Pindar's Rigveda.

AuthorWatkins, Calvert
PositionGreek and Vedic poetry - Critical Essay

THE COEDITOR OF THIS VOLUME once remarked that she never understood Pindar until she read the Rigveda. Herewith (by title nodding to Nagy 1990) I offer a few stylistic animadversions on both texts to the Jubilar, a sensitive observer, as a token of nearly forty years of friendship and admiration.

The Russian linguist V. N. Toporov in his pathfinding 1981 paper on Vedic and Indo-European poetics notes inter alia, developing the theories of Ferdinand de Saus-sure, that in Vedic, and by extension Indo-European, a given element, typically a name, may be encoded at least twice: both explicitly and as an anagram. I cite a number of Vedic and other examples in my 1995 work, pp. 188ff., the poet Vimada of RV 10.20-26 appearing as vidma ... jamivad and in the signature formula as vi vo made. As Toporov notes, the five-member anaphora of case forms of the god Agni in RV 1.1.1a-5a is followed by 6a yad anga... 6b agne... 6c... angirah.

Now this poetic phonetic focusing on a name both directly (vimadah ... gira 6 vaksat "Vimada... will bring songs of praise" RV 10.20.10) and anagrammatically (signature formula vi vo made... vivaksase RV 10.21, 24, 25) has a poetic syntactic analogue: constituents may either adjoin each other or be separated, sometimes at considerable distance. The latter figure is termed hyperbaton. The phenomenon is frequent in Noun Phrases (Noun + Adjective, etc.), but other syntagmata may exhibit it as well. Thus the determiner deictic pronoun (Vedic sa, Greek o) commonly functions as anaphoric or deictic and may adjoin its referent, or be deferred or distracted to some distance from it. The phenomenon is the same whether the determiner deictic sa has third-person or second-person reference.

In imperative sentences with sa with second-person reference and an overt pronoun, clause- and pada-initial sa tvam... is virtually the exclusive order; note also 9.72.8a = 9.107.24a sa tu pavasva with either a real or a folk etymology to sa tvam. In these clauses the verbal predicate follows the subject immediately. But as Jamison notes in her fundamental work on this construction (1992: 225 n.), distracted sa... t(u)vam is found at 8.44. l4ab sa no mitramahas t(u)vam, agne... "O Agni having the greatness of Mitra/an ally" (Jamison). This unique case of distraction (otherwise only 9.98.4 sa hi tvam with Wackernagel's Law clitic) is perhaps influenced by the earlier verse 11a agne ni pahi nas t(u)vdm "O Agni, protect us"; compare also RV 1.1.6ab... t(u)vam, agne....RV 8.44.23ab also shows disyllabic forms of the pronoun: yad agne syam aham t(u)vam va gha s(i)ya aham "If, Agni, I were you or indeed if you were I."

On the other hand the type with name and/or epithet immediately following the pronoun is quite uncommon: 2.20.7ab (echoed in 8.96.19d and 20a) sa vrtrahendrah krsnayonth, puramdaro dasir airayad vi "Indra the Vrtrakiller (Geldner Der Vrtratoter Indra) demolished the (cities of) the Dasas pregnant with black ones." Note also 2.24.1lcd sa devo devan prati paprathe prthu "He the god (Geldner Der Gott) spread out (as) wide (as the other) gods." The verse concludes (11d) with a nominal sentence and the god's name in hyperbaton, thus reestablishing the pattern of syntactic deferral: visves u ta paribhur brahmanas patih "All these (worlds) encompassing (is) Brahmanaspati." Indeed brdhmanas patih fills the cadence of seven of this hymn's fourteen jagati verses.

Rather more frequently the verbal predicate is found at some distance from the always clause- or pada-initial subject sa, and the referent of sa deferred to the right of the verb, e.g., 1.132.3fg sa gha vide...

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