Start the Bhagavad Gita with Laurie L. Patton's translation for Penguin Classics — 288 pages in paperback, published October 28, 2008, with an introduction and notes by the translator, according to the publisher's listing. It is the plainest honest door into the text for a reader who has never opened it. The Sanskrit is a conversation before it is anything else, and Patton lets it stay one.
The book: The Bhagavad Gita · translated with an introduction and notes by Laurie L. Patton · Penguin Classics · 288 pages, paperback · October 28, 2008 · ISBN 9780140447903 · $14.00 list price. Edition details are taken from the publisher's own catalogue page; no review copy was supplied for this guide, and no retail links appear anywhere in it.
What is the Bhagavad Gita actually about?
Two men talking in a chariot. W. W. Norton, describing its own trade edition, calls the text a dialogue between Krishna, an incarnation of God, and the warrior Arjuna on the eve of a great battle over succession to the throne. Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions puts the pivot more sharply: Krishna, Arjuna's great king and beloved friend, rejects Arjuna's declaration that he will become a monk, and instructs him instead in dharma.
That is the whole architecture. A man decides he cannot do the thing he was born to do; his friend, who is also God, tells him he is wrong, and then keeps talking. Everything the Gita is famous for — action without attachment to its fruit, the several disciplines it calls yoga, the vision of the divine that ends in terror rather than comfort — arrives inside that argument. Readers who come to it expecting a manual of serenity are usually surprised by how much of it is a man refusing to be consoled.
Which translation should a first-time reader buy?
Patton's. Penguin Classics carries the translation, introduction, and notes under a single scholar's name, which matters in a text this heavily commented: the apparatus and the English move together rather than pulling against each other. For a first reading, notes you can trust are worth more than an elegant line you cannot check.
What if you want the Sanskrit alongside it?
Then the interlinear edition is the only real answer. State University of New York Press publishes Winthrop Sargeant's The Bhagavad Gītā in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition edited by Christopher Key Chapple, and its description of the method is exact: a word-for-word English translation set beside the devanagari characters and the transliterated Sanskrit, with grammatical commentary, page-by-page vocabularies, and a running translation of each complete section at the foot of the page.
It is not a book you read in a chair on a Sunday. It is a book you work at a table, with a pencil, at perhaps four verses an hour, and the reward is that you stop taking anyone's English on faith. Chapple's editorial framing in the new edition is aimed precisely at readers who want to use the volume that way rather than admire it on a shelf.
Is there an edition that reads as poetry?
The Norton Critical Edition, translated by the poet Charles Martin and edited by the scholar of Hinduism Gavin Flood, is the one to reach for when the English itself has to hold up. Norton's page for the edition quotes praise calling it a true translation whose literary qualities make it stand out, and a chance to rediscover the Gita in a rendering that blends scholarship with artistry. Flood and Martin also produced a trade edition of the same translation.
The Norton Critical apparatus — the reason to choose that version over the trade paperback — is what you want on a second pass, once you know the argument well enough to want to hear other people argue about it.
In what order should you read it?
- Read Patton's Penguin Classics translation straight through, once, in as few sittings as you can manage, ignoring the notes entirely.
- Read it again with the notes, slowly, marking every place where a term is left in Sanskrit rather than Englished. Those are the load-bearing words.
- Read the Norton Critical Edition for Martin's verse and for the critical material around it.
- Only then, if the text has hold of you, open Sargeant and start construing the grammar yourself.
The order matters more than the list looks. Beginning with an interlinear is how people convince themselves the Gita is dry; beginning with a commentary is how people end up reading a commentator instead of a text.
Why do the chapter titles differ between editions?
Because they are not in the poem. The Harvard center's note on the eleventh chapter states plainly that the original Sanskrit text does not contain titles for any of its chapters — the familiar headings are editorial inheritance, and translators are free to disagree. The eleventh chapter is widely known as the Yoga of Universal Form, though the Harvard translator prefers Primordial Person for the Sanskrit viśvarūpa. A reader comparing two editions and finding two different chapter names has not caught an error. He has caught a convention.
What should you read alongside it?
Richard H. Davis's The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography, published by Princeton University Press on October 26, 2014 in its Lives of Great Religious Books series, 256 pages. Princeton's description of the book is the best short case for reading the reception history at all: the Gita has been translated into more than seventy-five languages, and the text has been embedded in one political setting after another, changing its meaning again and again.
The cast Princeton names is instructive — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Aldous Huxley, and J. Robert Oppenheimer on one side of the ocean; Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda putting the same dialogue to work against empire on the other. A text that can be read as a warrant for war and as a warrant for nonviolence is not a text with a hidden key. It is a text with a very long argument attached, and buying an edition is joining it.
What survives all of it is the moment in the eleventh chapter when Arjuna's request to see what he has been talking to is granted, and the friend in the chariot opens into what Aaron Michael Ullrey, translating from the critical edition of the Mahabharata for the Harvard center, renders as many mouths and eyes, many wondrous countenances, many divine adornments. Arjuna asked for a conversation. He got a face.
For a related faith perspective, read Where to Start With Thomas Merton.