Jagat

  6. Rasa : From aesthetic to sacred rapture Positive aspects of Sanskrit poetry that were the measuring sticks used by the connoisseurs of old and which can still be enjoyed by the modern reader are manifold: we can point to its meter, its sonority, or its love for multiple layers of meaning. Both Nathan and Ingalls precede their translations with excellent summaries of these aspects for the uninitiated and I heartily recommend the reader to study these essays.   The theory of language called sphoṭa-vāda , though universally applicable, has a recognizable influence on Sanskrit poetry. Sounds and words are said to build up to a cumulative effect that is not realized until the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Since Sanskrit is a highly inflected language, the poet enjoys a license for almost infinite variations of word order and can still count on word inflections and context to clarify syntactical relations. Powerful meters carry the words forward inexorably, bu...