History Forum / General / Ancient History / June 2004

It

Even more so.  Nobody speaks Vedic, but priests do learn to chant  it
in order to carry out birth, death and marriage rituals.  Even the
Sanskrit of the Mahabharata is more complex than Vedic, and Classical
Sanskrit was eventually so complicated that it took a high level of
education to understand it at all.

******Martin Edwards.******    

Come on!  Nobody's going to ride that lousy freeway
when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.

Eddy Valiant.

www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/1955/      

                                                   

Um?  What's incredible about it?

People start things all the time that they don't finish.  For
example, there's a Classic Chinese Novel called <The Golden Lotus>
whose existing translation is, um, bowdlerised.  So, about a
decade ago appeared the first volume of a new translation - I
don't remember the title or translator offhand, but can find 'em
if you really want.  A few years ago volume 2 appeared.  The guy
translating this is now apparently well past middle age, and there
are several volumes left to go.  What's your bet?

The <Mahabharata> is famously long.  Full recitations of it take
something like a month.  I don't think there's any known single
literary work that's longer, though these days that's not the
sort of thing one wants to bet on; I certainly haven't heard of
any longer poems.  van Buitenen's volumes are *thick* volumes,
there are four or five of them, and he had gotten halfway; I've
seen at least one volume from the continuators, perhaps two but
I'm not sure any more.  It's certainly understandable that active
professor types would not finish thick books very fast, and keep
in mind that they're doing this partly because they think Someone
Should, and partly in memory of their friend and mentor, not because
each of them individually thought "I want to spend a year or more
translating a particular book of the <Mahabharata>!"

Um, not really.  We are living in the golden age of translation into
English, full stop.  Ever since Caxton started printing the rate of
translations has been increasing, more or less, but the flood in the
past few decades has been *torrential*.  And although out of the way
oddities did get translated in previous eras, by *far* more of them
are being translated nowadays, thanks to the way dissertation
committees insist on people doing things that haven't been done
before, among other things.

In any event, of the works you mentioned and the works I added,
here's the score as I know it:

Gathas - Full translations by Darmesteter (19th century, Sacred
        Books of the East series) and Insler (this is a re-
        translation from a version in French or German, however).
        Lightly abridged translations contained in books edited
        and translated by Mary Boyce (<Textual Sources for the
        Study of Zoroastrianism>) and by William Malandra (I
        forget the title).  Now, this is just *what I know*, what
        I could find around 1991 when I set out to read these.
        You listed four entire translations unknown to me, and
        there's an ongoing Complete Avesta project, various
        volumes either in German or in English, that I assume has
        done the job sometime since 1991...

<Rgveda> - All I've read is the selection offered by Penguin from
          Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty.  I believe she has since set
          out to translate the whole book, and maybe she's even
          published that, dunno.  Anyway, there's a complete 19th-
          century version in the Sacred Books of the East series,
          I've seen at least one complete version published in
          India, and I assume that's a drop in the bucket compared
          to what else is out there (especially Indian versions).

<Shahnama> - The received versions are *immensely* long.  People
            don't generally set out to translate such huge works
            very often.  Someone has done so; it's just that the
            book didn't sell well, and is hard to get access to.
            So in the 1970s Reuben Levy did his micro-condensation,
            and subsequently people who believe in a critical edition
            have set out to translate that (but I don't know how far
            they are).

<Mahabharata> - There are at least two complete translations dating
               no later than about 1940; I think one is 19th century.
               These are not widely respected (we'll get to why that
               would be the case, below), though I gather one is
               rather better than the other.  van Buitenen has done
               about half of a new complete translation, and people
               are trying to complete his work.  Meanwhile, because
               the epic is widely recognised as hugely important but
               few people have time to read all of it even if they
               have access to all of it, there is a huge industry in
               condensations, and most of the <Mahabharata>s you'll
               see in bookstores or libraries fit in this category.

<Ramayana> - I believe there are several complete translations, and
            I'm pretty sure there's at least one half-decent one.
            Pollock, LaFeber or some such, and various others are
            trying to do a Western Scholarly version, and for some
            reason are not finishing at all fast.  (They had already
            started in 1991, but as far as I know they aren't done
            yet.)  Now, this epic is only seven relatively slim
            volumes as opposed to ten or twelve blockbusters, so
            there's *less* need for condensations, but flipside, it's
            more widely revered, so there's more demand anyway.

I don't see what in any of this is particularly surprising or odd,
but maybe that's just because I've been acquainted with this sort
of thing since, well, 1991.  (I was then researching an abortive
project to read The Highlights of World Literature in Chronological
Order, you see.)  I guess I do vaguely remember being upset at how
hard it would be to read these epics in full, back then...  The fact
is, though, that the traditional literatures of many lands have not
been very well treated yet by the translation boom.

Consider, for example, that for well over a millennium, the
*traditional* literatures in Greek and Latin have been Christian.
D'you think post-Roman and Byzantine material is fully translated?
Not likely!  This is edging closer to change - on the one hand, there
are now many practicing historians who don't *have* the Latin they
need; on the other, the well of pre- or non-Christian stuff is
starting to run dry, except in specialised areas (much of Galen, for
example, is untranslated, but to deal with that you need to know
something about Greek medical terminology, among other things).
But there's still a very long way to go.  By no means has everything
in mediaeval Greek even been *printed*, and this is still less the
case for mediaeval Latin.

And if this is true of these marquee languages, well, then, you
can see what it's likely to be like for others.  The Sanskrit
corpus is exceptionally *well* served, in that a fairly high
percentage of it has been done at all.  Until quite recently,
the same couldn't have been said for Armenian, say; it still
isn't true for Georgian, or for that matter for Arabic!  Persian
literature was dominant from Turkey to Bangladesh in the late
middle ages and early modern period, and in fact a bunch of
Persian works have been translated - but not from that period!
I know of maybe one book done into English, written between
1300 and 1800 in Persian.  There are bunches of major Chinese
works still untouched, though most of the *most* important have
been done - for example, Sima Qian's history has been almost
fully translated, but this is not true of most of the other
dynastic histories; similarly, we have versions of the very most
famous novels, but of very few others.  (It may interest you to
know that the books that underlie <Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon>
have never been translated, and that this is unlikely to change
soon.  Though these are modern books, not mediaeval or whatever.)

I don't hang out on sci.lang.translation, but I do sometimes visit
a group where several translators post (rec.arts.sf.composition).
The Rule is, you translate *from* a non-native language *into* your
native language.  I know this is not always followed - have argued,
in fact, to these people that it needn't always be followed - but
like most rules, while it can be broken, it does exist for a reason.

I think this has something to do with the notion that a translation
is a failure if it doesn't work as a literary work in its own right;
not that the translator has to be a Creative Genius, but simply
that when reading a translation you should be able to think you're
reading a book originally written in English, not something that
has unfamiliar grammatical structures and the like underlying
everything.  This is a relatively recent change in theories of
translation - the King James Bible, for example, though indeed a
case of translation into the translators' native language, used a
much more literal approach.  Anyway, so the catch with people who
are native speakers of, say, Hindi, translating Sanskrit works into
English, is that their own ways of phrasing things, ways of working
with vocabulary, whatever, are much closer to the Sanskrit than to
the English, and so at some level they wind up not using English
as fully as a native speaker of that language would, but at the
same time, English doesn't allow them to use everything the work
uses in Sanskrit...  You get the idea.

Yes.  I mean, Joe Translator, thinking "Now I'm going to tackle
the <Ramayana>!", is going to do one of two things.  If he's honest,
he'll go and learn Sanskrit and translate the thing, or at least
condense it directly.  If he isn't, he'll go and read some other
people's versions, and maybe see a dramatisation of some sort,
and then do a retelling in his own words altogether.  Either way,
he's not going to think of Hindi, or Tamil, or Thai, or whatever,
as having anything to do with it.

So when people translate these versions, they've got one of two
audiences in mind.  Either they're after people whose parents know
these versions, but who, themselves, speak English - Indians in
America or Britain, say.  "Now you too can read Tulsidas's famous
version of Valmiki's epic!"  (Tulsidas was the guy who translated
it into Hindi, I think; like most early translators, he vigorously
reshaped the work in so doing.  Literalism is what comes *between*
this and the modern approach.)  Appealing to ethnic pride, more
or less, as if there were massive differences between French and
Spanish Bibles, say, and so people of one descent, in America,
would prefer their own group's.

The other audience they'll be after is scholars.  "For the first
time, Tulsidas in English!  A fascinating comparison to Valmiki's
original epic, and a work of towering importance in its own right.
No scholar should miss it!"

Either way, they profit by emphasising the difference.

If you start getting into retellings and such, well, that's a
whole different ballgame.  If your reteller is a native speaker
of Hindi, the odds are *quite* high that the version he heard
recited as a child was, or was based on, Tulsidas, not directly
Valmiki.  So there's a good chance of at least some intermixture.

Most of the local versions are reasonably well dated and are
reasonably certain to be younger.  I suppose human oddness is
infinite, and there's *someone* out there who is a Burmese-
version-thumping fundamentalist who swears that the Burmese
version is the very first thing recited by the highest of high
gods the moment he first became conscious, but realistically,
no, you're not likely to piss anyone off by saying "Valmiki
first, for me, please".  I suppose you could give offense by
stating preferences among the other versions, but since I'm
pretty sure not more than two can be found in translation at
least in the US, this isn't likely to be an issue even if you
do decide to read any of them.

Keep in mind that the deal is that everyone knows Valmiki is a
Big Big Deal.  The reason the local versions *exist* is that not
everyone reads Sanskrit, and those people want some sense of what
Valmiki was doing for themselves.  Similarly, we make a big fuss
about the King James Bible, and Germans do something similar over
Martin Luther's version.  But no German is going to fault one of
us for wanting to read "a really reliable version", or for going
and learning Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, for that matter, and
insist that instead we should read Luther's version, or an
Englishing of it.  The differences between <Ramayana> versions
tend to be larger than the differences between Bible versions, by
a fairly wide margin, but a similar principle applies.

I'm just poking fun at the people who think the <Ramayana> dates
to 8000 B.C. and the <Mahabharata> to 3000 B.C. because They Have
Old Books That Say So.  (No, I'm not joking with the 8000 B.C.
date.  Really I'm not.  Most of them know, though, that that date
is kinda ludicrous, so you'll see much more effort expended towards
showing that India in 3000 B.C. really was the most advanced land
in the world, fully set up with everything the <Mahabharata>
mentions.)

"The Epic of the Kings".  Yep.  It's basically a history of Iran
down to the Muslim conquest, profoundly distorted by legendary
stuff.  (For example, the Parthian dynasty that ruled from about
200 B.C. to A.D. 200 is barely mentioned, in contrast to the
previous and subsequent dynasties.)  The most famous material in
it, from the Western point of view, has to do with the totally
legendary folks said to have lived way back before Cyrus founded
the original Persian Empire, and focuses on a warrior named
Sohrab and his son Rustam (um, I think).

Again, hope this helps.

Joe Bernstein

I found it.  The site is

http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/index.html

The project director died in May.  I hope the project continues.

Joe Bernstein <joe@sfbooks.com> on 23 Jun 2004 posted

It was actually the first site that I came across.  I thought to myself
'oh, that makes sense, avesta.org, duh'.  It was where I found the
translations I initially mentioned.

snip

mr caldwell notes that it was
http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/index.html

Look's like I'll be spending some time there too.  I had read the epic of
G before, so this older verision should be interesting too.

New Persian, in non-arabized form, was probably the spoken language by
the time of the Arab Conquest (there are reports of diglossia).

New Persian (non-arabized forms may be what is refered to as Dari,
while Farsi the later arabized form, that seemingly being the usage
at the time) developed in east of present day Iran, under the Samanids,
semi-independent. in (current) Iran (under direct Arab rule) Arabic was
used and the continued use of Middle Persian by the Zoroastrian clergy
didn't favor the use of the newer version.