The project was taken up by the Princeton University Press as the flagship work in its series, the Princeton Library of Asian Translations. The design of the Project called for the serial publication of the translation as each of the seven kandas, or books, of the poem was completed. In addition, the annotation, while dealing with every narrative, textual and interpretive problem presented by the critically established text also provides a translation and annotation of the numerous passages in the so-called “vulgate” versions of the poem, which are widely known and important to its traditional audiences, as well as a running commentary on more than half a dozen earlier translations of the various recensions of the work in European languages. No previous translation has brought forth the indigenous scholarship on the poem which has had a major impact on the theological and literary reception of the work. One innovation concerning the annotation is that it is informed by a close reading of the extensive and highly influential medieval body of Sanskrit language commentary on the text produced from the 12th to the 19th century. The project took as its mission not only a translation of the critically reconstructed text of the epic but a copious scholarly introduction and a dense annotation of each of the poem’s seven books. It has thus been a major contribution to scholarship in all fields concerned with early Indian literature, art, religion and society. The critical edition, prepared over a period of fifteen years by scholars at the Oriental Institute of Baroda, represents a scientifically reconstructed text of the great epic based on dozens of manuscripts in all scripts and from all regions of the Indian subcontinent. The Project had as its goal the production of a complete, accurate and readable English translation of the critical edition of the Valmiki Ramayana. The project, titled the Valmiki Ramayana Translation Project was started at Berkeley in the mid 1970’s and was being carried out by an international consortium of Sanskrit scholars under the direction of Professor Robert Goldman and Professor Sally Sutherland Goldman. Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaņa, one of the most popular and influential works of poetic and religious literature ever composed, has been the subject of a quartercentury-long translation project at UC Berkeley.
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