THE RÁMÁYANA OF TULSI DÁS:
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL HINDI.
BY
F. S. GROWSE, M. A., OXON., C. I. E.,
BENGAL CIVIL SERVICE.
Government Press, Allahabad.
Price Rs. 6-8.
"This is undoubtedly a valuable addition to Anglo-Indian literature. It opens a new mine of riches to European scholars. The translation is very faithful, literal, and animated. Mr. Growse has thoroughly entered into the spirit of Tulsi Dás, and has very agreeably succeeded in painting him in a foreign language to the best advantage that we could have wished.... If space allowed, we could give extracts to show the scholarlike manner in which he has rendered some of the most abstruse religious thoughts of the Hindus into idiomatic and simple English."—Indian Tribune, 1877.
"Mr. Growse has done a good service to letters in seeking to atone for the slight hitherto put by English translators upon a poet of no mean merit, Tulsi Dás, the bard of Rájapur. Translation may not be the grandest of fields, but it is no faint praise to occupy it with taste, judgment, and discernment.... So much care has been taken to reproduce in their exact form the similes with which every page of the original abounds that the book may safely be commended to all who want to make some acquaintance with the inner life and mode of thought of our countrymen. It is only in poetry so eminently faithful as that of Tulsi Dás that this advantage can be obtained. Officers may mingle for years with the thousands who cross their official path and be unable to get as clear an insight into real native life as they would by quietly studying and thinking out this translation in their study chairs."—Indian Tribune, 1878.
"We heartily welcome this translation. So far as we have been able to compare passages of it with the original, we have found them to be very faithful and accurate renderings. Though the style adopted by the translator is prose, which affords facility for a closer adherence to the original than verse would have done, yet it has a graceful rhythmical flow. Its idiom, moreover, is pure English. It seems impossible for the reader to help feeling himself transported into the fairy land of oriental poetry. The chief value of the work, however, is that it will assist Englishmen to become acquainted with the popular epic of the vast mass of Hindús, and thus enter into their loftiest feelings. Mr. Growse has in a well-written ntroduction enhanced the value of the translation by tracing the history of the poem and of its author."—The Aryan.
"We gladly welcome this first instalment of an excellent version of the most popular of Hindi poems. Of Tulsi Dás himself little is known, but what information is available has been collected by Mr. Growse in his introduction.... The translation appears to be executed in a scholarly style, and is carefully edited throughout with footnotes explanatory of the mythological allusions."—Indian Antiquary.
That the poem itself has been well and worthily translated is efficiently vouched for by Mr. Growse's high reputation as a Sanskrit and Hindi scholar; while his devout enthusiasm as an antiquarian makes him enter into his work with a zest which redeems it from much of the dryness which one ordinarily finds in philological labours. We cannot understand how any man can live in this country and not be touched by what he sees among the natives, especially the Hindus. To single out whatever seems to us grotesque and unreasonable in their religious system, and to ignore the deep religious feeling that underlines these flaws, is
