How to easily navigate to the original Mahabharata Sanskrit shlokha on sacred-texts.com?

Question

The website sacred-texts.com has two versions of Mahabharata:

Now if I want to see the original Sanskrit shlokha corresponding to a single line from Ganguli's translation, how can I easily do that without spending a whole day? I tried once before and gave up because the Sanskrit text is not as well organized as the English translation on that website. Has anyone else attempted the same before and succeeded?

E.g., I want to get to the Sanskrit shlokha that was translated as:

"Sanjaya continued, 'Govinda then said, "Fie, fie," unto Partha

Answer 1

Yeah I sucessfully do it all the time, though I admit it's not easy. The issue is that the English translation and the Sanskrit texts are from different recessions of the Mahabharata. Plus sometimes where the chapters begin and end are also different. In any case, here's the chapter you're looking for: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/mbs/mbs08049.htm The verse starting with "idānīṃ pātha jānāmi" corresponds to Krishna saying "I know now..."

Here's the general procedure I follow (in this case it took me 5-10 minutes):

1. Estimate roughly where the chapter would be in the Sanskrit version. In this case, the English chapter given is chapter 69 out of 90-something total chapters in the Parva, so roughly 2/3 of the way into the Parva. Now the Sanskrit version has 60-something chapters, so the chapter we're looking for will probably be in the 40's somewhere.

2. Choose any Sanskrit chapter in the estimated range, and find a distinctive proper noun, like a name of a person, a place, etc. that's not likely to be in that many other chapters. Then search the English version of the Parva for that name. In this case, after a couple false starts I chose the Sanskrit chapter 46 where [y], which means Yudhishthira, says devakīputra in verse 3. Devaki seems pretty distinctive, so I searched site:www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m08 Devaki on Google.

3. Compare each English chapter in the search results with the Sanskrit chapter you chose. (There shouldn't be that many search results if you found a very distinctive proper noun.) You can quickly see whether the chapter is the same or different by seeing whether the same speaker utters the proper name you identified. In this case, I found that the English chapter 66 has Yudhishtira saying both "son of Devaki" and "Dhananjaya" in the first sentence he speaks, just like in the Sanskrit version.

4. Now that you have a Rosetta stone, i.e. an English chapter and a corresponding Sanskrit chapter, use that as a starting point to get to the chapter you desire. In this case, I started in the English chapter 66, and traveled to chapter 69, while simultaneously trying to follow along in the Sanskrit. The beginnings and ends of different characters' speeches are a good way to compare landmarks. So by doing that, I found the right Sanskrit chapter, namely chapter 49

5. Now just try to find the desired quote in the Sanskrit chapter, by finding the meanings of different Sanskrit words through a Sanskrit-English dictionary and identifying what place in the chapter it corresponds to. In this case I found Krishna saying "idanim" and "janami" in verse 14, which corresponds to Krishna saying "Now I know" in English.

Or alternatively, you can just ask me for help!