Parul Sehgal Reviews Amit Majmudar's Godsong

At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews a new verse translation of The Bhagavad Gita by poet Amit Majmudar. Majmudar's translation, Godsong, brings to contemporary readers "the most enigmatic of religious texts, a masterpiece of moral ambiguity," Sehgal writes. From there: 

Its 700 verses are a philosophical interlude nestled in the blood-soaked Sanskrit epic “The Mahabharata.” The story begins when Prince Arjuna — after Hamlet, literature’s greatest ditherer — balks from battle. His family is at war with each other, he is obligated to fight, but how can he? How can he kill his own kin? The god Krishna, disguised as his charioteer, incites him to action, explaining that it is Arjuna’s divine duty, as a member of the warrior caste. Along the way the poem offers a compendium of Hindu metaphysics of the era — the obligation to one’s duty (dharma), the imperative to work without care for reward — and the thicket of elliptical, contradictory remarks on violence that have found it such unlikely devotees.

When Krishna reveals his true identity, the awe-struck Arjuna asks him the question we might pose to the Bhagavad Gita itself: “If you are so many ways at once, who are you, really?"

Majmudar, who lives in Ohio and is a radiologist as well as a writer, had been familiar with the Gita (as it is commonly called) since childhood but was surprised by a sudden surge of religious feeling later in life. “It is an incongruity I hide from the other rich, bespectacled Indian doctors of my cohort, entering middle age like me, trying to stay fit like me, suburban and Midwestern like me,” he writes.

To love the Gita is apparently to be seized by a desire to translate it. There have been countless retellings and at least 300 English versions since it was first translated in 1785 by a merchant with the East India Company — who made it sound like a Hindu Bible, full of “thee” and “thou.”

Read more at the New York Times.