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The Mahabharata is the story of a dynastic struggle that provides a social, moral, and cosmological background to the climactic battle. The present English rendition is a retelling based on a translation of the Sanskrit original published by Pratap Chandra Roy, in the beginning of the last century. William Buck has condensed the story. The old translation on the basis which he worked, covers 58800 pages of print, while his own book is less than a tenth of that ...
It is not rally a translation but more of a rewriting of the Ramayana, using as source material the published English translations. For translation of the Ramayana into English do exist, but none so far is very satisfactory, either from a scholarly, or from a literary point of view. William Buck's adaptation is an extraordinary accomplishment. He was neither a scholar nor a well-known author, and though he retells the Rama story with many variations of detail, he ...
Compared to the western epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata are more complete story of Hindu religious, cultural and social imagination and more exact narration of evolutionary rise of man. In this book, William Buck has succeeded better that anyone else in conveying the spirit of the original. The task of presenting a faithful image of the original text, its metaphysical nuances as well as its chronological sequence the world's largest epic in a small book is a ...