Ramayana Condensed in the Poet's Own Words /8

vi
 

 
FOREWORD
 

 
experience in private and public affairs

enshrined in proverbs, apophthegms and

rules of chivalry and statecraft, which

indicate millennia of civilisation behind.

If the reader but bring a little capacity

to reflect and learn, he will find himself

wiser and better when he closes the

volume than when he began it.
 

 
Those that have essayed literary tasks

will appreciate and enjoy a certain

feature of this enterprise. There is noth-

ing in this abridgment which is not

Valmiki's. Large portions of the original

epic have been cut out: but the articula-
tion of the portions that are retained is

tion of the portions that are retained is
effected in the poet's own words. No

vestiges are visible of the dismember-

ment, no transfusion from a foreign

organism, no prose links, no variation

from the anushtubh metre. The compiler

Pandit A. M. Srinivasa Achariar, has

necessarily been driven to strange shifts.

But I have not seen his vandalism go

lower down than quarters of slokas.

Perhaps there is not even one case of four

several quarters being lifted from four