130 When Greek and French were translated into English in previous centuries, the translator felt constrained to produce a beautiful poem in English because it was reasonable to assume that if the reader was educated to any significant degree,he would read the original. The main raison d^tre of the translation was, therefore, to create an English poem "inspired" by the original, a poem as good for the English reader as the Greek poem was for the Greek reader. Moreover, translation was the perfect medium for the scholar-poet to display his creativity and erudition. With Sanskrit, however, one can hardly expect even the educated reader to know the original, but one can expect a more serious interest in its own, exotic form. One is, therefore, released on the one hand from the obligation to make the translation "esthetic" in the English manner, in a recognizable English verse form; and, on the other hand, the translator owes his reader a more thorough preservation of the true content of the original. In his introduction to Poems from the Sanskrit (Penguin, 1968), John Brough remarks that English must not strain to imitate structural features of the original which English cannot accommodate. The artificial use in English of long compounds, for example, would usually destroy more important poetical qualities of the original. And Ingalls, in his introduction to An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry (Harvard Oriental Series, 1965), remarks that the long compound typical of Sanskrit appears "even to some extent in English, where it usually produces a humorous or barbarous effect." Yet both Brough and Ingalls resort to these long compounds in their introductory explanations in order to show the reader the true nature of the raw material, Ingails offers such a translation of Kumarasambhava 8.72 (" - these soft under-the-branches-fallen-flowers. . . .n) though he regards it as "so literal that it is almost unintelligible." Now, granted that such literal rendition of compounds is a highly unorthodox form of English verse, the English language can certainly strain to accommodate it; and, indeed, it is basically more straightforward and more easily intelligible than the widely accepted English verse of Ezra Pound, e. e, cummings, and others. The problems involved in unraveling the lines of causation within the compounds face the Sanskrit reader as they do the English reader; there is no reason to suppose that the English reader, once aware of the challenge, will be less able to solve the puzzle, which is half the fun of the Sanskrit verse, a pleasure which all other forms of translation automatically exclude.