Robert Goldman sings from the Ramayana

UC Berkeley Professor Robert Goldman sings a passage from Ramayanas Beautiful Book and recites the English translation. Robert Goldman was a graduate student spending several years in India in the late 1960s, when, just for fun, he and a friend read the epic Sanskrit poem, the Valmiki Ramayana. Goldman was captivated by the adventures of the Hindu god Vishnu, who comes to earth on a divine mission in the form of the human hero, Rama. Think the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible in one package, and you might get a sense of it, says Goldman, recalling the Ramayanas simultaneously literary and religious stories of love and war, sex and violence, and mundane daily struggles sprinkled with multiheaded monsters and an army of shapeshifting monkeys. During his original reading of the Valmiki Ramayana, he wished for a more readable English translation of the nearly 3, 000yearold classic, with its 24, 000 verses constituting some 50, 000 lines mostly in a 32syllable meter. It seemed a worthy idea, consider