Editing Kisari Mohan Ganguli

I'm going to take a break from giving away book formatting secrets and talk about something else: editing another author's work to make it easier to read. Specifically, Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translation of the Mahabharata.

Why edit it? Consider the following sentences:

And he soon covered the entire welkin with clusters of blood-drinking arrows. And as the (infinite) rays of the powerful sun, entering a small vessel, are contracted within it for want of space, so the countless shafts of Arjuna could not find space for their expansion even within the vast welkin.

And the monarch, on beholding that damsel, became surprised, and his raptures produced instant horripilation.

O thou of the prowess of the first of elephants, when Dyu was shown that cow, he began to admire her several qualities and addressing his wife, said, 'O black-eyed girl of fair thighs, this excellent cow belongeth to that Rishi whose is this delightful asylum. O slender-waisted one, that mortal who drinketh the sweet milk of this cow remaineth in unchanged youth for ten thousand years.'

Clearly some room for improvement. But consider another attempt to make language easier to understand:

And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

...and the improved version:

Jesus said to them, "Come, follow me! I will teach you how to catch people instead of fish."

or how about:

Jesus said to them, "Come with me. I'll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I'll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass."

I haven't been able to find it online, but in church I remember hearing it something like this:

Up until now you caught fish, but I'll teach you to catch men.

I imagined the disciples singing "It's Raining Men, Hallelujah!" after hearing that. But maybe that's just me.

The point I'm making is that if you clean up Ganguli's language you need to draw a line somewhere. Replacing a word here and there is OK. Rewriting a whole sentence is not. Ganguli should still sound like Ganguli.

So what I have done is the following:

1). Replace variant spellings with regular spellings. "Despatched" becomes "dispatched".
"Practise" becomes "practice".

2). Change obscure words to normal words. "Welkin" means no more and no less than "sky". "Horripliated" means to have goosebumps. That one takes a bit more work to replace. "Hath" is replaced with "has".

3). "Eth" words are replaced with plurals.

So we get:

O thou of the prowess of the first of elephants, when Dyu was shown that cow, he began to admire her several qualities and addressing his wife, said, 'O black-eyed girl of fair thighs, this excellent cow belongs to that Rishi whose is this delightful asylum. O slender-waisted one, that mortal who drinks the sweet milk of this cow remains in unchanged youth for ten thousand years.'

And he soon covered the entire sky with clusters of blood-drinking arrows. And as the (infinite) rays of the powerful sun, entering a small vessel, are contracted within it for want of space, so the countless shafts of Arjuna could not find space for their expansion even within the vast sky.

And the monarch, on beholding that damsel, became surprised, and his raptures produced instant goosebumps.

I do not go as far as J.A.B. van Buitenen did in his own translation, where he replaced the word "kshatriya" with "baron". While that is essentially accurate, you lose layers of meaning by doing that. Ganguli leaves the word untranslated and so do I.