Philip Lutgendorf, second to none among Western Tulsidas scholars in recent decades, here sets out on a new journey: translating Tulsi's Rāmcaritmānas in a projected series of seven volumes. These first two books make a magnificent beginning, fully complementing Lutgendorf's groundbreaking 1991 work The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas, and his prodigious related scholarship since that time. The familiar elegance of the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) is here put to excellent use, with the bespoke Devanagari and roman fonts reflecting each other's clarity across the facing-page spread; each of the two books has a brief introduction and a modest selection of endnotes. The present two volumes accommodate Bālkāṇḍ; the remaining five will offer respectively: 3–4 Ayodhyākāṇḍ; 5 Araṇyakāṇḍ, Kiṣkindhākāṇḍ and Sundarkāṇḍ; 6 Laṅkākāṇḍ; and 7 Uttarkāṇḍ.
The question of layout is probably the first aspect of these books to hit the eye (and then the mind and heart) of the Mānas aficionado. Since the time of the earliest printed editions of Tulsi's text, the established practice has been to show caupāī stanzas standing foursquare as a pair of two-foot lines set one above the other: that is, feet a-b set above feet c-d. This traditional layout yields a ready appreciation of verse structure, an intimate part of Tulsi's unsurpassed rhetoric. More specifically, it also allows for a vertical parallelism of a with c (and sometimes of b with d): for example, grammatical or rhetorical parallels between a and c may set up a compositional counterpoint against the sequential connection of a with b and of c with d. I do not mean to suggest that such arrangements regularly involve formal dicolons, or that there is any standard pattern of syntactic, semantic, rhythmic, phonetic, or other parallelism between the vertically paired feet; rather that interplay of the kinds just mentioned may occasionally form part of the immensely subtle weave of Tulsi's poetic fabric. Such visual subtleties are essentially a gift of the printed tradition, having no corollary in either manuscript calligraphy or recitation – but it is a gift we have grown used to enjoying since the printed tradition began, and it is wholly lost when the four feet are regarded as separately listable items, with four line-breaks instead of two.
This new MCLI edition parts from the age-old tradition and does indeed set the caupāī as a sequence of four separate lines, stacked one upon the other. This reviewer huffed and puffed for a while at the sight of such a radical change, but was mollified when the reason for it became apparent: the new arrangement allows for an exact match between the layout of the Awadhi on the left-hand page and that of the English translation on the right-hand page, where the translator has, in most cases, artfully maximized this connection in his deployment of the English phrasing. This foot-for-foot equivalence greatly facilitates the dual reading of mūla and translation, and turns out to be one of the most successful and attractive aspects of the translator's approach.
Earlier translators of the Mānas include F.S. Growse, Magistrate and Collector of Bulandshahr, whose translation as The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás was published in Allahabad in 1883; this text remained for many years the standard English version, and was influential on Growse's successors. Like most translations (apart from an unsuccessful rhymed version by A.G. Atkins, Delhi, 1954), Growse's text is in English prose. He renders the opening two stanzas of the Awadhi text thus:
O Ganes, of the grand elephant head; the mention of whose name ensures success, be gracious to me, accumulation of wisdom, storehouse of all good qualities! Thou too, by whose favour the dumb becomes eloquent, and the lame can climb the vastest mountain, be favourable to me, O thou that consumest as a fire all the impurities of this iron age.
Growse's diction reflects a Victorian mode of piety suggestive of the King James Bible, which is more or less contemporaneous with Tulsi's epic; he expands on Tulsi from time to time, for example naming “Ganes” where the poet offers only the epithet karibara badana “fine elephant-faced”. Lutgendorf sits closer to the original wording in this and also in his retention of the third-person optative of Tulsi's verbs (karaü, dravaü); and as already mentioned, he gives line breaks in close imitation of Tulsi's caupāī feet:
He whose recollection brings success, / great elephant-headed lord of legions, / a mass of wisdom and abode of auspiciousness – / may he be gracious to me.
He by whose grace the mute gain eloquence / and the lame scale lofty summits – / may that merciful one, who burns all the dross / of this dark age, take pity on me.
The two translators take different strategies to accommodate Tulsi's massed relative clauses; and strangely, both choose the idea of “eloquence” to render bācāla, for which “loquacious” or “garrulous” would capture Tulsi's relishable irony more pointedly. No translator can address the metrical subtleties of Tulsi's composition (in this opening sequence of verses he exploits a variant of sorṭhā metre to great rhetorical effect); but the verse-layout of Lutgendorf's translation lends it readability and grace, besides providing a conveniently neat match for readers with one finger on the Awadhi line and another on the English. The translator bases his version on the ubiquitous Gita Press edition but helpfully signposts the translated narrative by dividing the English text into chapters headed “Prologue”, “The story of Shiva and Bhavani”, “Causes of Ram's incarnation”, etc.
Readers and scholars may endlessly debate the detail of this or that word or phrase (is “dross” technically combustible?), but when all is said and done, we have in these paired volumes an excellent rendering of the first part of Tulsi's classic: a fine new version for our times.
