The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts.

• Author: Thompson, George
• Position: 'The Bhagavad Gita: The Original Sanskrit and an English Translation' by Lars Martin Fosse - Book review

The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts. By ANGELIKA MALINAR. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007. Pp. xxi + 296.

The Bhagavad Gita: The Original Sanskrit and an English Translation. By LARS MARTIN FOSSE. Woodstock, New York: YOGAVIDYA.COM, 2007. Pp. xxiv + 109. $14.95 (paper).

We are in the midst of a rather surprising flurry of new scholarly translations of the Bhagavad Gita (hereafter BhG). In English alone there have been at least four significant ones since 2007, and others, 1 know, are on the way. Inevitably the question arises whether there is a genuine need for yet more translations of this already much-translated text. One answer to this question, all too frequently encountered, is that the classics of world literature need to be translated anew in the voice and idiom of each new generation. Another answer, also well-worn, is that, as the scholarship on such classics as the BhG grows and new insights and interpretations emerge, new translations must be made to reflect these new developments in the relevant scholarship.

I made it clear in the introduction to my own translation of the BhG (2008) what my reasons were for producing it: when using translations of the BhG in my courses over the years I have restricted my choice to translations produced by scholars with a good record of scholarly publication, in standard academic journals like this one. While many translations in English have been produced by good and even profoundly learned scholars, these translations are generally less than satisfactory as literary products that make the BhG accessible to a general, non-specialist audience. In my view, the best way to translate the Sanskrit of the BhG is to adopt a vigorous rhythmic prose in which the basic poetic and semantic unit is the individual stanza. The BhG is composed after all in an Epic Sanskrit that is much closer to the contemporary vernacular, i.e., spoken Sanskrit, than are either the highly esoteric and very difficult poetry of the Rigveda or the highly refined and equally difficult courtly poetry of classical kavya. Translators of the BhG who adopt a metrical stanza attempting to mirror the four eight-syllable lines of the anustubh sloka invariably fail to produce effective poetic versions of the text. To successfully employ a metrical stanza that imitates the anustubh form requires a poetic skillfulness, or art, that, frankly, few Sanskritists possess.

Another element often lacking in translations aimed at a general audience is adequate attention to the historical and social context. The BhG is a foundational text in the development of post-Vedic Hinduism. Its importance and its general appeal, both to a scholarly and a general audience, is based on the fundamental role that the BhG has played...