Mahābhārata (I)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Attributed (authorship debated)
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~770,000 words · 3,680 passages
Cite this work
- APAMahabharata. (n.d.). Mahābhārata (I). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/mahabharata/the-mahabharata-vol-i-books-1-3-adi-sabha-vana-ganguli
- MLAMahabharata. "Mahābhārata (I)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/mahabharata/the-mahabharata-vol-i-books-1-3-adi-sabha-vana-ganguli.
- ChicagoMahabharata. Mahābhārata (I). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/mahabharata/the-mahabharata-vol-i-books-1-3-adi-sabha-vana-ganguli.
What it is about
The first third of the Mahabharata: the Adi, Sabha and Vana books — the origin of the two branches of the family, the dice game that sets everything off, and the years of exile in the forest.
Context and history
This is Kisari Mohan Ganguli's prose translation, made between 1883 and 1896: the first complete one into English. For years it appeared with the publisher Pratap Chandra Roy's name on the title page, and some still credit it to him. The poem is the work of no single author and no single age: it grew over centuries, and the tradition itself says it contains everything there is — anyone looking for a continuous narrative will find whole treatises in the way.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text by Kisari Mohan Ganguli [1883-1896] Scanned at sacred-texts.com, 2003. Proofed at Distributed Proofing, Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager. Additional proofing and formatting at sacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare. TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE The object of a translator should ever be to hold the mirror upto his author. That being so, his chief duty is to represent so far as practicable the manner in which his author’s ideas have been expressed, retaining if possible at the sacrifice of idiom and taste all the peculiarities of his author’s imagery and of language as well. In regard to translations from the Sanskrit, nothing is easier than to dish up Hindu ideas, so as to make them agreeable to English taste. But the endeavour of the present translator has been to give in the following pages as literal a rendering as possible of the great work of Vyasa. To the purely English reader there is much in the following pages that will strike as ridiculous. Those unacquainted with any language but their own are generally very exclusive in matters of taste. Having no knowledge of models other than what they meet with in their own tongue, the standard they have formed of purity and taste in composition must necessarily be a narrow one. The translator, however, would ill-discharge his duty, if for the sake of avoiding ridicule, he sacrificed fidelity to the original. He must represent his author as he is, not as he should be to please the narrow taste of those entirely unacquainted with him. Mr. Pickford, in the preface to his English translation of the Mahavira Charita, ably defends a close adherence to the original even at the sacrifice of idiom and taste against the claims of what has been called ‘Free Translation,’