This illustration in a 17th-century copy of the Ramayana, part of a British Library collection, shows a scene in which the birds fall out of the sky in fright, while Rama and Laksmana and the other monkeys look on from the right. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Berkeley - Robert Goldman was a graduate student spending several years in India in the late 1960s, when just for fun he and a friend read the epic Sanskrit poem, the Valmiki Ramayana . Goldman was captivated by the adventures of the Hindu god, Vishnu, who comes to earth on a divine mission in the form of the human hero, Rama. 'Think 'Iliad and the Odyssey? and the Bible in one package, and you might get a sense of it,' says Goldman, recalling the Ramayana's simultaneously literary and religious stories of love and war, sex and violence, and mundane daily struggles sprinkled with multi-headed monsters and an army of shape-shifting monkeys. Robert and Sally Goldman led the 40-year project to translate the Sanskrit epic poem Valmiki Ramayana to modern English. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian, Stephen McNally, and Phil Ebiner) He recalls wishing during his original reading of the Valmiki Ramayana for a more readable English translation of the nearly 3,000-year-old classic, with its 24,000 verses constituting some 50,000 lines mostly in a 32-syllable meter. A worthy idea, considering that the legend, translated and transformed from Sanskrit into all Indian and Southeast Asian languages, sheds light on an ancient world and still influences Indian art, religion, politics and life today. The translation saga Shortly after joining the University of California, Berkeley, faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of Sanskrit, Goldman says he assembled a group of scholars, divvying up the seven books of the Ramayana among them.
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