Download or read book The Ocean of Story, Vol. 4 of 10: Being C. H. Tawney's Translation of Somadeva's Katha Sarit Sagara (or Ocean of Streams of Story) (Classic Reprint) written by N. M. Penzer and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-07-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Ocean of Story, Vol. 4 of 10: Being C. H. Tawney's Translation of Somadeva's Katha Sarit Sagara (or Ocean of Streams of Story) Not much has been left to be said by way of introduction to the fourth volume of this splendid publication. The reader is familiar with the circumstances of the Sanskrit author's life; he knows what is necessary concerning the literary sources of the work; he has considered the origin of the stories, whether Aryan or Dravidian, in India itself, and their affinities with beliefs and practices in later India; and he has contemplated the important and difficult questions of transmission - transmission of stories and motifs from country to country, people to people, and the no less certainly attested inverse process of transmission from literary source to folk-lore. Then, again, the very march of the narrative has accustomed him to the ease of the authors style, fitting the matter like a glove, objective, impersonal and unmoved, whether the scene is earth or heaven or one of the various hells, an unvarying style equal to the burden of the long task. And the translator, as became a ripe scholar of fine literary taste, follows with a rendering as free from display as is the original itself. It was by no means a matter of course that the Great Tale of Gunadhya should come down to us in so acceptable a form. The example of Ksemendra's Brhatkatha-manjari ("Great-Tale Cluster") shows clearly that we might have had to be content with a much more restricted version by an author solicitous of poetical artifice rather than of the adequate presentation of the matter. Written in an old dialect little practised and contemned as vulgar, the work of Gunadhya was not safeguarded, like the Maha-Bharata and Ramayana, which Ksemendra subjected to the like treatment, by having been composed in the sacred language, by a theme relating to the great heroes of antiquity, by ancient fame and semi-divine character attaching to the author. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."