KALIDASA's "Cloud Messenger" started on its flight beyond the Hindu world in A.D. 1813, when Horace Hayman Wilson, then an Assistant Surgeon of the Honourable East India Company and Secretary to the Asiatic Society, published at Calcutta his edition princeps, accompanied by a very tasteful paraphrase in English verse, and by ample annotations which testify to the wide range of his reading and interests. In the following year Wilson's translation was reprinted in London. Goethe read it with admiration, and sent his copy of it to his friend Knebel on the 22nd December, 1817; he alludes to this. consignment in his Zahme Xenien (ii):-
"Und Meghaduta, den Wolkengesandten,
"Wer schickt ihn nicht gerne zu Seelenverwandten!"
Professor Macdonell aptly remarks that a well-known passage of Schiller's Maria Stuart (act iii, scene 1) reminds us of the theme of Kalidūsa's Meghadūta. But, as Maria Stuart was written in 1800, while Wilson's translation of the Meghaduta appeared several years after Schiller's death (1805), this agreement is due to congeniality, and not to borrowing.
A critical edition of the Meghadata by Gildemeister, which was based on a collation of Wilson's text with three MSS. (two in Paris and one in Copenhagen) and furnished with a Latin glossary, appeared at Bonn in 1841. Mallinātha's commentary seems to have been printed first at Benares in 1849. Among the numerous later editions of it, that of the learned Iśvarachandra Vidyasagara (Calcutta, 1869) marks a considerable advance on account of its appendix, which contains various readings of other commentators and important critical notes. Among subsequent editions of the text with Mallinatha's commentary the most useful one is that of G. R. Nandargikar (Bombay, 1894), to which copious critical and explanatory notes are added. Along with it I have consulted the fifth edition of Parab (Bombay, 1902) and an edition in Telugu characters (Madras, 1908).
that a Gildemeister, whose critical acumen was unsurpassed, showed number of verses in the traditional text of the Meghaduta are spurious. Already Mallinatha had pronounced several of them 'interpolated' (prakshipta), although he included them in his commentary, and other verses were rejected as spurious by Iśvarachandra Vidyasagara. Stenzler followed these critics in omitting most of those verses from the text and relegating them to an appendix. His well-known edition (Breslau, 1874) was accompanied by critical notes and a German vocabulary.
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