Mahabharata - A Modern Retelling

基本信息
Hardcover: 928 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (24 Mar. 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393081753
ISBN-13: 978-0393081756
Product Dimensions: 16.8 x 4.6 x 24.4 cm

內容簡介
Originally composed approximately two thousand years ago, the Mahabharata tells the story of a royal dynasty, descended from gods, whose feud over their kingdom results in a devastating war. But it contains much more than conflict. An epic masterpiece of huge sweep and magisterial power, a hundred times more interesting than the Iliad and the Odyssey, writes Wendy Doniger in the introduction, the Mahabharata is a timeless work that evokes a world of myth, passion, and warfare while exploring eternal questions of duty, love, and spiritual freedom. A seminal Hindu text, which includes the Bhagavad Gita, it is also one of the most important and influential works in the history of world civilization. Innovatively composed in blank verse rather than prose, Carole Satyamurti s English retelling covers all eighteen books of the Mahabharata. This new version masterfully captures the beauty, excitement, and profundity of the original Sanskrit poem as well as its magnificent architecture and extraordinary scope."

編輯推薦

Carole Satyamurti s modern retelling of this ancient, vast, and various story is a gift to be grateful for. It gives us, as all poetry should, access into a world we did not know or did not know well enough and which henceforth we will visit again and again. --David Constantine

[Satyamurti s] aim has been to produce a readable and gripping narrative, focusing on the story, for the reader who may have little or no previous knowledge of the epic, and in this she has been resoundingly successful. Her lines of iambic pentameter, with their rhythms, stresses and flow of ordinary English speech, give the narrative an easy, elegant momentum. Scenes of action are vivid and charged with a fast, drumming beat, quickening the reader s answering pulse. The very rare infelicity Bhishma s name, for example, is glossed as awesome , a word for ever tainted by the Friends generation only accentuates how her remaking, a monumental task that has resulted in a narrative poem nearly three times as long as Paradise Lost, is a remarkable achievement. --New Statesman

In her vibrant retelling of this set of tales from ancient India, British poet Satyamurti elegantly captures stories of family conflict, family rivalry, jealousy, pride, ambition, honour, defeat and love woven through the long Sanskrit poem[...] [She] succeeds in making this ancient masterpiece accessible to modern readers. --Publishers Weekly

作者簡介
Carol Satyamurti is a poet, sociologist, and translator. The author of many books of poetry, she has taught regularly for the Arvon Foundation and for the Poetry Society (UK). She lives in London. Vinay Dharwadker (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the author of Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001) and a book of poetry, Sunday at the Lodi Gardens: Poems (1994). He is the editor of The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994) and The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (1999), and the translator of a collection of Kabir's work called Kabir: The Weaver's Songs (2003). Wendy Doniger (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She first trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham and then went on to complete two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies (from Harvard and Oxford). She has taught at Harvard, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984 she was elected president of the American Academy of Religion, in 1989 a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1996 a member of the American Philosophical Society, and in 1997 president of the Association for Asian Studies. She has been awarded seven honorary degrees, and her book The Hindus: An Alternative History was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.