Translating a poetic text into a foreign language is an onerous endeavor. The metaphors, the constructs, the scenery – all are culturally linked to a land and her people. A translation can create odd connections to foreign language words when not sufficiently debated and analyzed. Brute translation by setting up the meanings as obtained from the dictionaries could serve the scholarly purpose of exposing an audience to a different literature, but is a disservice to the poet and the purport of the text. The best and the only way to relish the beauty pf poetic expression is to hear the material as composed by the poet in a simulation of the poet’s rendering. Loud lyrical reading of the text can bring out the texture of the composition for aesthetic appreciation, but the person must possess the fluency and command in the language with the native understanding of the culture. A poem is a creation, it captures the life of the people it describes!
The current work aims to present Valmiki’s immortal epic in a story form for the modern youth. It is retelling of the story in a prose style as the poet would do if he could present his work to a young audience in the twenty-first century. The retelling maintains the authenticity of the development of the story and the characterization of different personalities by closely following the text in the original. We have used the traditionally popular Ramayana text published by the Gita Press in Gorakhpur, India. No assumption is made of any cultural symbolism or any interpretation other than what is directly available in the text. Our goal is to treat the text as a poetic composition without inflicting any religious or social color.
The site is divided into three parts: a part containing the chapter-wise translation followed by two parts containing interpretative essays of episodes and characters in English and in Hindi. The translation material is uploaded gradually. We started working on the material in 2013 and this site is being released in 2020. We will continue to update the site as we proceed.
About The Site...
The site was planned in 2019 and is released in 2020. Mr. Ajay Kewale, a volunteer in Dwarkamai Vidyapeeth In Billerica, MA designed the site and maintains it. The English essays can be downloaded from https://vidyapeeth.dwarkamai.com/articles. The Hindi translations are downloadable from https://vidyapeeth.dwarkamai.com/index.php/phoca-downloads/category/4-sri-bijoy-misra. The readers can contact us for the translation texts. All help and financial contributions are directed to support Dwarkamai Vidyapeeth and India Discovery Center. All financial contributions are IRS tax-deductible in the USA.