Robert Goldman sings from the Ramayana
Channel: UC Berkeley
Date: 2016-11-17

UC Berkeley Professor Robert Goldman sings a passage from Ramayana’s “Beautiful Book” and recites the English translation.

Robert Goldman was a graduate student spending several years in India in the late 1960s, when, just for fun, he and a friend read the epic Sanskrit poem, the Valmiki Ramayana. Goldman was captivated by the adventures of the Hindu god Vishnu, who comes to earth on a divine mission in the form of the human hero, Rama.

“Think the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible in one package, and you might get a sense of it,” says Goldman, recalling the Ramayana’s simultaneously literary and religious stories of love and war, sex and violence, and mundane daily struggles sprinkled with multi-headed monsters and an army of shape-shifting monkeys.

During his original reading of the Valmiki Ramayana, he wished for a more readable English translation of the nearly 3,000-year-old classic, with its 24,000 verses constituting some 50,000 lines mostly in a 32-syllable meter. It seemed a worthy idea, considering that the legend, translated and transformed from Sanskrit into all Indian and Southeast Asian languages, sheds light on an ancient world and still influences Indian art, religion, politics and life today.

Shortly after joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of Sanskrit, Goldman says he assembled a group of scholars, divvying up the seven books of the Ramayana among them. The Valmiki Ramayana Translation Project was off and running.

In addition to translating the story, Goldman also was determined to produce an exhaustive annotation of the Ramayana for scholars of the text that serves as a foundation for Hinduism and provided core primers for Buddhist, Islamic, Jaina and other South and Southeast Asian cultures.

The Ramayana originated from an oral tradition. For more than 1,000 years of the story’s telling, there were no surviving manuscripts, notes Goldman, and when the epic was written, it was copied in different scripts.

Some controversial segments were even excised from regional variants of the epic. Eventually a critical edition of the original poem Ramayana was produced in the 1960s and ‘70s by the Oriental Institute of Baroda, India, from dozens of manuscripts collected from across the Indian subcontinent. Older translations into European languages generally were laden with awkward “thees” and “thous,” says Goldman. They were, of course, also not based on the critically reconstructed text.

Over the years, Goldman has been its director, editor and principal translator. His wife, Sally Sutherland Goldman, a UC Berkeley senior lecturer of Sanskrit, has been its associate editor. It often was an uneasy job for all involved.

“We argued about it, we fought about it, we disagreed,” says Goldman, explaining that he and fellow scholars eventually would agree on the interpretation that sounds “most correct” in English.

This week, Princeton University Press publishes the project’s seventh – and final – volume, Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, Volume VII, the Uttarakāṇḍa. It spells the end of the project led by Goldman and a consortium of Sanskrit scholars from around the world.

Read the full story and watch a video about the Goldman's quest to create the translation here: 
http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/11/17/ramayana-translation-project-turns-its-last-page-after-four-decades-of-research/

Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally

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