Kalidasa's status as the major poet and dramatist in classical Sanskrit literature is unquestioned. Yet, whereas individual works of the poet have been translated, an edition containing an English translation of his collected works does not seem to have been undertaken, specially a rendering that combines fidelity to the text with readability in contemporary English. The three -volume edition planned by the Sahitya Akademi might well be the first translation into English of the Kalidasa -corpus in the entirety, thereby fulfilling a long-felt need and making these classics accessible to a much wider audience than at present.