"Requiem for Sanskrit"

Willis Goth Regier writes of the demise of the Clay Sanskrit Library (full article here):

What happened? The sagging economy didn't help, screen media (the veil of Maya triumphant) are everywhere invincible, and Sanskrit literature has barriers of its own. Its hyperbolic tendencies are an acquired taste. Its complex meters, compound nouns, epithets, and wordplay do not translate easily. It is crowded with contending supreme gods and stuffed with moralizing speeches. In several places the Mahabharata commends study of the Vedas, yet in another declares no one understands them. An ever-rising flood of Bhagavad Gitas blocks the way to everything else....

Clay was frustrated by the pace of progress: himself fighting a crippling disease, he originally planned to complete the zoo-volume library by 2010. Its last volumes will appear this year. Clay expected a reception for the CSL comparable to its ambition but didn't get it. (Sanskrit literature has much to say about ambition.) Reviews were enthusiastic, but Sanskrit literature still remains the province of a privileged few.....

Against great odds, he published a series of successes. Even unfinished, the CSL is magnificent. Built by the best Sanskrit translators of our time--Wendy Doniger, Patrick Olivelle, Sheldon Pollack, and Mallinson--the CSL launched new translators--Isabelle Onians, Somadeva Vasudeva, Kathleen Garbutt, and Judit Torzsok--who brought works that had languished in obscurity into modern English......

As it stands, the CSL powerfully affirms Sanskrit's contributions to world literature, ethics, and religion. Vampires anyone? One of the oldest vampire tales in the world is in King Vikrama's Adventures, translated by Torzsok. Shape-changers? They're everywhere, and play large roles in the Ramayana. Clay answered every American Sanskrit student's wish by giving us Sanskrit and English texts for beginners' books: the disingenuous animal fables of Natayana's Hitopadesha (translated as Friendly Advice) and Vishnusharman's Panchatantra (translated as Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom). These fables were gathered for the sake of the instruction of princes; with good reason they have been compared to Machiavelli.....

Buddhists, no matter how practiced, should fly to the CSL. Clay published Olivelle's translation of the Life of the Buddha (Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita), the very best of the Buddha's Lives. The CSL also includes Ashvaghosha's Handsome Nanda, a Buddhist conversion story translated by Linda Covill, and The Heavenly Exploits (translated by Joel Tatelman), telling the legends of four Buddhist saints....

Had Clay been able to see the CSL to its goal, English readers would have found the way to Sanskrit literature paved for them with handsome books bound in emerald blue. Get them while you can and let them take you as far as you can go. You will visit marvelous places, with rivers of milk and wish-giving trees, where sages debate, poets sing, and captive spirits break ancient curses by telling tales of India.

This is very sad. I mean it's not like we needed even more evidence that we are living in the Kali Yuga! I am definitely going to get all of the Buddhist titles mentioned above, as well as the remaining Kalidasa titles (I already have his Kumarasambhava).

I think this is an excellent example of a noble effort that is no less noble due to its limited success. I can't even bring myself to say "failure" - because the CSL was surely not a failure! If anything, the way in which the series has come to an end highlights the great need our society has for great Bodhisattvas like John Clay, and all the others who participated in his dream. Sigh.

Take them off--your noisy anklets; such jingling betrays a trysting lover; Into the dense dark forest, my friend, cloaked in black, go under cover. By the Yamuna, where the wind wafts winsome, there in the woods, Krishna rests, There where once his restless hands caressed cowherdesses' curvaceous breasts.
[Song Eleven, from Love Songs of Radha and Krishna, CSL vol. 42]

Finally, here is another article on the Clay Sanskrit Library, from the Dec/Jan 2006 Bookforum.com.