"They say that if a man's born to a trade He shouldn't give it up however low it may be. Even the softest-hearted butcher Is in the cruel job of slaughtering animals." It is impossible to understand where he gets the reference to the butcher from when the text refers to a sottia - srotriya in Sanskrit learned brahmin in English. The fisherman is having a dig at the holy brahmin when he says, "The learned brahmin, most tender-hearted, cruelly kills animals (at sacrifices), does he not?" Since Sanskrit plays were written for a highly educated and sophisticated audience it was natural that the dialogues should be a free mixture of prose and verse. This raises for the English translator the problem of method for the adequate rendering of the stanzas. The great Sanskrit scholar Monier Williams felt that the first translation of Shakuntalam, all in prose, made by Sir William Jones at the end of the eighteenth century was not adapted to meet the needs of a great play and opted for blank verse as the uniform vehicle for rendering the great variety of metres in which the shiokaswere composed. Fifty years later, in 1910, A.W. Ryder took a different view and chose the rhymed verse as the medium of translation. The result was not a conspicuous success, however. The short couplets fail to convey the rich euphonious melody of a sharduldrvikriditam or a shikharini shioka. For instance, the famous Shioka with which Kanva comes on the stage in the fourth act is translated by Ryder, ^Shakuntala must go today; /1 miss her now at heart; / I dare not speak a loving word / Or choking tears will start." Mr. Coulson decides to keep carefully the distinction between prose and verse in his translation, and so far verse is concerned, to adhere to the four-line structure of the original in the hope, as he puts it, of suggesting something of the variety of the metres. His poetic talent however is not up to the task. In the result the free verse of his four-lined stanzas fails to suggest either the form or the cadence of the shiokas. The reason seems to me to be lack of style, and even of felicity of expression. Upama Kalidasasya is a common evocation of his poesy among us. The translator's task is hardest when he comes up against a breath-taking simile of the poet, meditates on it and tries to recapture its fulness and intensity in the other language. If his grasp of the original is complete he will not omit to give due place to every significant word in his rende-reing. For instance, stanza 21 (Mr. Coulson's numbering) in the fourth Journal of Arts and Ideas 77