The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation by George ThompsonReview by: Joydeep BagcheeJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 131, No. 4 (October-December 2011), pp. 657-659Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41440526 .

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Reviews of Books 657

explaining - among other things - how the unique character of the Indian constitution makes it possible for such explicitly religious groups to claim the mantle of secularism. Finally, Krishnan provides an overview of Hindu migration patterns from South Asia during the modern period and briefly describes the sorts of the legal issues - particularly issues of legal identity - that these diasporic Hindu communi- ties have faced in their non-South Asian homelands.

In short, the essays contained in Hinduism and Law cover an impressive array of topics related to law and Hinduism in all major historical periods. They are on the whole extremely well-written and useful contributions suitable for a broad scholarly audience. My only substantial criticism of the work is that a few of its chapters are written in such a needlessly obscure style that I am able to glean from them only the vaguest of arguments and conclusions.

David Brick Yale University

The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation . By George Thompson. New York: North Point Press, 2008.

The past few years have seen a spate of Bhagavadgïtâ translations, most notably by Laurie Patton (2008), Lars Martin Fosse (2007), and Graham Schweig (2010). The Bhagavadgïtâ seems to be an inexhaustible sub-field of study, whose hold on readership has not diminished since the earliest transla- tions by Western Sanskritists (Wilkins' 1785 translation being the earliest). The enormous number of translations catering to different perspectives and audiences, however, forces each new translator to struggle to find a niche and to bring his own voice to the text.

George Thompson takes his place alongside earlier translators with a compact and elegant edition targeted especially at undergraduate students. Finding that many students had problems with the stan- dard translations ("awkward, stiff, and sometimes hardly poetic at all" [p. xii]), Thompson set out to create an accurate but approachable translation - a challenge he meets admirably for the most part. In particular, he succeeds in rendering the Bhagavadgïtâ into "colloquial, direct, and fast-paced English" (p. xiii), albeit often at the price of philosophical nuance. I will return to this point later in my review; here I would like to focus on the principles behind Thompson's translation. A consistent feature in his attempt to create a fast-paced translation is his use of pairs or triads of shorter sentences, where other translations opt for a series of sub-clauses. Thus, he renders 2.2 as "Where does this weakness in you come from, Arjuna, at this time of crisis? It is not fitting in a nobleman. It does not gain you heaven. It does not bring you honor" (p. 8). Contrast this with van Buitenen's translation: "Why has this mood come over you at this bad time, Arjuna, this cowardice unseemly to the noble, not leading to heaven, dishonorable?" Thompson's short staccato sentences keep the action moving forward.

Thompson also employs a number of other strategies in the interests of an accessible translation: notes are kept to a minimum and moved to the end of the book and difficult Sanskrit words are trans- lated with standardized generic English terms (e.g., 'duty' for dharma , occasionally also rendered as 'law'). There is, of course, a price to pay for this straightforward translation of a highly nuanced poem: the term dharma also implies the four purusãrthas , and has a wide range of moral and metaphysical implications as well that are often lost in Thompson's translation. For example, he translates 2.31 as "Also, you should reflect upon your own caste duties. You should not get agitated. In fact, for a war- rior there is nothing more noble than a just war." The term he renders as 'caste-duty' is svadharma , but svadharma is not the same as varnadharma : although they may coincide in the case of Arjuna the ksatriya , this is an oversimplification of the text. The issue of dharma in the Bhagavadgïtâ is a complex one (see, for example, the chapter on "Dharma in the Bhagavadgïtâ" in Alf Hiltebeitel's recent Dharma [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 20111). In the case of Brahmins at least, the equivocation Thompson suggests breaks down, as Hiltebeitel shows.

Arjuna' s multiple names and epithets are generally (although not always) replaced with "Arjuna." Especially in chapter 11 with its long tristubh sections, Thompson's minimalist approach leads to a radically simplified text. Verse 11.22, for example, is simply translated as "Terrifying gods and

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658 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.4 (201 1)

heavenly gods, bright gods, and perfected gods; universal gods, the divine twins, storm gods, and ancestral spirits; hosts of celestial musicians, sprites, demons, and saints - they all look upon you and are seized with wonder." If it does not quite capture the sonorous rhythms of the original, Thompson nonetheless succeeds in producing a kind of poetry of his own. Although lacking the poetic expressive- ness and elegance of Schweig' s rasa-sensitive translation, Thompson's translation of chapter 1 1 makes it much easier to teach this complex and terminology-rich chapter.

Thompson's translation of the key chapter 15, on the other hand, is more accurate than van Buite- nen's in a number of respects. For example, van Buitenen translates asaňgašastrena as 'axe of disin- terest' in 15.3; Thompson has 'ax of detachment'. Van Buitenen translates prasrtã as 'derived' where Thompson has 'flowed forth' (verse 15.4). But in spite of these improvements, Thompson's simpli- fication occasionally tends to the simplistic. An example of this is the word kutastha, which occurs in a philosophically pregnant way in verse 15.16. Thompson translates this word here and elsewhere as 'mountaintop'. Although 'mountaintop' is an acceptable translation of kutastha , it is only one of its meanings. Thompson does clarify in his introduction that kutastha means 'the one standing on the mountaintop', but this does not suffice to convey the philosophical depth and semantic range of the term (especially its relation to the ksara and aksara aspects of purusa). Regrettably, the notes to chapter 15 do not clarify this verse at all.

Some problems concern not so much the translation as the translator's interpretive presuppositions, especially those concerning the poetic principles of the Bhagavadgïtâ. For example, Thompson counts 6.5 among the text's "strange, awkward passages" (p. xiii) for its repetition of the word ãtman a total of seven times. The poet of the Gïtâ, on the other hand, obviously delights in and intends this repetition to be significant. Poetry and philosophy are not two different things in the case of the Gïtâ. Thus, 6.5 does not merely feature repetition for "stylistic effect." Poetic repetition in this verse alerts the reader to the polysemy of the word ãtman. A look at classical Indian commentaries on this verse would have been useful: Šamkara for example takes the first ãtmãnam to mean "oneself sunk in the sea of the world" and, in the next verse of his commentary, interprets eva ãtmã as "the aggregate of body and organs." Rãmãnuja interprets the second ãtmãnam as "the mind, which is unattached to sense-objects" or, alter- natively, as "a mind which is of the contrary kind" (in the case where it lets the self sink). The point here is not to read the commentators back into the Bhagavadgïtâ , but to preserve the philosophically fertile poetic nature of this text that gave rise to these commentaries in the first place.

More serious is Thompson's hasty conclusion that bhakti supersedes or is even opposed to Vedic religion. His translation of 2.42-44 suggests an antipathy between the doctrines Krsna espouses and Vedism, a view also found in the notes (cf. "This is a very emphatic rejection of all the Vedas . . [p. 91, n. to 2.46] and "Here the Bhagavad Gïtâ clearly reveals its disdain for the Vedas" [p. 98, n. to 15.1]). However, Thompson's translation of 2.42-44 is misleading, since Krsna' s criticism is not directed at the Veda tout court but at those who, as van Buitenen elegantly puts it, "delight in the dis- putations on the Veda." Krsna specifically condemns the atheists who assert "there is nothing more" (nãnyad asti), thus tacitly validating the Veda. A similar misunderstanding colors the brief coda to his introduction, where he argues against seeing chapter 11 as part of the original text. Thompson's main argument is that the events of this chapter "are described by Arjuna rather than by Krsna himself. . . . As such it is an Arjuna Gïtâ rather than a Bhagavad Gita" (p. xlv). Thompson is right to note the change of perspective (especially that between chapters 10 and 11), but this is insufficient justifica- tion for considering chapter 11 to be a "later insertion" or for imputing "many apparent layers and internal contradictions" to the text (p. xlvii). The dialogical structure of the Gïtâ is perfectly capable of accommodating a variety of perspectives: not only Arjuna' s or Krsna' s, but also that of Samjaya, who is instrumental in narrating sections of chapter 1 1 . The poet is aware of the power of the vision Krsna gives Arjuna: it is meant to go beyond words and concepts and to induce a transformative experience in Arjuna. Arjuna' s lengthy response is framed by the key term: pasyãmi (repeated in 11.15, 16, 17, and 19). That Arjuna "sees" attests to the success of the Gïtâ. (Dhrtarãstra, in contrast, is blind in more ways than one.) But, for all its sublimity, the vision also evokes feelings of terror; it is both fascinans and tremendum. The vision of the visvarüpa, which mirrors the Kuru field with its many limbs, weap- ons, and its destructive horror, is also intended as a paraphrase of Arjuna' s experience. Since what is

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Reviews of Books 659

at stake is Ar juna 's perception of reality and his recognition of its significance, it is only fitting that the poet chooses Arjuna's voice to gloss it.

Apart from such issues with the introduction, the translation is eminently suitable for classroom use. Thompson's many years of teaching the text are reflected in its simple and direct message, and in the effective use of the notes to convey the minimum background required for students to grasp complex concepts such as causality, embodiment, and the effects of the gunas. Although the loss of philosophi- cal nuance can be a problem at times, on the whole his decision to reduce complexity and focus on the Gïtâ's moral philosophy could work well in classroom situations. There is no glossary, but the annotated bibliography should be useful to undergraduate students looking for further reading sugges- tions. The book is well laid out, with each verse numbered, in contrast to van Buitenen's translation. On the whole, Thompson's decision to translate for a specific audience is a modest yet admirable goal. It succeeds in producing a focused translation that can be recommended as an introductory text to both students and general readership.

JOYDEEP BaGCHEE Philipps-Universität, Marburg

Time, Tense and Aspect in Early Vedic Grammar: Exploring Inflectional Semantics in the Rigveda. By Eystein Dahl. Brill Studies in Indo-European Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xviii + 475.

The question concerning the precise temporal and aspectual values of the Rigvedic present, aorist, and perfect stems has been a vexed one, producing a range of different interpretations by such scholars as Berthold Delbrück, Jan Gonda, Karl Hoffmann, Peter Arnold Mumm, Eva Tichy, and Paul Kiparsky, among others. The present work adopts a formal semantic approach to both of these parameters, involv- ing the notions of evaluation time (t0, the default value of which is speech time [ts]), reference time (ť), and event time (tE). Taken together with relationships of inclusion (c), precedence (<), overlap (® ), and partial precedence (<), these yield formal specifications of both tense and aspect. The former is defined as a relation between evaluation time and reference time and the latter as a relation between reference time and event time. The tense categories so defined are present (t0 < t'), past (ť < t0), and future (t0 < ť), whereas the aspect categories are neutral (ť ® tE), imperfective (ť Q tE), perfective (tE ç ť), and anterior (tE < t'). Dahl applies these criteria to both telic and atelic verbs in all five moods of the present, aorist, and perfect stems (indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative, and injunctive) as well as to their participles and concludes that the present system possesses neutral aspect, the aorist perfective aspect, and the perfect anterior aspect. These basic aspectual meanings combine with tense and mood operators to produce a set of lexically and contextually determined readings that result in the areas of overlap and differentiation among these categories. Thus, the present indicative shows progressive-processual, iterative-habitual, performative, and extended-now readings, as well as a com- pletive-sequential reading, whereas the perfect indicative shows existential, resultative, present state, and extended-now readings. These two categories show only the extended-now reading in common. More generally, the perfect indicative serves to specify inherently an extended-now reference whose default value is that of a retrospective present, while the present indicative is typically associated with a general present reading but is compatible with a retrospective present reading when modified by an adverb such as sanat 'from of old'.

With regard to the two main past tenses, imperfect and aorist, the latter seems to be compatible with a broader range of past reference times than the former. Both are found in hodiernal and remote-past reference times, but the aorist alone is found in contexts with an immediate-past reference time. Both the aorist and imperfect can be used with completive- sequential and inchoative-ingressive readings, and both are compatible with durative adverbs ('for X years'), although only the imperfect forms of telic predicates are compatible with a progressive-processual reading. Dahl concludes that aspectual

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