to the iambic trimeter of Sophocles or
the blank verse of Shakspere, but roughly corresponds to the Greek
choruses or the occasional rhymed songs of the Elizabethan stage. In
other words, the verse portion of a Sanskrit drama is not narrative; it
is sometimes descriptive, but more commonly lyrical: each stanza sums up
the emotional impression which the preceding action or dialogue has made
upon one of the actors. Such matter is in English cast into the form of
the rhymed stanza; and so, although rhymed verse is very rarely employed
in classical Sanskrit, it seems the most appropriate vehicle for the
translation of the stanzas of a Sanskrit drama. It is true that we
occasionally find stanzas which might fitly be rendered in English blank
verse, and, more frequently, stanzas which are so prosaic as not to
deserve a rendering in English verse at all.[26] But, as the present
translation may be regarded as in some sort an experiment, I have
preferred to hold rigidly to the distinction found in the original
between simple prose and types of stanza which seem to me to correspond
to English rhymed verse.

It is obvious that a translation into verse, and especially into
rhymed verse, cannot be as literal as a translation into prose; this
disadvantage I have used my best pains to minimize. I hope it
may be said that nothing of real moment has been omitted from
the verses; and where lack of metrical skill has compelled expansion,
I have striven to make the additions as insignificant as
possible.

There is another point, however, in which it is hardly feasible to
imitate the original; this is the difference in the dialects used by the
various characters. In The Little Clay Cart, as in other Indian dramas,
some of the characters speak Sanskrit, others Prakrit. Now Prakrit is
the generic name for a number of dialects derived from the Sanskrit and
closely akin to it. The inferior personages of an Indian play, and, with
rare exceptions, all the women, speak one or another of these Prakrits.
Of the thirty characters of this play, for example, only five
(Charudatta, the courtier, Aryaka, Sharvilaka, and the judge) speak
Sanskrit;[27] the others speak various Prakrit dialects. Only in the
case of Sansthanaka have I made a rude attempt to suggest the dialect by
substituting sh for s as he does. And the grandiloquence of Sharvilaka's
Sanskrit in the satirical portion of the third act I have endeavored to
imitate.

Whenever the language