Philosophy 135, 001 - Spring 2014 Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

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. ...