information:extraction
Principal writings

Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, who had specifically encouraged writing and publishing, at one meeting told Prabhupada: If you ever get money, print books. So regardless of how busy or sometimes unwell Prabhupada might have been, he remained focused on producing books. Prabhupada slept little, waking at 1:00 am every night to translate and comment on the Srimad-Bhagavatam and other texts. During the day he would give attention to guiding disciples and seeing to the affairs of his international society and its temples, and very early in the morning, while most people were asleep, he did most of his writing “because even with his age and uncertain health, he was unwilling to sacrifice his writing time for extra rest”.

By 1970 he had translated the Bhagavad-gita, two cantos of the Bhagavatam, a summary study of its tenth canto, and a summary volume drawn from the expansive Caitanya-caritamrta. From 1970 on, his literary output slowed only slightly due to the demands of his expanding Hare Krishna movement. His task, as scholars have observed, was not merely to translate the text but to translate an entire tradition.

Historian of religion Thomas Hopkins relates that Prabhupada told him in a conversation in Philadelphia in 1975 that "the Gita provided the basic education on Krishna devotion, the Srimad-Bhagavatam was like graduate study, and the Caitanya-caritamrita was like postgraduate education for the most advanced devotees”.

Hopkins says that by presenting in English such works as the Bhagavatam and Caitanya-caritamrta, Prabhupada made important texts accessible to the Western world that were simply not accessible before. Hopkins says, “hat few English translations there were of the Bhagavata Purana and Caitanya-caritamrta were barely adequate and very hard to get hold of”. Prabhupada, Hopkins says, “made these and other texts available in a way that they never were before” and “made the tradition itself accessible to the West”.