Ramayana Russian Translation Prehistory
Russia is perhaps the only European country where the Valmiki Ramayana, the story of Lord Rama written by the Hindu sage Valmiki, has sold tens of thousands of copies in Russian.
While eminent Indologist Alexander Baranikov first translated the Ramayana into Russian in 1948, Natalia Guseva, another prominent scholar on India, had written the script for a play based on the Indian epic that was staged in Moscow Children’s Theatre in the Soviet Union for the first time in 1957.
First Full Russian Academic Translation (2006-)
First full Russian translation of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa from Sanskrit was undertaken by Pavel Grincer (1928-2009). Until that nobody in Russia did even try to. It was based on Parab 1888 Southern edition, as a literary preferred one. P. Grincer managed to publish first two (out of seven) books in 2006 of this rather voluminous work. The prepared translation of critical apparatus of the third book was published posthumously in 2014. Sergey Serebyaniy, a PhD student of P. Grincer, finalized the editing of P. Grincer’s draft translation by 2018, adding commentaries and an introduction, it is yet to be published in 2022. In 2020 the work has been started on continuing the poetic Russian translation of Sundarakanda by Maksim Leonov from Moscow, Mārcis Gasūns from Krasnodar will deal with the commentaries, supported by Aleksand Arkhipov from Moscow. We plan to finish the publishing of Russian Rāmāyaṇa in 20 years from now.
Specimen of the Sanskrit-Russian Parallel Corpus can be seen here since 2013.
Selected papers of Mārcis Gasūns, Youtube channel on Sanskrit NLP and linguistics.
Mārcis Gasūns, 22/02/2021