Page:The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás.djvu/649



" is undoubtedly a valuable addition to Anglo-Indian literature. It opens a new mine of riches to European scholars. The translation is very faithful, literal, and animated. Mr. Growse, unlike other translators, has to a great extent preserved the spirit of the original. His prose sometimes reads like poetry. His command of the English language is so great that he expresses in simple language all des of Indian thought, paying particular attention at the same time to English idiom. We would strongly recommend the replacement of some of the books now fixed for the high proficiency examination in Hindi by the Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás. Mr. Growse has thoroughly entered into the spirit of Tulsi Dás, and has very agreeably succeeded in painting him in a foreign language to the best advantage that we could have wished. He bas very rarely left out phrases or introduced others of his own. We have carefully gone through the first half of Book I, the most difficult part of the translation, and, with the exception of a few solitary passages, we have not met but faithful translation……If space allowed, we could give extracts to show the scholarlike manner in which Mr. Growse has rendered some of the most abstruse religious thoughts of the Hindus into idiomatic and simple English."—Indian Tribune, 1877.

" has done a good service to letters in seeking to atone for the slight hitherto put by English translators upon a poet of no mean merit, Tulsi Dás, the bard of Rájapur. Translation may not be the grandest of fields, but it is no faint praise to occupy it with taste, judgment, and discernment. We are wont to hear Hindi spoken of as a language which will hardly repay the effort of mastering, and, with the exception of the Prem Ságar, we doubt whether there is any other passage of Hindi poetry with which a hundred Englishmen are fairly conversant. The loss is, however, their own. Even the lead given by Mr. Growse, when he made his first venture, has failed to encourage others to follow in his footsteps. We have read with redoubled interest this second instalment of the Rámáyana, and there is nothing in it which grieves us so much as the announcement that Mr. Growse has perforce to postpone sine die the completion of his work. The power that removed Mr. Growse from a sphere so peculiarly his own, as was that of Mathurá, to regions like those of Bulandshahr, where Sanskrit is unknown and unappreciated, tempts us with the men and women who gazed after Ráma and Síta on their way to Chitrakút to say—"God's doings are all perverse."……So much care has been taken to re-