48 The New York Reviewrepetition suggests a bond between
the two born- again creatures, the bird
and the brahman poet, which explains,
in part, the poet’s compassion for the
bird. (The word for “compassion” is
also repeated for emphasis.)
These overtones will simply have
to be left out of the translation. Every
Sanskritist knows the old saw that a
word in Sanskrit can mean itself, its
opposite, a name of god, a position in
sexual intercourse, and a word for an
elephant. In Sanskrit, you don’t have
to pay the words extra to make them
mean so many different things, as
Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty did.
But you can’t signal all the multiple
meanings of a Sanskrit word, which
makes the translation depend even
more than usual on the discretion of
the translator.
The word dharma is also repeated,
first in the epithet of the poet (“whose
soul was dharma”) and then in his
judgment that the hunter’s act was
adhar ma, not- dharma, a repetition
that is effective if dharma is left un-
translated or translated consistently.
The bird’s species, krauñca (kraun-
cha), is a waterbird, variously said to
be a kind of curlew, heron, crane, or
sandpiper; Ramanujan called them a
pair of lovebirds, as they are known for
their fidelity to their mates (a point the
Sanskrit text may hint at with the word
for “one/alone/lone” applied to the
male bird). Krauncha can therefore be
translated as “heron,” “curlew,” “bird,”
or “lovebird.” The Nishada (NiৢƗda),
a low- caste aboriginal hunter, can be
simply called a “hunter,” at the cost of
distracting and nonessential (though
not irrelevant) cultural meaning. Both
terms, krauncha and Nishada, are used
twice in this passage. In the final curse,
“May you not find a resting place [or
state of rest] for eternal ages,” changing
“not” to “never” would more fully con-
vey the spirit of the strong negative im-
perative of the curse and capture some
of the force of “eternal ages.”
A still close but smoother translation
might be:And when he saw that bird that the
hunter had brought down, compas-
sion arose in the poet whose soul
was dharma. From this emotion
of compassion, thinking “This is
not dharma,” the brahman, hear-
ing the female lovebird weeping,
said, “Hunter, may you never ever
find a final resting place, since you
slaughtered the lone male of this
mating couple of lovebirds when
he was mad with sexual passion.”What choices did the Goldmans
make in dealing with these linguistic
dilemmas? Here is their version in the
seven- volume edition:And the pious seer, seeing the bird
struck down in this fashion by the
NiৢƗda, was filled with pity. Then,
in the intensity of this feeling of
compassion, the brahman thought,
“This is wrong.” Hearing the
krauñca hen wailing, he uttered
these words: “Since, NiৢƗda, you
killed one of this pair of krauñcas,
distracted at the height of passion,
you shall not live for very long.”“Shall not live for very long” seems
to me to miss or distort the Sanskrit
meaning, and the forceful negativeimperative form of the curse (“May
you never”) is weakened to a simple
future. The curse is further dulled by
being moved to the end of the verse.
The emphasis on “compassion” is lost
by the substitution of “pity” for one
of the two occurrences of the same
Sanskrit word. Dharma, too, is trans-
lated differently each time it occurs
(“pious” and “wrong”), and the choice
of “seer” rather than “poet” blunts the
self- referential nature of the passage.
“Mating couple” is reduced to “pair,”
and “mad/infatuated” to “distracted.”
The female bird is now called a “hen,”
but the maleness of the other bird is not
mentioned, erasing the crucial paired
allusions to the birds’ genders. More
problematically, the Sanskrit words for
the hunter and the bird are kept in their
full, technical, diacritical form. But
they are, at least, explained in the notes:
we are told that the krauñca is a type
of heron or curlew, and the note on the
NiৢƗda gives details of his low caste sta-
tus in Sanskrit literature. The transla-
tion is complete and accurate but loses
the emotional power of the original.
In the new one- volume edition, the
o n l y c h a n ge i n t h i s p a s s a ge i s i n t h e t r a n s -
lation of the second, negative occurrence
of dharma, now rendered “unrighteous”
(and still not echoing the adjective for
the seer). But now there are no notes to
tell us who the NiৢƗda and the krauñca
are; krauñca is not even included in the
glossary at the back, though NiৢƗda is.
Both words are, however, indexed, and
under NiৢƗda we learn that it means
“hunter” and that he “kills sƗrasa crane
(krauñca),” adding the sarus crane to
the other guesses of the translation of
krauñcha, in addition to heron, sand-
piper, curlew, crane, and lovebird. The
reader is left with questions that obstruct
the flow of the passage.
T his is how A rshia Sattar translates it:Compassion welled up in VƗlmƯki’s
heart when he saw the fallen bird,
killed so unrighteously, and the
grief of its mate. Deeply moved, he
said, “Hunter, because you killed
this bird while he was making love,
you shall never find a resting place!”Sattar helpfully identifies the “seer/
sage/poet” as Valmiki. She calls a spade
a spade: the Goldmans’ “distracted at
the height of passion” becomes simply
“making love.” More important, she
jettisons the disruptive Sanskrit words,
letting the bird be simply a bird and the
Nishada a hunter, while conveying that
the bird who is killed is male, imply-
ing that the mourning bird is female.
This tighter and shorter version is a
vivid rendition that cuts through lin-
guistic knots that might come between
a general reader and the power of the
Sanskrit. I would only quibble, again,
with the translation of “not- dharma”
as “unrighteously,” the omission of
dharma from the epithet of the poet,
and the reduction of the curse to a pre-
diction transposed to the end of the
line (though Sattar helpfully uses the
stronger “never” rather than “not”).
What does all this mean for the read-
ership of the new one- volume trans-
lation? If you want an accurate, fairly
literal translation, with notes to explain
what lies behind the words, you want
the full Princeton edition in seven vol-
umes. But if you want to experience
the beauty and emotional power of the
Ramayana, you need another kind of
translation.In addition to the academic choices
that get in the way of the lay reader,
there is a leaden quality to the Gold-
mans’ translations. They made a se-
rious effort to render their scholarly
rendition more accessible, but they
could have done more. In their fas-
tidiousness, they tend to follow the
Sanskrit sentence structure, which
abounds in passive verbs and gerunds
that fragment the English sentences
and make them awkward, when they
might have rethought the whole verse
in the more active syntax that is nat-
ural to English speakers and lets the
verses flow easily.
In their translation of the passage
about the hunter, for example, the poet
“uttered these words” instead of “said,”
and elsewhere after quoted speech they
add, superfluously, “When he had spo-
ken in this fashion,” translating literally
the formulaic and constantly repeated
phrases that in Sanskrit only serve the
functions of open- and close- quotation
marks and, when translated over and
over, dilute the English text. In gen-
eral, the Goldmans’ translation leaves
far too much Sanskrit in the English.
This need not have been so. Vol-
umes 2 and 3 of the scholarly edition
were translated by Sheldon Pollock,
widely and rightly regarded as the
finest American Sanskritist of his
generation, and these volumes are a
pleasure to read. Pollock finds ways
around the formulaic repetitions and
restructures the sentences into ele-
gant English patterns. Just as accurate
as the Goldmans, he also somehow
always fashions passages that flow
smoothly and elegantly. Moving from
the Goldman translation of volume 1
to the Pollock translation of volume 2
is like walking out of a dense forest into
a sunny meadow.
Does this matter? Should one quib-
ble about grace and fluency in a trans-
lation that has worked so hard to be full
and accurate? I think in this case one
should. The whole point of the passage
about the hunter is that it describes the
invention of poetry. Non- Indian schol-
ars tend, Eurocentrically, to call the
Ramayana an epic because of its re-
semblance to the Iliad. The Iliad, like
the Ramayana, tells of a great battle
fought to retrieve an abducted woman,
and both texts inspired later retellings
that protected the reputation of the ab-
ducted heroine (Sita, Helen) by imag-
ining that she was never abducted at
all, but remained safely in hiding while
an identical image of her caused all the
trouble.* Most Indians, however, re-
gard the Ramayana not as an epic but
as a poem—indeed, the foundational
poem. If you lose the poetry in a trans-
lation of the Ramayana, you’re losing
the heart of it.
But one can’t have everything. Ex-
haustiveness and concision are mutually
exclusive, as are, almost always, aca-
demic precision and literary grace. The
great scholarship of the seven- volume
translation simply cannot be squeezed
into a single readable, let alone elegant,
volume. Really, the only solution is for
everyone to learn Sanskrit. Q*See, for example, Aeschylus, Aga-
memnon, 416–424; Herodotus, His-
tory, 2.112–120; and Plato, Republic,
book 9, 586C. I discuss “shadow Sitas
and phantom Helens” in Splitting the
Difference: Gender and Myth in An-
cient Greece and India (University of
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