Ramayana gets "Goldman" touch

Robert Goldman, a Sanskrit professor at Berkley spent forty years of his life, along with his wife, Sally, translating the Valmiki Ramayana. And today, it is finally complete.

It is no simple work – this is a 3000 year old classic and has 24,000 verses, with 50,000 lines and almost all of them in a 32-syllable meter. When he came to India visiting in 1962, he chanced upon this legend ad was enthralled with the story. But he felt that there was no translation which did full justice to the beauty of Valmiki’s writing and thus embarked upon this task to translate it into a readable and more appealing English.

This week, Princeton University Press publishes the project’s seventh – and final – volume, Rāmāyaṇa of VālmÄ«ki: 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.

Funding for the Translation Project came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, UC Berkeley research grants, Princeton University Press, the American Institute of Indian Studies, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.