In many places, on the other hand, the poem follows the drama very closely. For instance, the passage in the first canto describing the mad elephant (pp. 14, 15)[221] is a paraphrase of the warning uttered by one of the holy men in Act 1. Sc. 4 (ed. Kale, p. 40). The discourse of Śakuntalā with her friends (pp. 37, 38), the incident of the bee and Priyamvadā's playful remark (pp. 38-40) are closely modelled after the fourth scene of Act 1. Many passages of the poem are in fact nothing but translations. Thus the words which the king on leaving, writes to Śakuntalā (p. 78):
Doch mein Herz wird stets zurückbewegt,
Wie die wehende Fahne an der Stange,
Die man vollem Wind entgegenträgt—
are a pretty close rendering of the final words of the king's soliloquy at the end of Act 1:
gacchati puraḥ śarīraṃ dhāvati paścād asaṃstutaṃ cētaḥ cīnāṃśukam
iva kētōḥ prativātam nīyamānasya
"my body goes forward; the mind not agreeing with it flies backward like the silken streamer of a banner borne against the wind."
A large part of the whole poem is pure invention, designed to make the story more exciting by means of a greater variety of incident. Such invented episodes, for instance, are the gory battle-scenes that take up the first part of the fourth canto, the omen of the fishes in the fifth, and the episodes in which Bharata plays the chief rôle in that canto. Some of the things told of this boy, how he knocks down the gate-keeper who refuses to admit his mother, how he strikes the queen Vasumatī who had insulted her, and how he slays the assassin whom this jealous queen had sent against him, are truly remarkable in view of the fact that the hero of all these exploits cannot be more than six years of age (see pp. 112, 113). The account in the Mahābhārata, to be sure, tells of equally fabulous exploits performed by the youth, but there we move in an atmosphere of the marvelous. In Bodenstedt's poem, however, the supernatural has been almost completely banished, and we cannot help noticing the improbability of these deeds.
FOOTNOTES:
[204] Hebrew by Jos. Choczner, Breslau, 1868; Dutch by van Krieken, Amst. 1875; English by E. d'Esterre, Hamb. 1880; Italian by Giuseppe Rossi, 1884; Polish by Dzialoszye, Warsaw, 1888. See list in G. Schenk, Friedr. Bodenstedt, Ein Dichterleben in seinen Briefen, Berl. 1893, pp. 246-248.
[205] Aus dem Nachlasse Mirza Schaffys, Berl. 1874, pp. 191-223.
[206] In ZDMG. vol. xxiv. pp. 425-432.