Bhagavad Gita (Sargeant)

The Bhagavad Gita is the title of Winthrop Sargeant's translation, first published in 1979, of the Bhagavad Gītā (Sanskrit: भगवद्गीता, "Song of God"), an important Hindu scripture. Among Western English translations of the Gita, Sargeant's is unusual in providing a word-by-word translation with parsing and grammatical explanation, along with Sanskrit and English renderings. The original edition was published in 1979 with the lengthy subtitle An interlinear translation from the Sanskrit, with word-for-word transliteration and translation, and complete grammatical commentary, as well as a readable prose translation and page-by-page vocabularies. The subtitle was omitted from the 2nd edition (1984) and the 3rd edition (2009), which were edited by Christopher Chapple. Huston Smith wrote a foreword to the 3rd edition. Sargeant's translation has been described in The New York Times, and reviewed in professional journals.