Die Bildersprache Kalidasas im Kumarasambhava.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Book Review

Die Bildersprache Kalidasas im Kumarasambhava. By MARTINA JACKMUTH. Beitrage zur Indologie, vol. 35. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2002. Pp. 252. [euro]58.

There has been a recent burst of interest in investigating figurative and metaphorical language in Indic texts through analytic models not derived from indigenous Indic poetic theory. This volume belongs to this trend, along with, e.g., Claudia Weber's Die Lichtmetaphor im fruhen Mahayana-Buddhismus (published in this same series, as vol. 37, 2002), Ulrike Roesler's Licht und Leuchten im Rgveda: Untersuchungen zum Wortfeld des Leuchtens und zur Bedeutung des Lichts (1997), and Joanna Jurewicz's Kosmogonia Rygwedy: Mysl i Metafora (2001) (in Polish, with English summary). The analytic lenses chosen by these authors are varied--from the semantically based, fairly non-intrusive "Wortfeld" schema of Roesler and, to a slight extent, Weber, to more rigid systems. For example, Jurewicz applies the cognitive linguistics work of George Lakoff (e.g., Metaphors We Live By [1980], Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things [1987]) to the figurative language of the Rig Veda. The book here under review not only also works within a strict formal model, but applies it to the work of Kalidasa, not only the most famous poet Sanskrit has produced, but also a, or the, premier representative of Classical court poetry, or kavya. This is a particularly audacious move, since kavya is the special province of Indic poetic theory (alamkarasastra); indeed, one might argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between this poetry and its theory--the poetry as much determined by as determining the theoretical categories and analyses (though Kalidasa, as the earliest of the great court poets, predates most of the theoretical works, at least in their attested forms). In the other scholarly works mentioned above, since the Indic texts examined do not belong in the alamkarasastra tradition, the invocation of other theoretical models, including Western ones, seems more legitimate; with regard to kavya one might ask whether it needs any more theory than it already has.

Thus Jackmuth's book poses in particularly acute form the questions that all non-indigenous analysis of literature raises. How "universal" is this literature, and (a different question entirely) how "universal" are schemata of literary analysis? Does the application of formal models developed in a vastly different time, place, and cultural environment allow us a...