La Geste de R[a.bar]ma: Poetize a double sens de Sandhyakaranandin (Introduction, texte, traduction, analyse).

• Author: Knutson, Jesse Ross
• Position: Book review

La Geste de R[a.bar]nza: Poeme a double sens de Sandhyakaranandin (Introduction, texte, traduction, analyse). By SYLVAIN BROQUET. Collection Indologie, vol. 110. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY and ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME ORIENT, 2010. Pp. x + 523. Rs. 1000.

Sylvan Brocquet's recent study and translation of the eleventh-century Sanskrit bitextual poem (dvyarthak[a.bar]vya, dvisandhanak[a.bar]vya) from the Pala court of Bengal/Bihar is an excellent resource for studying this poem; it represents a magnificent contribution to scholarship on medieval k[a.bar]vya in general and the figure of "bitextual pun" slesa in particular. The work is both stylistically elegant and painstakingly meticulous, such that it forms an almost perfect point du depart for reading the poem. It dissects the work minutely, opening it up to the reader's gaze (hast[a.bar]malakavat) in the best tradition of philological explication de texte. In the process something of the work's historical world may have been sacrificed, but Brocquet has not set out to do the work of the historian or comparativist in this volume; therefore further research of another kind stands to build on his substantial achievements.

The R[a.bar]macarita is an elaborate Sanskrit poem (k[a.bar]vya), which combines the royal biography (of the de facto "carita" genre) with a narration of some key events of the R[a.bar]m[a.bar]yana epic. The awesome polyvalence of Sanskrit's lexicon and the dazzling flexibility of style and allusion allow the poet to tell at least two stories (sometimes even three) with the very same words. This is called slesa ('embrace') as a figure, and applied to a work as a whole we get "double text poetry": dvyarthak[a.bar]vya or dvisandh[a.bar]nak[a.bar]vya (see the recent book-length study by Yigal Bronner: Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, Columbia Univ. Press, 2010).

The R[a.bar]macarita was discovered in a single manuscript by the late and great scholar of Sanskrit and Bengali, Haraprasad Shastri, early in the last century, accompanied by a commentary without which much of the historical referentiality would be utterly obscure. This is a historical poem, but its history is at once disavowed; Brocquet calls it both "l'histoire deguisee en mythologie" and a "projet pseudo-historiographique" (pp. 30, 33). He goes on to say that if there is true history here, we have the commentator and not the poet to thank for it. The historical events are related in an abbreviated and occluded fashion that presumes intimate familiarity with the context for...