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REVIEWS
The Rāmāyaṇa of Valmiki. Volume I: Bälakända. Introduction and Translation by Robert P. Goldman. Annotation by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland. Princeton University Press, 1984. xx, 429 pp. £52.50. Volume II: Ayodhyākända. Introduction and Translation by Sheldon I. Pollock. Princeton University Press, 1987. xviii, 560 pp. £40.00.
The entire Rāmāyaṇa has been translated into English, French and Italian. Goldman states that there are at least three translations into English. With the recent publication of N. Raghunathan's translation (Madras, 19811982) there are now five translations of the entire poem into English, the others being by R. T. H. Griffith (1870-1875), M. N. Dutt (1891-1894), M. L. Sen (1927) and H. P. Shastri (1952-1959). The Rāmāyaṇa has been translated into French by Hippolyte Fauche (1854-1858) and by Alfred Roussel (1903), and into Italian by Gaspare Gorresio (1847-1858 and 1870). Goldman makes the following remarks with regard to the existing translations: "Whatever their literary merit, and this varies radically, all of the translations so far made have been based upon a single version or recension of the text, either the vulgate or the Bengal version, and their authors have not been in a position to judge accurately the vital text-critical problems that the epic presents. None of them, moreover, has attempted to put before its audience the results of a close and critical reading of the extensive commentarial literature that has grown up around the poem" (Vol. I, p. 96).
This new translation undertaken by a group of American scholars is based upon the critical edition published in Baroda (1960-1975). However, the text of the critical edition has not been followed slavishly as can be seen from the many notes in which decisions taken by the editors of this edition are queried and from the list of emendations and corrections at the end of volume two. Sheldon I. Pollock has contributed an essay on the Rāmāyaṇa text and the critical edition to Volume I (pp. 82-93) in which he discusses in some detail the relation between the northern and the southern recensions. According to Pollock the northern recension presents some sort of revision but not because, as has been maintained in the past, grammatical irregularities of the southern recension have been eliminated in
Indo-Iranian Journal 32: 195-254, 1989.
1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
