Sanskrit "Loeb"

Loebs have been a tremendous boon for students of ancient Greek and Latin with one page in the original language and their facing page in English. Now Sanskrit students will have a similar set of tools, the Clay editions of ancient Sanskrit documents, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In The New Republic's The Arrow and the Poem, David Shulman says that more than 30 volumes have already been produced in this series named for a benefactor who studied Sanskrit at Oxford a while back. The Sanskrit is transliterated into Roman characters. Not only will this be a boon to Sanskrit students, but the translations into English will offer non-Sanskrit readers the opportunity to read the original in a palatable form -- something earlier translations were not:

...most of the new volumes do succeed in conveying--for the first time in English--something of the toughness and the elegance of Sanskrit at its best.

The Mahabharata is an enormous undertaking and when finished the Clay edition will be the first time it has been completely translated into readable English. It is considered dangerous:

...Indian tradition tells us that the text is so powerful, and potentially so destructive, that is positively dangerous to attempt to translate it, or even to read it, from beginning to end. Copies of the work are often kept outside the house, on a porch or in some other relatively safe repository, lest it set the home on fire.