Mystery continues to shroud one of Earth’s earliest civilizations, the Indian culture that left behind one of Hinduism’s foundational texts, the Vedas. With Ardor, Italian scholar Roberto Calasso investigates the Vedas with a poet’s sense for the meaning behind words and the meanings behind the meanings. “There is room for doubt on everything,” he maintains throughout his beautifully written meditation on the strangeness of a civilization whose guiding ideas are often difficult to comprehend. By the time the Hindu mythological epic, the Mahabharata, was composed, Indian culture had assumed a more familiar shape. Putting the text in the form of easily readable blank verse, poet Carole Satyamurti makes the richness of its images accessible to a wider public. The Mahabharata also records some good adventure-romance stories as any fan of Bollywood can attest.
