Mahabharata
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Mahabharata was written over a period of six hundred years. To put it in perspective, Wikipedia is developed in last twenty years — give or take! Our total science led industrial age is hardly three hundred years. Despite obvious help of technology these days, it is almost impossible to write such superlative poetry without divine grace (#chatGPT:-) — particularly in a language (Sanskrit) that itself has a well justified lien on being the medium of divine communication …
To translate this epic, it took Sh. Kisari Mohan Ganguli six years of intense dedication and singular focus at the beginning of last century. I highly recommend reading his preface before you take up study of the largest epic ever written by humans. Here is an excerpt ..
The object of a translator should ever be to hold the mirror upto his author. That being so, his chief duty is to represent so far as practicable the manner in which his author’s ideas have been expressed, retaining if possible at the sacrifice of idiom and taste all the peculiarities of his author’s imagery and of language as well. In regard to translations from the Sanskrit, nothing is easier than to dish up Hindu ideas, so as to make them agreeable to English taste. But the endeavour of the present translator has been to give in the following pages as literal a rendering as possible of the great work of Vyasa. To the purely English reader there is much in the following pages that will strike as ridiculous. Those unacquainted with any language but their own are generally very exclusive in matters of taste. Having no knowledge of models other than what they meet with in their own tongue, the standard they have formed of purity and taste in composition must necessarily be a narrow one. The translator, however, would ill-discharge his duty, if for the sake of avoiding ridicule, he sacrificed fidelity to the original. He must represent his author as he is, not as he should be to please the narrow taste of those entirely unacquainted with him.
1896
Calcutta
As per Wikipedia page of the translator
Ganguli wanted to publish the translation anonymously, while Roy (the publisher) was against it. Ganguli believed that the project was too mammoth to be the work of a single person, and he might not live to complete the project and adding names of successive translators to appear on the title page was undesirable. Eventually, a compromise was reached, though the name of the translator was withheld on the cover, the first book of Adi Parva, that came out in 1883, was published with two prefaces, one over the signature of the publisher and the other headed–‘Translator’s Preface’, to avoid any future confusions, when a reader might confuse the publisher for the author.
However, by the time Book 4 was released, the withholding of authorship did create controversy, as “an influential Indian journal” accused Pratap Chandra Roy of “posing before the world as the translator of Vyasa’s work when, in fact, he was only the publisher”. Roy immediately wrote a letter to clarify, citing the preface, but the confusion persisted for many years amongst readers who overlooked the preface. Once the complete eighteen books were successfully translated, the name was no longer withheld from the publication.
The Ganguli English translation of the Mahabharata is the only complete edition in public domain - to date. His translation was reprinted by Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.