Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, towards its end, cites a verse from Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam, accompanied by the Merton & Moussaief translation. The original Sanskrit reads:
In the words of Merton & Moussaief:
We may call it nostalgia; the Germans, Sehnsucht; the Portuguese, saudade; the Persians, دلتنگی; Proust, a remembrance of things past that draws you into une recherche du temps perdu. Kālidāsa sees in this form of recognition (which, not-so-incidentally, is fundamental to the plotline of the Śākuntalam) something deeply and fundamentally part of being human. Our old loves are never really lost; if they were true loves, sauhṛdāni, minglings of hearts, then they transform who we are for eternity. (And for Kālidāsa, it really is eternity!) They are fixed points within the flux of Being—within human beings, and within Being itself, shot through with human experiences.
What Kālidāsa does not say in this one verse is what we should do with this insight. We may choose to cling on to these points of stability, and to thus anchor ourselves in the past. Or we may choose to cast ourselves into the flow of being, while nonetheless retaining our knowledge of these fixed points, using them like stars to help us navigate uncharted waters.
ramyāṇi vīkṣya madhurāṃś ca niśamya śabdān
paryutsuko bhavati yat sukhito ’pi jantuḥ |
tac cetasā smarati nūnam abodha-pūrvam
bhāva-sthirāṇi jananântara-sauhṛdāni ||
In the words of Merton & Moussaief:
Even the man who is happy glimpses something
Or a thread of sound touches him
And his heart overflows with a longing
he does not recognize
Then it must be that he is remembering
a place out of reach people he loved
In a life before this their pattern
Still there in him waiting
I would translate it slightly differently:
Seeing something beautiful,
Hearing something sweet,
He begins to yearn for something—
although he was happy before this.
Surely he remembers something,
if only subconsciously:
Loves from lost lives
Indelibly imprinted in Being
We may call it nostalgia; the Germans, Sehnsucht; the Portuguese, saudade; the Persians, دلتنگی; Proust, a remembrance of things past that draws you into une recherche du temps perdu. Kālidāsa sees in this form of recognition (which, not-so-incidentally, is fundamental to the plotline of the Śākuntalam) something deeply and fundamentally part of being human. Our old loves are never really lost; if they were true loves, sauhṛdāni, minglings of hearts, then they transform who we are for eternity. (And for Kālidāsa, it really is eternity!) They are fixed points within the flux of Being—within human beings, and within Being itself, shot through with human experiences.
What Kālidāsa does not say in this one verse is what we should do with this insight. We may choose to cling on to these points of stability, and to thus anchor ourselves in the past. Or we may choose to cast ourselves into the flow of being, while nonetheless retaining our knowledge of these fixed points, using them like stars to help us navigate uncharted waters.
Beautiful, thanks. Both your version and theirs are different ways of interpreting the original, which yields itself to further other interpretations.
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