A Single Volume Ramayana - And a Bit too Much Excitement

 You know, there are moments when I have to admit to a ever so slightly nerdy moments. Generally, I accuse many of my friends (for instance, Cyndi) of being much bigger nerds than me (well, Janet gets a pretty consistent accusation), but, maybe I may have an ever so insignificant, almost unmeasurably small, degree of nerd in me. No one should be so excited about the arrival of a thousand page version of the Ramayana. To be fair, I do love the Ramayana, but the arrival of a single volume is huge for my Epics project. I have been able to tie my research and writing to single editions of the Iliad (Robert Fitzgerald), the Aeneid (Robert Fagles), the Shahnameh (Dick Davis), and Journey to the West (Anthony Yu, although Yu's classic is four volumes - he did create his single volume The Monkey and the Monk, which I use every year). All of these are easy to track down and inexpensive to acquire. The outlier was always the Ramayana. There simply wasn't a single volume that featured the original text from the Indian poet Valmiki. There are several much shorter retellings, but I wanted my readers to experience the original text, and not a modern retelling. So, I tied my writing to Robert Goldman's massive Critical Edition, which is extraordinary, but something that would be hard to find unless you had access to a library at a research university. So, the arrival of The Ramayana of Valmiki: the Complete English Translation from Robert Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman is a godsend. I have my single, affordable edition that I can tie to my research (although lining things up to my original citations from the Critical Edition, and factoring in new translations, is a late challenge to my work) solves a big problem. Beyond everything else, I was simply way too excited to have the book arrive, and provide me yet another opportunity to delve into the Indian classic.

Robert Goldman, who is a major scholar but also a very nice guy, told me about the publication of the single volume Ramayana (which somehow I had missed). It's still a tome, obviously, but here it is next to the seven volume Critical Edition of the Ramayana from which it is culled.