MAHABHARATA CONDENSED INTO ENGLISH ... - Mandhata Global

the concluding books of the Epic is familiar to a larger circle of Englishmen. A complete
translation of the Epic into English prose has also been published in India, and is useful
to Sanscrit scholars for the purpose of reference.
But although the old Epic had thus been spoilt by unlimited expansion, yet nevertheless
the leading incidents and characters of the real Epic are still discernible, uninjured by the
mass of foreign substance in which they are embedded--even like those immortal marble
figures which have been recovered from the ruins of an ancient world, and now beautify
the museums of modern Europe. For years past I have thought that it was perhaps not
impossible to exhume this buried Epic from the superincumbent mass of episodical
matter, and to restore it to the modern world. For years past I have felt a longing to
undertake this work, but the task was by no means an easy one. Leaving out all episodical
matter, the leading narrative of the Epic forms about one-fourth of the work; and a
complete translation even of this leading story would be unreadable, both from its length
and its prolixness. On the other hand, to condense the story into shorter limits would be,
not to make a translation, but virtually to write a new poem; and that was not what I
desired to undertake, nor what I was competent to perform.
There seemed to me only one way out of this difficulty. The main incidents of the Epic
are narrated in the original work in passages which are neither diffuse nor unduly prolix,
and which are interspersed in the leading narrative of the Epic, at that narrative itself is
interspersed in the midst of more lengthy episodes. The more carefully I examined the
arrangement, the more clearly it appeared to me that these main incidents of the Epic
would bear a full and unabridged translation into English verse; and that these
translations, linked together by short connecting notes, would virtually present the entire
story of the Epic to the modem reader in a form and within limits which might be
acceptable. It would be, no doubt, a condensed version of the original Epic, but the
condensation would be effected, not by the translator telling a short story in his own
language, but by linking together those passages of the original which describe the main
and striking incidents, and thus telling the main story as told in the original work. The
advantage of this arrangement is that, in the passages presented to the reader, it is the poet
who speaks to him, not the translator. Though vast portions of the original are skipped
over, those which are presented are the portions which narrate the main incidents of the
Epic, and they describe those incidents as told by the poet himself.
This is the plan I have generally adopted in the present work. Except in the three books
which describe the actual war (Books viii., ix., and x.), the other nine books of this
translation are complete translations of selected passages of the original work. I have not
attempted to condense these passages nor to expand them; I have endeavoured to put
them before the English reader as they have been told by the poet in Sanscrit.
Occasionally, but rarely, a few redundant couplets have been left out, or a long list of
proper names or obscure allusions has been shortened; and in one place only, at the
beginning of the Fifth Book, I have added twelve couplets of my own to explain the
circumstances under which the story of Savitri is told. Generally, therefore, the
translation may be accepted as an unabridged, though necessarily a free translation of the
passages describing the main incidents of the Epic.