The Mahabharata is an Indian epic in its original Sanakrit probably the largest ever composed. Combined with a second great epic, the Ramayana, it embodies the essence of the India cultural heritage. William Buck, a young American whose untimely death at the age of thirty-seven occurred only months after he delivered manuscripts for both epics to the University of California Press in Berkeley,has retold these classics, as many poets have before in a language and at a length that make them available to the contemporay reader.