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KING Yes. I shall release you -SAKUNTALA When?KING When?When, like a bee, I kiss the bud of your unbruised lipAnd flood my thirsting mouth with nectar.Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, their separation by a curse, and eventual reunion, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition ofSakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to certain types of mystical experience.The pioneering English translation of Sakuntala in 1789 caused a sensation among European composers and writers (including Goethe), and it continues to be performed around the world. This vibrant new verse translation includes the famous version of the story from the Mahabharata, a poetic anddramatic text in its own right and a likely source for Kalidasa. The introduction discusses the play in the aesthetic and cultural context of ancient India.… (more)
User reviews
And remember, this is a story about true, romantic love in a world where the king already has two wives and has to leave all the time to fight demons, where he never sees his kid until he's four years old and then the kid's all "you're not my dada!" (The kid is also the personification of India. Indra's charioteer makes fun of Dusyanta for being overawed by the sky god's sweet ride. The comic, the smiling Bollywood or sitcomic even, sits so comfortably within and around the epic here). This is a love story that, with all its ambiguities and little fears teasened out by circumstances only so they can be swept away by passion and happily-ever-after, a post-fallow fruition like all the real stories--this is a love story that can speak to us now, not as a part of our archetypal monogamous-nuclear-family-style romantic heritage (monogamonucleosis?) but against the odds as reflecting the real circumstances of our lives.
I've already alluded to Shakespeare twice. Shit. This play is fuller of sap and mood swings than Romeo and Juliet. It's a lusher, more magnificent cosmic verdation than The Winter's Tale, which I expected this book to recall for me. I didn't expect to think of Much Ado About Nothing--but Sakuntala's fuller of that fascinating mix of the placid and fearsome, the joy of the young and divine that can't quite banish the troubling social and gender dynamics burbling underneath. I can do better than just comparing this to Shakespeare. But I'll have another chance. New seasons will come in their multiplicity, and I'll visit Sakuntala's bower again.