The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation

Apr 2012 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this eBook

The Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, is an ancient Hindu scripture about virtue, presented as a dialogue between Krishna, an incarnation of God, and the warrior Arjuna on the eve of a great battle over succession to the throne. This new verse translation of the classic Sanskrit text combines the skills of leading Hinduist Gavin Flood with the stylistic verve of award-winning poet and translator Charles Martin. The result is a living, vivid work that avoids dull pedantry and remains true to the extraordinarily influential original. A devotional, literary, and philosophical masterpiece of unsurpassed beauty and imaginative relevance, The Bhagavad Gita has inspired, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley. Its universal themes—life and death, war and peace, sacrifice—resonate in a West increasingly interested in Eastern religious experiences and the Hindu diaspora.

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About the author

Gavin Flood is Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion and Academic Director of the Centre for Hindu Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of An Introduction to Hinduism; The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory, and Tradition; and The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion.

Charles Martin was born in New York City in 1942. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The recipient of numerous awards, Martin has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Three of his poetry collections—Steal the Bacon (1987), What the Darkness Proposes (1996), and Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (2002)—have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses won the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.