Dilemmas of a 'Global' Core: Reading the Bhagavad-Gita with First-Year Students (part 2 of 3)

By Nathan Rein

The two quotations I began with, as I noted, are drawn from two different translations of the Gita. Which one is better for freshmen? I think it depends on whether you want to emphasize strangeness or build familiarity, and for the remaining time I want to illustrate this tension a bit more concretely. Recently, I was involved in a small, but significant controversy on our campus, which I think exemplifies this dilemma of choosing between comfort and discomfort in our approach to these challenging texts. Here, in very condensed form, is the story. My institution's core course, the “Common Intellectual Experience” or CIE, begins with a Great Books-style sequence in the fall semester. As I’ve noted, most of the texts we read in the fall are drawn from the Western canon, but we devote three weeks to the Bhagavad-Gita and Mencius. From the time of the incorporation of the Bhagavad-Gita into the CIE syllabus up until two years ago, we have always used the Miller translation, which is the first of the two I quoted from initially. Since 2012, though, we’ve been using the newer, more scholarly, and slightly more expensive Patton translation, which was the source of that second quotation. I serve on the committee of four that administers the CIE, and part of the job that I’m responsible for is running the process by which the syllabus and reading list are updated from one year to the next. We follow a formal procedure, including a proposal followed by a faculty vote, for cutting texts, introducing new texts, or changing other fundamental features of the course, such as the writing requirements. On the other hand, the CIE committee typically institutes more minor changes, such as switching out one edition of a text for another, or making minor shifts in timing, without this voting process.

This raises an interesting question: in such a setting, is a move from one translation to another a major change that requires a vote, or a minor change? We initially chose to treat the change as minor. We moved to the Patton translation on the urging of a single faculty member, one of two on our staff who teach Asian studies, without a proposal or a vote.

But this choice proved problematic. Our CIE instructors come from all across the campus, including the natural sciences, and for many of them, leading discussions on Plato or the Bhagavad-Gita is a daunting prospect. After two years with Patton, many were fed up; they wanted to go back to the Miller translation, which was familiar and easier to work with. As a sort of procedural compromise, I didn’t require anyone to make a formal proposal for the translation change, but I did include a question about the translations on our annual syllabus vote. The overwhelming majority of faculty preferred to go back to Miller, and so it was decided.

It will probably not surprise you to hear that my colleague, the one who had originally pushed for using the newer, more scholarly translation, was not pleased with this outcome. He was scathingly critical of the Miller translation, to the point of suggesting that it was irresponsible to expose our students to it. On his view, omitting the Gita from the syllabus would be preferable to using this translation. Besides being inaccurate in many particulars, he said, Miller was also deeply Orientalist in character. Her translation choices supported a range of outmoded stereotypes about the supposedly mysterious, ascetic, spiritual bent of so-called Eastern cultures. Miller’s version, he argued, effectively lessened our students’ engagement in the thought of the Gita by conforming so neatly to common preconceptions.

(Part three available here.)