This is amazing, Robert. Just last week I was reading about how influential Hari Prasad Shastri's English translation of the Rāmāyaṇa was. Who would have thought that an Indian teacher, an accomplished Sanskrit scholar as he was, would have largely translated from the French translation of a Western scholar rather than from the original Sanskrit.

Nancy and I take this opportunity to express our utmost appreciation to you and Sally and your team for your lifelong project of translating the critical edition of the Rāmāyaṇa into English. The team from the Oriental Institute, Vadodara (Baroda), working from 1951 to 1975, gave the world the first critical edition of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa. Your team gave the world the first reliably accurate English translation of the Rāmāyaṇa. The value of these two contributions cannot be overestimated.

Best regards,

David Reigle
Colorado, U.S.A.


On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Robert Goldman <rpg@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Since the topic has come up, it is illuminating as David and Nancy have done, to look beyond the wretched and ignorant writings of Mr. Malhotra to examples of work in wide circulation in which the author’s unethical reliance on earlier scholarship has not been widely noticed.

The most serious and extensive example we have  encountered in the course of our work is Hari Prasad Shastri’s three volume English translation of the Vālmīkirāmāyaṇa, The Ramayana of Valmiki (London: Shanti Sadan 1959). This work has been very substantially translated directly from Alfred Roussel’s 1903 French translation Le Rāmāyaṇa de Vālmīki, (Paris: Librairie des cinq parties du monde. Bibliothèque Orientale, no. 8.) as Sally Sutherland Goldman and I have amply documented throughout  the annotation of our translations of the epic’s Sundara, Yuddha and Uttara (now in press) kāṇḍas.

As others have noted Sanskrit does  of course have a widely used marker of quotations in the form of the particle iti and the numerous authors with whom we have worked are quite meticulous in citing their sources whether they agree or disagree with the quoted authors or texts. They do not necessarily cite, as  modern western protocol requires, by chapter and verse, generally being content with ascriptions to a text, a body of text or an author as in iti śrutiḥ, iti pādme, iti bhaṭṭatīrthāu etc. But that is the normal scholarly protocol of their intellectual tradition.

Bob Goldman
Dr. R. P.  Goldman
Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies
Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies MC # 2540
The University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-2540