Produced by David King, Juliet Sutherland, and Charles
Franks, John B. Hare and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team
The Mahabharata
of
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text
by
Kisari Mohan Ganguli
[1883-1896]
Scanned at sacred-texts.com, 2003. Redaction at Distributed Proofing,Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager. Additional proofing and formatting atsacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare. This text is in the public domain. Thesefiles may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this notice ofattribution is left intact.
The object of a translator should ever be to hold the mirror up to hisauthor. That being so, his chief duty is to represent so far aspracticable the manner in which his author's ideas have been expressed,retaining if possible at the sacrifice of idiom and taste all thepeculiarities of his author's imagery and of language as well. In regardto translations from the Sanskrit, nothing is easier than to dish up Hinduideas, so as to make them agreeable to English taste. But the endeavour ofthe present translator has been to give in the following pages as literala rendering as possible of the great work of Vyasa. To the purely Englishreader there is much in the following pages that will strike as ridiculous.Those unacquainted with any language but their own are generally veryexclusive in matters of taste. Having no knowledge of models other thanwhat they meet with in their own tongue, the standard they have formed ofpurity and taste in composition must necessarily be a narrow one. Thetranslator, however, would ill-discharge his duty, if for the sake ofavoiding ridicule, he sacrificed fidelity to the original. He mustrepresent his author as he is, not as he should be to please the narrowtaste of those entirely unacquainted with him. Mr. Pickford, in thepreface to his English translation of the Mahavira Charita, ably defends aclose adherence to the original even at the sacrifice of idiom and tasteagainst the claims of what has been called 'Free Translation,' which meansdressing the author in an outlandish garb to please those to whom he isintroduced.
In the preface to his classical translation of Bhartrihari's Niti Satakamand Vairagya Satakam, Mr. C.H. Tawney says, "I am sensible that in thepresent attempt I have retained much local colouring. For instance, theideas of worshipping the feet of a god or great men, though it frequentlyoccurs in Indian literature, will undoubtedly move the laughter ofEnglishmen unacquainted with Sanskrit, especially if they happen to belongto that class of readers who revel their attention on the accidental andremain blind to the essential. But a certain measure of fidelity to theoriginal even at the risk of making oneself ridiculous, is better than thestudied dishonesty which characterises so many translations of orientalpoets."
We fully subscribe to the above although, it must be observed, the censureconveyed to the class of translators last indicated is rather undeserved,there being nothing like a 'studied dishonesty' in their efforts whichproceed only from a mistaken view of their duties and as such betray onlyan error of the head but not of the heart. More than twelve years ago whenBabu Pratapa Chandra Roy, with Babu Durga Charan Banerjee, went to myretreat at Seebpore, for engaging me to translate the Mahabharata intoEnglish, I was amazed with the grandeur of the scheme. My first questionto him was,—whence was the money to come, su