An American’s Generosity: Sanskrit Classics Made Easy

I look back with regret that I could not study Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages. It is easier to get good translations of the Greek and Latin classics than the Sanskrit literature. The ancient Sanskrit literature remains unparalleled in its metaphysical as well as erotic flight.

I thank our co-blogger Hollyrob for sending me a write-up by David Shulman, Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, that highlights a major project to translate Sanskrit — the Clay Sanskrit Series.

“The series is named after the generous donor, (New Jersey born) John P. Clay. More than thirty volumes have already appeared in this extraordinary project, with another twenty or more in the pipeline. And so, for the first time in English, we have the beginnings of a representative canon of Sanskrit literary works, well translated and accessible to a wide public.

“The Clay volumes are patterned after the justifiably celebrated Loeb Classical Library for Greek and Latin: small, elegant books, beautifully printed, sparsely annotated, and bilingual. This arrangement naturally delights students of Sanskrit, who may dispense, at least temporarily, with their dictionaries and grammar books; but you do not have to know Sanskrit to enjoy reading these volumes.

“Indeed, their raison d’être is to win for the Sanskrit classics an audience outside India, and certainly beyond the limited scholarly circles that have, for the last two centuries or so, studied these works, produced critical editions and philological commentaries, and sometimes also translated them into Western languages, almost invariably badly.

“The sheer awfulness of most earlier translations from Sanskrit can help to explain the profound ignorance of Sanskrit literature among Western readers. What is not easy to explain is why the standard of acceptable translation was, from the very beginning, set so low–in marked contrast, for example, to translations from classical Chinese and Japanese.

“A part of the trouble no doubt stems from the particular difficulties of Sanskrit — its forbidding morphology, its fondness for extraordinarily lengthy nominal compounds, its vast lexicon, its daunting syntax, and above all its somewhat exotic, or in any case distinctive, world of thought and imagination.” More here…