It’s the poetical history of mankind - Jean-Claude Carriére's Mahabharata - it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted

The third India-related book I read was The Mahabharata, not the ancient Indian epic itself, of course, since it is endlessly long and also bears a curse, but the superb French theatrical adaptation by Jean-Claude Carriére (1985) written for and with Peter Brook (who is also the translator).  I was a bit too young to remember the excitement when Brook brought the play to New York in 1987, but I do remember reading about, in The New Republic (RIP), and never finding, the 1989 film (Carriére is best known as a screenwriter).  The film is three hours long, cut down from a six hour television version, itself reduced from the play’s nine hours.

So of course this is really A Mahabharata, maybe even Several Mahabharatas.  The scale is reduced, although I can fill in what Carriére and Brook cannot.  He can say that an army of millions is fighting and dying, but onstage he has a dozen or two.  I have millions, and dozens, too.  I imagine what is in the theater; I imagine what I want.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What’s this flame that’s devouring the world?  Elephants are howling in terror, snakes are hurling themselves into the sky.

BHIMA:  Aswatthaman has just released his father’s sacred weapon.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What can we do?  Men, animals, the earth itself – all are shriveling to ashes.

GANDHARI:  I see a white heat.  (199)

The detonation of a mystical nuclear weapon by the desperate Kauravas is just one of the visual opportunities for a theater director, and one of the many surprises for the reader.  I have read versions of the epic before, yet it is so rich that I am always surprised.

The war that ends the play – by ends, I mean fills the last third – including the difficult argument of the Bhagavad-Gita is outstanding, and the myths, origin stories, and heroic deeds that occupy the early two-thirds are just as exciting, but what is really makes the play effective, and is an innovation of Carriére’s, is the narrator figure Vyasa, by tradition author of The Mahabharata, who wanders in and out of the action.  Here is how the play begins:

A boy of about twelve enters.  He goes toward a little pool.  Then a man appears.  He is thin, wearing a muddy loincloth, his feet bare and dirty.  He sits thoughtfully on the ground and, noticing the boy, he signals him to come closer.  The boy approaches, slightly fearful.  The man asks him:VYASA:  Do you know how to write?

BOY:  No, why?  The man is silent for a moment before saying:

VYASA:  I’ve composed a great poem.  I’ve composed it all, but nothing is written.  I need someone to write down what I know.

BOY:  What’s your name?

VYASA:  Vyasa.

BOY:  What’s your poem about?

VYASA:  It’s about you.
[skip a bit]
It’s the poetical history of mankind.  If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.  For it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted.  It washes away faults, it sharpens the brain and it gives long life.  (3)

I was pretty much captured several lines earlier, even before I learned about all the prize I would win.  And at this point, Ganesha appears, offering his services as a scribe.  These three wander through the rest of the play which it turns out has not only not been written but not performed, or the history has been imagined but has not happened.  We watch it happen along with its author.

There are other good ways to read The Mahabharata.  R. K. Narayan’s prose retelling, for example, or William Buck’s.  Maybe not better ways, though.

Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz - like rolling balls of wool

Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834) is the Polish national epic. That has a dreary sound to it, somehow - conjures images of bored schoolchildren memorizing patriotic passages - even though The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, The Niebelungenlied, the great medieval national epics, are wonderful poems. They wouldn't have the status they do if they were boring.

Pan Tadeusz is hardly boring. It's set in the Grand Duchy of Lithuanaia (confusingly, in modern Belarus), amongst the Polish gentry. Young Master Tadeusz has just arrived from the university, to an estate that has not one but two lovely, marriageable ladies. The neighboring Count is his rival. Since it's a love quadrangle, the story ought to have a happy ending. One of the funniest scenes is during a bear hunt - Tadeusz and the Count both fire at the bear and miss, then both grab the same spear, then both run. These are not the usual epic heroics.

A lot of the long poem concerns itself with vivid descriptions of more or less ordinary life - hunting, mushroom picking, banquets. But there's also a lawsuit, a mysterious monk, and a battle against the Russians. A lot going on, actually. Pan Tadeusz is sort of a combination of a Scott novel, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Goethe's "domestic epic" Hermann and Dorothea.

Mickiewicz and Pushkin were friends and mutual admirers (the only other Mickiewicz I've read are English translations of Pushkin's translations from the Polish, a pointless exercise). Compared to Eugene Onegin, Pan Tadeusz is less satirical, less digressive. I think Pushkin's characterization is also a bit deeper, although Mickiewicz has some fine touches. Acknowledging the limits of judging by tranlation, Mickiewicz is Pushkin's peer in inventive metaphorical language. Here one of the heroines is feeding her chickens:

Bare-headed in her morning gown she stands
Holding a sieve uplifted in her hands.
The fowls run up to her: like rolling balls
Of wool, the ruffled hens; the cockerels
Come rowing with their wings o’er ridge and brake,
While on their heads their coral helmets shake,
And spread their sharp-spurred feet in either side.
...
Here amber beaks, there crests of coral rear
Like fishes that above the waves appear.
The thrust-out necks sway gently to and fro
Like lilies on the water’s surface. So
A thousand eyes like stars on Zosia flash.
Book V

Every canto has something as good as the "rolling balls of wool" and the chicken-head lilies.

I read a translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie, published by the Polish Cultural Foundation in London. The Polish was included, allowing me to see that the original and translation are both in regular rhyming couplets. That's about it. Another complete tranlsation is available in a PDF here.