pretend to. To thousands of European readers Homer is familiar
in the original, to hundreds of thousands he is known in various
translations in various modern languages. What Homer actually wrote,
a numerous class of students in Europe wish to know; and a literal
prose translation therefore is welcome, after the great Epic has been
so often translated in verse. The case is very different with the
_Maha-bharata_, practically unknown to European readers. And the
translators of Homer themselves gracefully acknowledge, "We have
tried to transfer, not all the truth about the poem, but the
historical truth into English. In this process Homer must lose at
least half his charm, his bright and equable speed, the musical
current of that narrative, which, like the river of Egypt, flows from
an undiscoverable source, and mirrors the temples and the palaces of
unforgotten gods and kings. Without the music of verse, only a half
truth about Homer can be told."

Another earnest worker of the present day, who is endeavouring to
interpret to modern Englishmen the thoughts and sentiments and poetry
of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, has emphatically declared that "of
all possible translations of poetry, a merely prose translation is
the most inaccurate." "Prose," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, further on,
"no more represents poetry than architecture does music. Translations
of poetry are never much good, but at least they should always
endeavour to have the musical movement of poetry, and to obey the
laws of the verse they translate."

This appears to me to be a very sound maxim. And one of my greatest
difficulties in the task I have undertaken has been to try and
preserve something of the "musical movement" of the sonorous Sanscrit
poetry in the English translation. Much of tile Sanscrit Epic is
written in the well-known _Sloka_ metre of sixteen syllables in each
line, and I endeavoured to choose some English metre which is
familiar to the English ear, and which would reproduce to some extent
the rhythm, the majesty, and the long and measured sweep of the
Sanscrit verse. It was necessary to adopt such a metre in order to
transfer something of the truth about the _Maha-bharata_ into
English, for without such reproduction or imitation of the musical
movement of the original very much less than a half truth is told.
My kind friend Mr. Edmund Russell, impelled by that enthusiasm for
Indian poetry and Indian art which is a part of him, rendered me