The Bhagavad Gita is like white noise in our society. By this I mean that it is part of the background din of our lives, quoted platitudinously, and masking rather than provoking thought. Technically, white noise like white light contains all the frequencies and is used to hide other sounds--the way one uses a fan sometimes to shut out the noise of traffic in order to sleep. In the same way the Gita's presence is imperceptible yet comforting, like the random sounds of a Hindi film song in the bazaar.
I said to myself recently that I would do something about it. To lift the Gita out of the white noise I would actually read it, and read it not with reverence for an ancient religious text but for pleasure, like a poem or a story that a child reads for the first time. Since I had only rudimentary knowledge of Sanskrit, I looked for a good English translation, but soon discovered that there were more than thirty translations to choose from, and like the Pandavan hero of the Gita, I became confused. So I talked to friends, visited libraries and dipped into different versions to help me make up my mind. An article by Gerald Larson, 'The song celestial: two centuries of the Bhagavadgita in English.' also guided me.
Vedanta enthusiasts directed me to the slim Isherwood-Prabhavananda translation, which has an introduction by Aldous Huxley on perennial philosophy. While I thought it satisfying as literature--after all Christopher Isherwood is a great writer--I felt it was not the most accurate, and its interpretation was a de-ethnicised Shankara combined with western mysticism. Radhakrishnan's rendition I found to be dull and commentarial. Indologists recommended Zaehner, and although his translation turned out to be stilted, his wonderful discussions on Ramanuja, Shankara and the Upanishads that run parallel in the text make it quite exciting. Although an accomplished orientalist, Zaehner was clearly attracted to the notion of the love of a personal god.
The most poetic is still the Victorian version of Sir Edwin Arnold, and it has the virtue of being the cheapest in the Dover thrift edition. Those seeking pure accuracy should read either Edgerton's translation or Van Buitenen's, who views the Gita as an integral part of the epic and challenges the traditional idea that it was inserted later. Don't trust Mascaro's version, which tries unsuccessfully to be poetic. Bhaktivedanta's rendition is a dull, sectarian, Sunday school textbook, reflecting the Vaishnavite values of Chaitanya. Since I am a beginner in Sanskrit, I found Winthrop Sargeant's very useful (but expensive); it is accompanied by an interlinear Sanskrit text, a word for word grammatical commentary and vocabulary.
In the end I chose Barbara Stoller Miller's translation because it is both accurate, poetical, and has the great virtue of simplicity. Before she died in 1993, she was professor of Sanskrit at Barnard/Columbia and she created the translation for our generation. Through this process of selecting I have come to realise that there is no right or wrong translation and each one serves its particular audience. Van Buitenen's version is no good to a follower of Sai Baba, as Arnold's account will not interest a Sanskritist. Mahatma Gandhi's or Tilak's use of the Gita in our freedom struggle is as valid as Edgerton's reading of the text as a Vaishnava Brahmin document of 1st c. AD.
As for me, I was charmed by this elegant philosophical poem, and it will never be white noise for me. The description in I.18 of Arjuna's dejection is magical: 'My limbs sink, my mouth is parched, my body trembles, the hair bristles on my flesh.' Like the American poets, Emerson and Thoreau, I was drawn to Gita's teaching that one should act selflessly without thinking of the reward. Being a practical sort of person, I have an intuitive feeling that this idea could be a powerful way to motivate people in our organizations, and become a source of national competitive advantage. But that is the subject for another Sunday.