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Reviews
“The Gita is a love song to reality, a hymn in praise of everything excellent and beautiful and brave.” Time and again Mitchell’s rendition evokes just that... It is a moving text, poignant, beautiful, haunting.
—Los Angeles Times
Mitchell must by now be accounted one of our generation’s heroic
translators, having taken on the Book of Job, the Tao Te Ching,
and Genesis and done so much to popularize Rilke in English.
Now he applies his considerable skill and sympathy to one of
the most noted sacred texts of Asia, the Bhagavad Gita, and
the results are very happy... Highly recommended.
—Library
Journal
As Mitchell notes in his excellent introduction, the Gita is
not just one of the core texts of Hindu religious philosophy;
it has been a key work in the development of American literature
as well... Mitchell has the uncanny ability to usher originals
into an English of beauty and resonance without making them
all sound alike. His Gita is dazzling without ostentation...
This is a handsome and expertly translated version of one of
the world’s most important religious poems.
—Kirkus Reviews
Few events in publishing these days can be called joyous and
historically significant, but the appearance of Stephen Mitchell’s
new translation of the ancient Hindu holy book the Bhagavad
Gita is such an occasion... He has created a verse translation
of the Gita that moves more quickly and is more accessible than
the previous translations... [This is] the perfect book to delve
into whenever you feel a need to enter... a world in which we
are eternal, radiant, and loved.
—Yoga Journal
On the list of the greatest spiritual books of all time, the Bhagavad Gita resides permanently in the top echelon.... In this titular translation, Stephen Mitchell's rhythms are faultless, making music of this ancient "Song of the Blessed One."
—Brian Bruya, for Amazon.com
Mitchell must by now be accounted one of our generation’s heroic translators, having taken on the Book of Job, the Tao Te Ching, and Genesis and done so much to popularize Rilke in English. Now he applies his considerable skill and sympathy to one of the most noted sacred texts of Asia, the Bhagavad Gita, and the results are very happy. He works in free-verse quatrains of about three beats per line, and his language flows with great naturalness. Inevitably, this text will remain both ancient and foreign to many modern readers, but Mitchell’s work goes a long way to making these words...[drive] away your ignorance and delusion. Highly recommended.
—Library Journal
Thoreau said of this Indian masterpiece that "in comparison, our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial," while Gandhi claimed that those who meditated upon it would "derive fresh joy and new meanings from it every day." The sixth book of the epic Mahabharata, the Gita is one of Asia's most renowned spiritual texts. Mitchell, whose translation of the Tao Te Ching has been extraordinarily popular, offers a direct, clean translation of the Gita that reads like a series of pithy epigrams of advice and comfort… Mitchell clarifies meaning without sacrificing beauty and emotional resonance. Recommended for libraries whose patrons show strong interest in non-Western religious traditions.
—Booklist
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