I first became aware of the Bhagavad Gita in the mid '60s. I was a college student taking my first tentative steps onto my spiritual path, reading all I could about the Eastern traditions. It seemed that every writer I admired -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, J.D. Salinger -- wrote with great admiration of the Gita. Even the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer had quoted it when the first atomic bomb exploded in the Nevada desert. With endorsements like that, I had to get myself a copy.
I couldn't find one in any of the bookstores I usually frequented -- and this was in New York City! I eventually discovered Weiser Antiquarian Books, "the oldest occult bookstore in the United States," which had two or three versions. Now, of course, you can find dozens of translations with a few keyboard strokes. I chose the translation and commentary by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood because I recognized the latter as a celebrated writer of fiction, and because it was thin and cheap (95 cents).
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