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Debendra K. DashDipti R. Pattanaik 37The extent of abstraction to which Jagannath Das hadmoulded the Oriya language can be gauged from a subsequent texttitled Siba Swarodaya by Jasobanta Das, one among the so-calledPanchasakhas. 5 Siba-swarodaya is a translation of the Sanskrit textSwarodaya Lesa. The original text is divided into twenty-one smallchapters. Jasobanta Das transformed the entire text into one singlecontinuous discourse having four hundred and seventy threecouplets. He justifies the undertaking of the task of retelling the textin Oriya on the ground that the wisdom codified in the text isactually meant for the people. Had it not been meant for the people,it would not have been articulated at all. Once it has been articulated,it should be transmitted into the language, which the common peoplecan easily access. He does not therefore call it translation, but amanifestation, Prakash, coming out of some thing, which is latent.However, if the original Sanskrit text and the derivative Oriya textare compared, one can easily sense the closeness of the translatedtext to the original, a rendering of simple and lucid Sanskrit intostandardised Oriya, which had started taking after Sanskrit, afterJagannath Das’s Bhagabata.Jayadeva’s Gita Gobinda, which has been translated morethan twenty times during this period alone, is the central text for ananalytical understanding of the evolution and standardization oftranslational practice in Orissa. The popularity of this text can begauged from the number of imitations it had spawned in Sanskritwithin Orissa’s geographical space. The lilting rhythm, the erotictheme and the epic structure, all contributed to its enormouspopularity among various sections of the audience ranging from thecommon people to the royal courts. After Chaitanya adopted andeulogized this, it became the canonical text of the Vaishnav sect,which followed Chaitainya’s teachings.