As the Pāṇḍava brothers move through the forest in the third book of the Mahābhārata, they hear stories of fantastic transformations and journeys: a band of gods all masked as the same prince, dice that become thieving birds, a sage turned into a hunted deer, a woman who traverses Yama’s realm. These tales recast and elucidate the conditions in which the Pāṇḍavas find themselves, translating their narrative so that the brothers might navigate the wilderness. The Disguise of Language explores translation through the Mahābhārata to uncover ways in which the text develops and carries meaning. Examining a matrix of interacting narratives, this study argues that the epic poem binds diverse genres and perspectives toward its self-description as comprehensive and exhaustive. Dan Rudmann builds sites of alliance between the epic’s discourse and a range of literary traditions, theory, and scholarship to present new ways of understanding translation as dialogical correspondence, occurring within and between languages. The Disguise of Language asks how an alteration of form or change of context can at once obscure and reveal its subject
