The Ramayana - Softcover
About the Book: The Ramayana The great Indian epic in what many consider its definitive translation-Arshia Sattar's work captures the essence of the original Sanskrit text, while making the epic accessible to the modern reader. A.K. Ramanujan used to say that no one in India hears theRamayana (or the Mahabharata ) for the first time-they are there,'always, already'. We know these stories in greater and lesserdetail perhaps, but all of us do actually know them. We've heardthem from grandmothers, we've read them in childhood comic books,we've watched them on television. Why then, must we have translations of these texts from so longago? Why do we need to tell and hear this tale over and over again?We could say that its because we love the story of the unjustlyexiled prince and his honourable brothers and the gentle princesswho was so cruelly abducted by a rapacious creature. We love theflying monkey who can speak Sanskrit and change his shape and sizeat will. We love the golden deer and the grotesque rakshasas thathaunt the forests. We marvel at the idea of Ravana's ten heads andwe are tickled by Kumbhakarna's excesses. No single telling or reading of the many Ramayanas that enrichso much of our artistic expression can exhaust either the magicalor the human dimensions that are simultaneously present in thetext. This Ramayana was published at the very end of 1996. When Igot the first copies, I was awed by the gravitas the work hadacquired by being transformed into a heavy, black-jacketed hardbackbook. But over the years, I've developed an intimacy with the text,an intimacy very different from the one I had when I was actuallyworking on the translation. More and more, I have had to confrontwhat I translated: what I put in and what I left out, what I choseto say and how I chose to say it. I have also had to consider whatI might have done differently were I to do the same translationnow. If that were the case, I feel quite sure that the translationwould probably be much
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- PublisherPenguin India
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 014341805X
- ISBN 13 9780143418054
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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