was atra asti is represented as atr’ asti
Finally, three other points concerning the initial letter of the sec- ond word:
(1) A word that before sandhi begins with r (vowel), after sandhi begins with r followed by a consonant: yatha” rtu represents pre-sandhi yatha rtu.
(2) When before sandhi the previous word ends in t and the following word begins with s, after sandhi the last letter of the previous word is c ________
and the following word begins with ch: syac chastravit represents pre-sandhi syat sastravit.
(3) Where a word begins with h and the previous word ends with a double consonant, this is our simplified spelling to show the pre-sandhi form: tad hasati is commonly written as tad dhasati, but we write tadd hasati so that the original initial letter is obvious.
COMPOUNDS
We also punctuate the division of compounds (samasa), simply by inserting a thin vertical line between words. There are words where the decision whether to regard them as compounds is arbitrary. Our principle has been to try to guide readers to the correct dictionary entries.
Exemplar of CSL Style
Where the Devanagari script reads:
Others would print:
We print:
And in English:
May Ganesha’s domed forehead protect you! Streaked with vermilion dust, it seems to be emitting the spreading rays of the rising sun to pacify the teeming darkness of obstructions.
(“Nava·sahasanka and the Serpent Princess” 1.3)
Wordplay
Classical Sanskrit literature can abound in puns (slesa). Such parono- masia, or wordplay, is raised to a high art; rarely is it a cliche. Multiple meanings merge (slisyanti) into a single word or phrase. Most common are pairs of meanings, but as many as ten separate meanings are attested. To mark the parallel senses in the English, as well as the punning original in the Sanskrit, we use a slanted font (different from italic) and a triple colon (⋮) to separate the alternatives. E.g.
It is right that poets should fall silent upon hearing the Kadamba- ri, for the sacred law rules that recitation must be suspended when the sound of an arrow ⋮ the poetry of Bana is heard.
(Someshvara·deva’s “Moonlight of Glory” 1.15)
T
his volume is substantially the work of Friedhelm Hardy. When he died suddenly in 2005 on his sixtieth birthday, he left a vast amount of unpublished papers, including a large number of editions and annotated trans- lations of Sanskrit and Prakrit works. Though all the work was legible, none of it was dated, and where there was more than one version, it was usually not possible to tell which represented his final wishes.
For Go·vardhana he left well over a thousand pages. He evidently changed his mind more than once about the form in which he wanted to publish them. He wrote perhaps half a dozen introductions, none complete. Many of the verses he translated twice, but about fifty of them, scattered through the work, apparently not at all.
Three CSL editors, Richard Gombrich, Sheldon Pollock, and Somdev Vasudeva, have primarily shared the task of putting the work that Fred (as we knew him) left unfinished into presentable form. We hope—albeit with little confidence—that he would not have been too cross with our inadequate efforts.
A Poetic Exploration of Love and Life,
Women and Gods from Twelfth-century Bengal
G
o·vardhana, like his classical model Hala, has been a source of entertainment and fascination for me for nearly forty years. These miniature poems make ideal reading for moments of leisure and reflection, and in the company of congenial friends offer ample amusement.
But those forty years have seen many changes, both in my own attitudes and in the cultural environment. Intellectual fashions are almost as transient as those of clothes, and so are a society’s moral climate and aesthetic sense. Inevitably my own perception of Go·vardhana has been influenced by these factors. He has become more, not less, of a problem and a challenge. In presenting the full corpus of his poetry, I was initially tempted to relate it explicitly to some contemporary issue, by extricating a particular position on, for example, the relationship between religion and human love. But this temptation had to be resisted: what may be a hot issue at the time of writing will surely be outdated in a few years’ time. Moreover, this kind of approach to culturally alien material, viz. using it merely as raw material to back up some fashionable grand theory orism, represents to me a travesty of scholarship. Instead, let