The Book of Lost Books (14 page)

The Recognition of
akuntala
, to give it its original name, has many of K
lid
sa's dramatic preoccupations: romantic misfortune, magical intervention, enchantment and disenchantment. It opens with King Dushyanta on a hunting expedition, meeting with the maiden
akuntal
. They marry in secret and he gives her a ring, but is called back to court, and promises to send for her. A curse makes him forget, and when the pregnant
akuntal
finally finds him, he cannot recognize her, nor can she prove she is his beloved, since the ring has been lost. It is found in the belly of a fish, and the couple are reunited.

A synopsis can hardly do justice to the charm of the piece, nor can a translation ever capture the subtleties of alliteration, homonymy, and wordplay. Moments in another of his plays,
Urva
i Won by Valor
, have the feel of an exotic, late-period Shakespeare: the nymph Urva
i is won by the King Pururavas only after he descends into madness, and she must escape a curse that will turn her back into a celestial being at the moment she sees her child's face. Given the scant nature of the K
lid
sa canon, alongside the undeniable problems of translation, it is unremarkable though unfortunate that he has also been misprized. Max Muller famously damned his work with faint praise, saying his “plays are not superior to many plays that have been allowed to rest in dust and peace on the shelves of our libraries.”

Muller may well think so, but his opinion does not explain K
lid
sa's high esteem by his native peers. An anonymous panegyric said, “Once, when the poets were counted, K
lid
sa occupied the little finger; the ring finger remains unnamed true to its name [the Sanskrit for ring finger means, literally, ‘without name']; for his second has not been found.”