Description: The "Bhagavad Gita", the sixth book of India's national epic, the Mahabharata, is universally acknowledged to be one of the world's literary and spiritual masterpieces. It has been treasured by American writers from Emerson and Thoreau to T.S. Eliot, who called in the greatest philosophical poem in world literature, after Dante's The Divine Comedy. The earliest Western translations were made in the eighteenth century, and there have been more than 200 English translations alone. Yet, though there are many competent literal versions, there has never been a truly distinguished English translation. Not one of the three most popular current translations of the Gita -- which have sold more than one-and-a-half million copies -- is an exciting literary text in its own right.

Now Stephen Mitchell has turned his attention to this great work. Stephen is widely known for his ability to make old masterpieces thrillingly new, to step in where many have tried before and, as with his bestselling Tao Te Ching, his Job, and his Rilke, to create versions which were destined to be called masterpieces, and definitive for our time. His "Bhagavad Gita", as William Arrowsmith said of Mitchell's Sonnets to Orpheus, will "instantly make every other rendering obsolete".

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