Subodhinee Vyakya Sahitha Kavyadarsha Prathama Bagaya

Authored by Dandin the Kavyadarsha is the oldest Sanskrit work on poetics which influenced a number of Sinhalese books such as Subodhalankaraya and Siyabaslakara. The work originally contained three chapters. The commonly known edition has about 660 verses. In Kavyadarshaya Dandin offers an argument that the beauty of a poem stems from the use of rhetorical device. He divides the rhetoric device into 36 types such as punning sameness favour beauty interpretation and vigour. A beautiful poem should have one of these features or a combination of them according to Dandin’s explanation in Kavyadarsha. The work earned much popularity as it was translated into several languages such as Kannada Sinhala Pali Tibetan English and Tamil. Scholars believe that the translations of this work could have influenced the later literature of the east. The Kavyadarsha came to be a reference material on a regular basis among the later scholars of Sanskrit. The present edition contains a word - to - word translation of Kavyadarsha along with the stanzas.