Juan Mascaró

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Juan Mascaró (December 8, 1897 – March 19, 1987) was a translator born in Majorca (an island of Spain) to a farming family. He is responsible for one of the most popular English translations of the Hindu text Bhagavad Gita, and of some of the major Upanishads (both written originally in Sanskrit). He also translated a key Buddhist text, Dhammapada, into English from Pāli. It was published in 1973. Uniquely, the languages used in his translations were not his native tongue.

[edit] Life and career

His interest in religion started from the age of 13 when he studied a book on occultism. After finding this spiritually misleading, he discovered an older English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. This inspired him to study Sanskrit in order to gain a better understanding of the text, as the available translation was quite poor.

He studied modern and oriental languages at Cambridge University and spent some time lecturing on the Spanish Mystics. He then went to Ceylon where he was Vice-Principal of Parameshvara College at Jaffna. Later, he became Professor of English at the University of Barcelona. He settled in England after the Spanish Civil War and there made his translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads, as well as returning to Cambridge University where he was supervisor of English and lectured on "Literary and Spiritual Values in the Authorized Version of the Bible".

He married Kathleen Ellis in 1951 and had a twin son and daughter. He died in 1987 near Cambridge.

[edit] References

• Mascaró, Juan, The Creation Of Faith. Bayeux Arts, 1999. ISBN 1896209297