Overview

The Mahabharata, originally composed some two thousand years ago is an epic masterpiece, ""a hundred times more interesting"" than the Iliad and the Odyssey (Wendy Doniger), it is a timeless work that evokes a world of myth, passion and warfare while exploring eternal questions of duty, love and spiritual freedom. A seminal Hindu text, it is one of the most important and influential works in the history of world civilisation. This new English retelling, innovatively composed in blank verse, covers all the books of the Mahabharata. It masterfully captures the beauty, excitement and profundity of the original Sanskrit poem as well as its magnificent architecture and extraordinary scope.

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9780393081756

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Reviews

This book is a kind of miracle: a talented English poet has brought alive in blank verse an ancient Sanskrit epic for the contemporary ear and in a language that does not draw attention to itself but captures the weft and warp of the original thrilling tale, including its moral complexity. --Gurcharan Das

A bold new English translation captures the excitement and scope of the original Sanskrit epic poem. -- The Tablet Carole Satyamurti's Mahabharata, crucially not a translation, uses previous English versions as a springboard for her blank-verse modern retelling . Her aim has been to produce a readable and gripping narrative, focusing on the story, for the reader who may have little or no previous knowledge of the epic, and in this she has been resoundingly successful. -- New Statesman

Carole Satyamurti's new version of the Mahabharata moves swiftly and powerfully through nearly 900 pages of supple and muscular verse. She has found a voice that's capable of a wide variety of expression, and a line-basically classical English blank verse with a jazz-like freedom to swing-that propels the reader effortlessly onward through the cosmic, earthy, terrifying, erotic, sublime events of this extraordinary work. I shall keep it beside my desk together with Christopher Logue's Iliad and Ted Hughes's Ovid; I think I shall never get tired of it. -- Philip Pullman An exquisitely crafted reminder of the power of the Mahabharata: how riveting a read it is, and how relevant it remains to our times. -- Manil Suri Carole Satyamurti's 'modern retelling' of this ancient, vast, and various story is a gift to be grateful for. It gives us, as all poetry should, access into a world we did not know or did not know well enough and which henceforth we will visit again and again. -- David Constantine Effortlessly blending a fabulous array of stories with sophisticated narrative devices, this version of the Mahabharata is a spellbinding reading experience and a magisterial achievement. -- Eva Hoffman Like the Iliad, the Mahabharata has everything: love, war, family, gods, all the beauty and horror of life. I hope Carole Satyamurti's compelling version will introduce this marvelous epic, still largely unknown in the west, to a whole generation of new readers. -- Katha Pollitt This book is a kind of miracle: a talented English poet has brought alive in blank verse an ancient Sanskrit epic for the contemporary ear and in a language that does not draw attention to itself but captures the weft and warp of the original thrilling tale, including its moral complexity. -- Gurcharan Das

Author Information

Carol Satyamurti was a poet and social scientist. She published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Countdown. Her work has been widely anthologized and won numerous awards, including first prize in the National Poetry Competition, 1986, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2000. Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling, of which this volume is an abridgment, won the inaugural Roehampton Poetry Prize in 2015. Vinay Dharwadker (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the author of Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001) and a book of poetry, Sunday at the Lodi Gardens: Poems (1994). He is the editor of The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994) and The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (1999), and the translator of a collection of Kabir’s work called Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs (2003). Wendy Doniger (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She first trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham and then went on to complete two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies (from Harvard and Oxford). She has taught at Harvard, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984 she was elected president of the American Academy of Religion, in 1989 a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1996 a member of the American Philosophical Society, and in 1997 president of the Association for Asian Studies. She has been awarded seven honorary degrees, and her book The Hindus: An Alternative History was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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