Mahabharata Transcreated
Pradip Bhattacharya
THE MAHABHARATA OF VYASA CONDENSED FROM SANSKRIT & TRANSCREATED INTO ENGLISH by P. Lal Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1981, 371 pp., 30.00
March-April 1981, volume 5, No 3/4

R.C. Dutt, the first ‘condenser’ of the Mahabharata’s one lakh slokas, chose to spare the Western reader the ‘unending morass’ and ‘Monstrous chaos’ of epi­sodical matter by leaving out whatever he felt to be superincumbent. The result was a Tennysonian Vyasa rhythmically relating· his knightly tale of barons at war in two thousand English couplets, in Locksley-Hall metre. In the process Dutt sacrificed much that is integral to the Vyasan ethos: most of the Adi and Vana parvas and all of the Maushala, the Mahaprasthana and the Svargarohana parvas. He felt, quite sincerely, that it was neither possible nor desirable to translate the epic in toto. Professor P. Lal however, holds a diametrically different view and his project of transcreating the epic sloka-by-sloka into English verse and prose is still in progress, 132 monthly fascicules having been published till 1981. The book under review is Lal’s condensation of the hard-core narrative: the Pandava-Dhritarashtrian conflict, around which a vast collection of myths, legends, folk-lore and didacticism has been woven to make up the great epic of Bharata.

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