Feedback

Here is some feedback we have received from our readers and reviewers. We will be delighted to hear more from you. Please feel free to email us at theclaysanskritlibrary@gmail.com.

“This is the biggest Sanskrit translation project ever conceived since Friedrich Max Müller published Sacred Books of the East.”

“I am most struck by how well the translation itself reads. I can picture myself easily peasily reading it aloud to a ten year old. Very few translations stand up to that and that’s my criterion.”

“Although I know some Sanskrit and occasionally use sanskrit texts in my research I am far from being a Sanskritist. Some time ago I received some volumes of the CSL and it promted me to have a try. I was amazed how easily I was able to read Dandin with the help of the solved Sandhi and of the English translation.

“I work on Tulsidas, so I started to read Ramáyana I: Boyhood. I was enchanted by the beauty of the text and how easily it reads. I started to read it on a hospital bed and then on buses and trains and in waiting rooms and whatever place I had time. The size of the book makes it easy to carry it with me. The series changed my perception of the language. Earlier I thought that it was such a difficult language that one has to be a Sanskritist to be able to fully enjoy its literature. This was the first occasion that I was able to read a book in Sanskrit as I do with one in English or in Hungarian. I will definitely be reading the CSL volumes regularly.

“The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance.”
—Willis G. Regier, Chronicle Review

“Published in the geek-chic format.”
BookForum

“Represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot… Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes.”
New Criterion

“No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience.”
Times Higher Education Supplement

“I had ecstatic feedback on CSL from an accessions librarian here at McGill University last week. He did not even know that I had anything to do with it, just saw in what area I was looking for books. He thinks they are so good that he is reading them for his own pleasure—he’s not an Indologist. His only reservation was that they are the perfect size for stealing, (‘piking’ in his terminology) but in what is probably a rather Canadian coda to that reflection, he suggested that if someone steals one they must really want it, so perhaps they should have it!!!”

“I just wanted to send you a note about the Maha·bhárata series…I’m glad you’re not using the Critical Edition. [Nila·kantha’s recension] has more stories and way more details than that one.  I’m reading Viráta right now (both CLS and the van Buitenen), and I prefer Kathleen Garbutt’s translation, if it’s okay that I say so. The chapter, ‘Kichaka’s Lust and Death,’ has blown me away!  It’s so vivid. The part about Bhima pummeling Kichaka’s corpse into a lump of flesh just about knocked me out of my seat.”