Twenty-Two Goblins
By Translated from the Sanskrit - Arthur W. Ryder
Shiva lives in a city called Benares. Pious people like the soil of Mount Kailasa love it. The river of heaven shines there like a pearl necklace. And in the town lived a king called Valour who burned up all his enemies with courage, as a fire burned a forest. He had a son named Thunderbolt, who broke the pride of the love-god with his beauty and the pride of men by his bravery. This prince had a clever friend, the son of a counsellor. One day, the prince enjoyed himself while his friend was hunting, and they went far. And so he came to a great forest.
There, he saw a beautiful lake, and being tired, he drank from it with his friend, the counsellor’s son, washed his hands and feet, and sat down under a tree on the bank. And then he saw a beautiful maiden who had come there with her servants to bathe. She seemed to fill the lake with the stream of her beauty, make lilies grow there with her eyes, and shame the lotuses with a face more lovely than the moon. She captured the prince’s heart the moment that he saw her. And the prince took her eyes captive. When she saw him, the girl had a strange feeling but was too modest to say a word.
So she gave a hint of the feeling in her heart. She put a lotus on her ear, laid a lily on her head after making the edge look like a row of teeth, and placed her hand on her heart. But the prince did not understand her signs; only the clever counsellor’s son understood them. A moment later, the girl went away, led by her servants. She went home, sat on the sofa, and stayed there. But her thoughts were with the prince. The prince went slowly back to his city, was lonely without her, and grew thinner daily. Then, his friend, the counsellor’s son, took him aside and told him she was not hard to find.
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Translated from the Sanskrit - Arthur W. Ryder
Arthur William Ryder (March 8, 1877 – March 21, 1938) was a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley.
Biography.
He is best known for translating several Sanskrit works into English, including the Panchatantra and the Bhagavad Gita. In 1905, when still at Harvard, Ryder translated Śudraka’s Mṛcchakatika into English as The Little Clay Cart, published as volume 9 of the Harvard Oriental Series. He translated Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam, Meghadūta, and other works, as well as the Bhagavad Gita and several volumes of verse translated from works by Bhartṛhari and others.
His prose translations included the Panchatantra in 1925, excerpts from which were published as Gold’s Gloom, Daṇḍin’s Daśakumāracarita as The Ten Princes of Dandin, and Twenty-Two Goblins, a translation of Vetala Panchavimshati. He also wrote excellent original verses, which he circulated privately but did not publish. Some verses from his translations were set to music. His Little Clay Cart was enacted at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1907, a production that included a real live elephant on stage. Also enacted there in 1914 was Shakuntala, which was performed by the Mountain Play Association, who were invited to perform there after their performance in a natural amphitheatre on top of Mount Tamalpais, California. These two were the only Indian dramas performed there until 2004.
His Little Clay Cart was also enacted in New York City in 1924 at the Neighborhood Playhouse, which was then an off-Broadway theatre, at the Theater de Lys in 1953, and at the Potboiler Art Theater in Los Angeles in 1926, when it featured actors such as James A. Marcus, Symona Boniface, and Gale Gordon. Following his death in 1938, some of his original poems were published in a posthumous memorial volume with a biography and several of his translated verses. This was the only book of original poetry published by the University of California Press for several decades.
Translated from the Sanskrit - Arthur W. Ryder
