Insights

Click here for the translator's synopsis of the book.

I had known Sávitri's story for a long time – I can't quite remember how long. Perhaps I first came across it in the form of Gustav Holst's chamber opera. I knew it was about Death and a temporary reprieve from death; I knew it was about a resourceful woman. I don't think I came to the Maha·bhárata's version directly until some time later, and even then I skimmed such stories because I was impatient to proceed with what seemed to be the narrative core of the Epic. (I say 'version', but the Maha·bhárata story, if not the original, must at least stand for it now.) Yet an image stayed with me: a black figure in a red robe, suddenly appearing in a forest clearing to a woman cradling her husband's head in her lap. And for some reason – perhaps because of the inherent drama of the situation – I always imagined this scene being played on an empty stage: a man and a woman in a pool of light, and this third, threatening figure, which seems like a man, but is not a man, at the edge of darkness. It was this image that came to mind when I was asked to translate some of the Maha·bhárata for the Clay Sanskrit Library, and so it was there that I decided to start.

As I made a first draft of the translation, the urge to dramatize the story became irresistible. Others have been similarly seduced, for different reasons: to glorify a faithful wife, to teach schoolchildren about a Hindu wedding, to impart some metaphysical truth. Perhaps mine was a middle-aged motive: to explore an encounter with death, and the accommodation to mortality. So as to my left there crystallized a not quite literal, but close rendering of the Sanskrit, to my right, there grew a 'translation' only in the loosest sense. Yet both seemed to have a similar purpose: to retell an old story in a modern idiom for a contemporary audience. For no better reason than that it grew organically out of my Sanskritist's translation, and casts an oblique light on it, here is my other version.

My dramatization finishes here - ambivalent and unresolved in the modern way; the original goes forward with greater confidence to its own culturally specific conclusion.

After I had finished a draft of the Sávitri episode, I began to look at the episodes on either side of it, and at the Forest Book as a whole. Slowly I realised my mistake: the Forest Book with its multiple stories, rather than being a diversion from, or accretion to the core narrative of the Epic, was in many ways its replicant. If, as it claims for itself, the Maha·bhárata contains everything, so in a sense does the forest (and its Book), but in a different register. Even without the benefit, or anachronism, of modern psychological analysis, the whole might be imagined as a series of clearings in the forest - clearings in which critical and transformative encounters take place. These are not just places where men and women get lost, where they encounter death and demons, they are also spaces in which individuals have a chance to discover themselves, in Indian terms, to realise their dharma. (The same might be said of our modern equivalent, and the site of most of our present fictions, the urban 'jungle'.) It is therefore no accident that Sávitri's encounter with death takes place in the forest, that Sita; is abducted there, that the Pándavas, after a mortal trial with Dharma disguised as a yakṣa, die and are brought back to life there. More widely, it is no accident that it is to the forest that renouncers go in search of liberation, and that a change of location is equated to an inner transformation. In short, I realised that the Epic forest, has many clearings, and, like Prospero's (and Caliban's) island, many voices. I also saw that each story, in its own way, could be as dramatic, and as potentially unsettling as Sávitri's debate with Death. The Forest Book lay before me: what better way to discover it than to go to the beginning and start to translate.