Now you can read the words of Sri Ramakrishna as M. (Mahendranath Gupta) recorded them in his diaries from 1882 through 1886. Conversations With Sri Ramakrishna is a word-for-word translation into English of Ramakrishna's conversations as they occurred. The translation was written out in longhand virtually without erasure or correction and appears in exact form as the translator, Sachindra Kumar Majumdar, took it off the pages of M.'s five volumes published in Bengali.
No attempt has been made to polish or edit Ramakrishna's words. Nothing has been added, nothing taken away in approximately 1,400 pages of text.
The reader should understand that the translation lacks the polish and beauty of the Nikhilananda translation of the Gospel. An added problem is that when translating from one culture to another, it is easy to mis-understand the context or the meaning. Ramakrishna may appear crude or vulgar at some places, when in context, that is not what is going on.
We are happy to note one change that will please many women who read the Nikhilananda edition: The phrase "woman and gold"has been taken out of volumes 2 and 3, and replaced with the Bengali Kamini-kanchana. A full explanation appears in the book.
The translator, Sachindra Kumar Majumdar (1909-1999), was a disciple of Swami Shivananda, the second head of the Ramakrishna Monastic Order. As a young man in Bengal, Mr. Majumdar met M. and soon began experimenting with the translation of Kathamrita into English. The wish to provide an exact and complete renderingof the original script in a manner that would have satisfied M. became almost a life-long challenge for Mr. Majumdar and culminated in this translation when he was in his eighties.
Mr. Majumdar was an independent pioneer in the teaching of yoga practices and Vedanta philosophy in the West. He was a swami of the Ramakrishna Order for many years, and came to the US as an assistant to Swami Nikhilananda. For various reasons, he left the order and taught Yoga independently. This CD is truly compatable with a PC or MAC. You will need Adobe Reader (which is on the CD) to view the material. All the power of Adobe Reader is available, including cut and paste, and search.
