LIKE SUNS RISEN AT THE END OF TIME: METAPHOR AND MEANING IN THE MAHÅBHÅRATA: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

I’ve given this paper a flamboyant title because it is one of my favorite embellishments of what in Sanskrit is a much more condensed phrase. Why is kålasürya˙ thought by more than one translation to be the “doomsday sun,” rather than some other kind of sun—a “black sun,” for example? More generally my question is simply: when we translate the Sanskrit of the epic into English, why do we choose the words that we do? The translator pursues an art often doomed to failure or obscurity or both, but it is one that is nonetheless central to our attempts to understand the meaning of the epic. He or she moves across the surface of the text, balancing between words as if on rocks in a river. The waters below run deep. It has always surprised me to hear connoisseurs of the more recherchë varieties of Sanskrit literature dismiss the text of the Mahåbhårata as “simple.” “Voluminous” I can understand. Even the patient Pune editor of the Dro∫aparvan, the book I have been translating for some time now, complains in
his introduction of its “inconceivable prolixity.”