Customer Reviews

The Mahabharata, Volume 7: Book 11: The Book of the Women Book 12: The Book of Peace, Part 1

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The translator of this book and author of it's copious notes, introductions and vast amounts of other ancillary material, has done a great service to this series.

I put off buying this one after reading the first three volumes. I didn't understand why they continued the series out-of-sequence. I later learned the complex reasons why things came about this way, but will not go into it here. However, after I did finally give in and buy this volume, I was glad I did.

On the one-hand, Fitzgerald overdoes it with the supplementary material. (Being a bit of an OCD case myself, I had to read it all anyway.) And the volume is a bit over-intellectualized. (As if the first translator Van Buitenen wasn't intellectualized enough?)

In spite of the aforementioned difficulties, Fitzgerald really saves the series by doing a fantastically thorough job, if not overly-qualified, of putting the book in context, showing how it fits in to the as-yet-untranslated volumes. He sets the whole thing up so that one feels one really is continuing along without missing a beat, so to speak.

Also, he is the one doing volume 8, (he's overseeing staffs who will translate the others in due time). But Volume 8 will finish off the Book of the Peace, which is the most monstrously long of all the books of the MBH. In this way, he's ensuring the project really gets done eventually. And volume 8 is supposed to be not-to-long in the offering. By the time one reads both 7 and the upcoming 8, the other books should one-by-one, find their way to the press.

So Fitzgerald has really done the heavy lifting of taking over from where the late Van Buitenen left off. And he has done the heavy lifting by doing the hardest work himself. His effort should restore the faith of any former follower of this massive project who was confused when the thing stopped at the third volume.