The Song Celestial, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold, 1st ed.

The Song Celestial, Sir Edwin Arnold. Trubner & Co., Ludgate Hill, London. First edition, 1885. Hardcover, no dusjacket. Fair ocher yellow cloth cover with soiling and other discolorations. Dinged and worn corners and wear at top and bottom of and along the spine. Gilt lettering Former owner’s name signed twice: front free end paper and on the first blank page, followed by “1891.” Good interior with several faint or small stains. Deckled fore edges, and many ragged edges at the bottom.

When Mahatma Gandhi studied law in England as a young man, he met Sir Edwin Arnold in England around 1890 and found his poetic rendition of the Bhagavad Gita to be compelling. Arnold served as vice-president of Gandhi’s Bayswater Food Reform Society, a motley group of vegetarians that included George Bernard Shaw. Speaking of Arnold’s translation, Gandhi wrote: “The verses in the second chapter
‘If one
Ponders on objects of the sense, there springs
Attraction; from attraction grows desire,
Desire flames to fierce passion, passion breeds
Recklessness; then the memory–all betrayed–
Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind,
Till purpose, mind, and man are all undone’

made a deep impression on my mind, and they still ring in my ears. The book struck me as one of priceless worth. The impression has ever since been growing on me with the result that I regard it today as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth. It has afforded me invaluable help in my moments of gloom. I have read almost all the English translations of it, and I regard Sir Edwin Arnold’s as the best. He has been faithful to the text, and yet it does not read like a translation.”

Paramahansa Yogananda quoted from The Song Celestial four times in Autobiography of a Yogi.