A funny name that pops up increasingly often in my readings. And writings, too. Juan Mascaró. Pelican’s The Bhagavad Gita (1962), The Upanishads (1965), and The Dhammapada (1973), all short (the second book was a selection from twelve Upanishads only), and all preceding the Christian era by several centuries at least, are unimaginable without his impassioned introductions spanning many a religion. As critics have observed, such translations, formidable in themselves, are impossible without deep sympathy with the spirit of the original texts. Born in Majorca, most likely in the early Twenties, he translated from Sanskrit and Pali into English, not his own language. He taught at Oxford, Jaffna in what was Ceylon, Barcelona, and Cambridge, England. In the Fifties he married an English woman and had two children with her. He died in Cambridge in the late Eighties. This is practically all we know about this man with a funny name, who has touched many a soul around the world with his poetic translations, all of which took many a year. All my efforts to learn more about him have been in vain. This is how he seems to have wished it to be, contrary to the mores of our times. And my own, to be sure. Whence my eulogy, I suppose.