The Song Celestial, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold, SRF ed.

The Song Celestial, Sir Edwin Arnold. Self-Realization Fellowship. 1975. Small hardcover with dustjacket (copyright 1976). Very good with good-minus dustjacket. Dj has two chips, creases, rubbing. Green cloth cover with some wear to bottom of spine. Clean, bright pages. Anonymous Christmas gift inscription in pencil on front free end paper.

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.