Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Edwin Gerow

Reviewed work(s):
The Style of Ba: An Introduction to Sanskrit Prose Poetry by Robert A. Hueckstedt
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp. 361-
363
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602867
Accessed: 05/04/2010 02:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aos.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of
the American Oriental Society.

http://www.jstor.org
 Reviews of Books
select nineteenth and twentieth century Russian Indologists
who have contributed to the general knowledge of classical
Indian culture [chs. 2-5], and (iii) an account of current
archaeological research in Soviet Central Asia as it pertains
to the understanding of early Indic, particularly Kusana,
history [ch. 6].2
The book does not pretend to be anything more than a
summary in any of these areas, and is intended for a broader
audience than Sanskritists or even Indologists. Although it
has a relatively extensive bibliography [mostly in Russian],
its lack of footnotes or other academic apparatus make it
difficult for the specialist to use, or to assess, given that much
of the material covered, especially the archaeological, is
available only to Soviet scholarship. But its utility and
interest should not therefore be underestimated.
The book testifies in great detail to the ancient and pro-
ductive cultural and material interchanges between Russia
and its eastern neighbor. We tend to forget, in the West,just
how proximate a land of fable India is to the Russian. And
also the peculiar avenues of early contact: Byzantine litera-
ture on the one hand, and overland travelers on the other.
Nikitin, who spent three years in India [1469-72], was only
the best known of several Russian merchants whose travels
antedated Vasco de Gama.3 And by 1615 colonies of Indian
traders had found their way to Astrakhan.4
The middle section of the book sketches the scholarly con-
tributions of recent Russian5 Indologists, but focuses on
three: Minayev, S. F. Oldenburg, and of course, Shcherbat-
skoy [sic]. The tenor of the biographies is rather anecdotal
and popular, emphasizing more the importance of the schol-
ars' work to the general audience of Indianists (especially in
India), than it is critical, for it does not really attempt to
situate their scholarship in broader context of Western
scholarship. This is more than just a perspectival defect, for
it testifies sadly to the cultural isolation in which contempo-
rary Soviet scholars work. Of particular interest to Indolo-
gists in the West will be Chapter 5, which briefly summarizes
the curricula vitae and research interests of their colleagues
working in the U.S.S.R. since the revolution. Contemporary
Indologists and their works are also noted.6
The most interesting, and very likely the most immediately
useful section of the book, to Western Indologists, is the
2
A brief survey of Indian manuscript collections in the
U.S.S.R. is appended.
3 Pp. 25-30.
4 Pp. 31-32.
5 In the local, not always the ethnic, sense: inter alia, a
charming memorial to Otto von B6htlingk and other immi-
gre German scholars, pp. 76-79.
6 Not
mentioned, perhaps for obvious reasons, are several
recent emigr6s: e.g., D. Zilberman, A. M. Pyatigorsky.
361
third, revealing doubtless to a greater degree the sure hand
of Professor Bongard-Levin. Therein is treated, still sum-
marily, but in great detail, the process and results of con-
temporary Soviet archaeological inquiry into those Central
Asian sites that reveal Indian cultural connections. Perhaps
nowhere before in so compact a form has the thrust of
Soviet work in these most interesting areas been presented.
From the computer assisted "decipherment" of the Indus
valley hieroglyphs,7 to the painstaking revelation of Buddhist
and Indo-Greek artifacts, the reader is taken on a tour of the
"finds" now being excavated in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in
Soviet Turkestan. A number of charts, diagrams and color
plates accompany the text.
Perhaps because of the summary method adopted, the
expository style is largely impersonal, and gives the reader
the impression of a great collective enterprise; individuals are
named, but for the most part in executive capacities; the
objective mode predominates. As elsewhere in the book,
little sense is conveyed of the connection of Soviet work with
that undertaken elsewhere; the exception is the work of
Indian researchers, who are often given credit for parallel
inquiries, or for having made use of Soviet research. Never-
theless, the chapter on Central Asian excavations, which
after all are a private reserve of Soviet scholarship, offers
rare and interesting insights into Soviet research strategies
and impresses the reader with the vitality and breadth of
Soviet historical interests.
The unavoidable ideological bias is throughout very much
muted; the usual calls are made to the friendship of the two
peoples involved. What is clear, as in Bongard-Levin's work
generally, is his careful and broad learning and his great
respect for the genius of the Indian past. Even if this book
presents a far from disinterested apercu, it succeeds in giving
a sense of the unique importance that the Orient, and India
in particular, has always had for a partly orientalized Russia.
EDWINGEROW
REEDCOLLEGE
7 Some few of which have come to light in Soviet territory:
p. 190.
The Style of Bana: An Introduction to Sanskrit Prose Poetry.
By ROBERTA. HUECKSTEDT. Pp. xvi + 212. Lanham
PRESSOFAMERICA.
(Maryland): UNIVERSITY 1985.
This is a revision of Hueckstedt's thesis at Harvard, and
shows its indebtedness to the guidance of Daniel H. H.
Ingalls. The thesis has two forms, of which the briefer is that
Weber was incorrect when he characterized Bana's style as
362 Journal of the American
"... ein wahrer indischer Wald . . ."'-full of "beasts in the
form of words" and other creeper-like hindrances. The refu-
tation of Weber takes the form of recharacterizing Bana's
style as "a sculptured Mogul garden,"2 each stylistic device
carefully tailored to the effect desired.
The fuller form of the thesis is thus a defence of Bana's
characteristic prose within the constraints of a legitimating
poetic-which amounts to formulating, as Hueckstedt puts
it, "an introduction to Sanskrit prose poetry."
Now one might quibble with translating "(indischer) Wald"
as 'jungle' (as Hueckstedt does), for in this battle of meta-
phors, hyperbole is self-serving;3 but a more serious issue is
whether Weber really needs to be refuted. He was, after all,
not trying to analyze Bana's style objectively, but was simply
giving voice to the frustration he felt in the presence of this
formidable and alien intellectual creation-a frustration we
all feel, mired as we are in Kaliyuga, whether we like
Sanskrit prose or not. Still, all this is pretext: Hueckstedt's
effort to understand Bana's stylistic individuality is well-
enough grounded in se; and it goes without saying that such
understanding is a prerequisite to any serious appreciation of
the author.
Hueckstedt's treatment proceeds in orderly fashion through
the set of topics required by a stylistic: story-initial and
sentence-initial paradigms, word-order within sentences,
clausal structure, peculiar uses of clause structures, and
phonologically definable restrictions on the sentence (i.e.,
alliteration, rhythm, etc.). He considers also the styles of two
other masters of kavya prose: Bana's son Bhusanabhatta,4
and Subandhu, judged sufficiently like Bana's to warrant
comparison.5 The point he makes throughout is that Bana's
complex effects are derived from carefully crafted ordering
principles.6The book is completed with numerous appendices
giving both Sanskrit and translated passages, with a glossary
of technical terms, a bibliography, and two indices.
As an account of Sanskrit prose style, Hueckstedt's
account is thorough and circumstantial. He achieves, I think,
his main goal, if that could be said to be a descriptive goal.
At least no one will henceforth stumble into the pitfall of
ZDMG 7:582, cited and translated p. 12.
2
P. 62 and passim.
3So Hueckstedt (ibid.): "That word implies wildness, lack
of sophistication, words thrown together helter-skelter, and
that is exactly the way Bana does not write." Also p. 192.
But "Dschungel" is the straightforward German term: see
Waldemar Bonsels, Indienfahrt, passim.
4 Who
completed the Kadambari
Dandin is excluded, presumably because of the relatively
more conversational tone of his Sanskrit.
6 12
Pp. 61-62, 130, 192, etc.
Oriental Society 107.2 (1987)
considering Bana a careless or clumsy craftsman. But the
problem I have with Hueckstedt's stylistic is that the argu-
ment often requires a leap into the stylistic unknown: that
longer sentences correlate with static descriptions may be
taken as established,7 but don't we also need to know why
descriptive passages figure so preeminently in this style? And
if it is simply that long sentences provoke "wonder" in the
hearer,8 isn't the middle term of the argument missing? Or
are we to understand that description is more prominent
because it is more wonderful? That would seem, in addition
to being somewhat dubious, to beg the question.
There is in the argument a certain lack of sophistication
which often prevents us from relating this stylistic to a
theory of literature as such. Indeed I may be overreaching
here, but I think that the book would have been greatly
improved by such additional attentions. For instance, much
of the book considers the sentence in Bana; yet we get no
clear idea what Hueckstedt thinks a sentence is, except that
it is whatever comes to a full stop.9 But what stops? This is a
material concern to a stylistic, because we might make the
contrary case that, at the conceptual level, the sentence of
prose kavya is illegitimately compared to an English sentence:
it is really what we would call a paragraph, whereas our
sentences are what figure as clauses (or compounds) in the
Sanskrit. Now if such a case could be made, then much of
Hueckstedt's rationale is misplaced, for he has been talking
about the wrong thing. Showing us long "sentences" in
English or German (which are really accumulations of par-
tially repetitive sentences separated by the usual semi-colon)'?
only makes the question more acute: is this the sentence of
the kavya? On the face of it, one would think not, for the
beast is normal in Sanskrit, and not so obviously compound.
Another instance of my puzzlement is Hueckstedt's treat-
ment of verb-initial and verb-final sentences." If verb-initial
sentences are the marked type, and they figure in contexts
where strong emotion or quick action are expressed,'2 then
(if a correlation is to be proven) the argument would seem to
require that there be no association of emotion with verb-
final sentences. I can find no such demonstration. The point
is not trivial, for much of the succeeding argument presumes
the corollary that follows from the undemonstrated premise:
that verb-final sentences are "descriptive."
7 P. 52, but see below.
8 P. 68.
9 And thus has
within it a (finite) verb? See pp. 24ff. I
would guess that the Paninean verb-based akanksa model is
presumed, but Hueckstedt does not state or defend this
choice: cf. pp. 62-63.
'0
Pp. 64-67 [Wordsworth, and Albrecht Weber himself!]
1 Pp. 39ff.
P. 40.
 Reviews of Books
These puzzlements are really no more than requests for
clarification. A stronger theoretical grounding would have
made this innovative and enthusiastic book into the authori-
tative statement that the murky problem of Sanskrit prose
style deserves.
I must, in fine, take exception to Hueckstedt's ad hominem
attack on M. C. Bharatiya.13The charge of plagiarism is a
serious one, and should not be made on the basis of "suspi-
cions," however well-founded. If I understand Hueckstedt's
reasoning here, he has not consulted the suspected source of
the plagiarism, a work by a "Dr. Vyasa" (not noted in the
Bibliography), but has based his charge on a third person's
paraphrase of that presumed source. Even if Hueckstedt is
right, a certain uncautiousness of argumentation is apparent.
EDWINGEROW
REEDCOLLEGE
13
P. 68, ft. 15.
The Origin of the Young God: Kdliddsa's Kumarasambhava.
Translated, with Annotation and an Introduction, by HANK
HEIFETZ.Pp. 178. Berkeley: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
PRESS. 1985. $25.00.
This translation should serve as a model for anyone who
aspires to translate poetry from the Sanskrit into English.
Not only is it accurate, which is the easier part of translating,
but it is also poetically sound, by far the more difficult part.
The translation is preceded by a short introduction, intended
primarily for non-Sanskritists, and a note on the word tapas,
which is wisely left untranslated. Short notes at the end of
the translation serve two purposes. For the non-Sanskritist
they explain facts of meter, mythology, or poetic convention,
and for the Sanskritist they indicate which of variant read-
ings is being translated, which commentator is being fol-
lowed, the Sanskrit source of an English phrase, or why a
word not in the Sanskrit has been added. Unfortunately,
Vallabhadeva's commentary seems not to have been avail-
able to the translator (for a review of the printed edition of
that commentary, see JAOS 105.2, pp. 381-82).
The Introduction consists of sections dealing with general
notions about the Sanskrit language and about kavya, about
Kalidasa, the Kumdrasambhava, the traditional concept of
mahdkavya, the characters in the poem, rhythms and expres-
sion, problems of translating from the Sanskrit, and a note
on editions and commentators. Those ideas and opinions are
clearly and succinctly stated, and they serve well to introduce
the non-Sanskritist to the Kumdrasambhava and to what we
know of its cultural milieu. I am particularly pleased with
363
the unusual comparison of Kalidasa's use of character with
that of Bertolt Brecht. "Character, in both cases, is primarily
the expression of a value, and this value does not move us
through eliciting identification with a unique and detailed
psyche but rather through means which can best be termed
musical." (p. 8).
Despite its overall accuracy, beauty, and grace, a few
improvements could be made in the translation and the
notes.
The first seventeen stanzas of the poem describe Himalaya,
and the unity of these verses is maintained in the Sanskrit by
the use of relative-pronoun-based sentences in stanzas 2-17.
In the first five stanzas of the translation it is clear that the
subject in each is Himalaya. In stanzas six and seven,
however, the main subject is, respectively, hunters and female
Vidyadharas. Stanza 8 then begins, "He blows into the
hollows of bamboos . ." The reader who is unfamiliar with
the Sanskrit has no way of knowing who "he" is. A similar
problem occurs at stanzas 9-12 and 14-16. It is true that
much of the enjoyment of Sanskrit poetry comes from the
beauty of each individual stanza. Nevertheless, emotion is
built up by various syntactical methods of joining stanzas, as
is done here. This needs to be expressed in the translation, or
at least indicated in the notes.
In the note to 1:33, the beginning of the limb-by-limb
description of ParvatT, Mr. Heifetz slightly misreads
Mallinatha's commentary and writes that "in conventional
Indian poetry, divine women are described from the feet up,
human women, from the head down." Mallinatha's comment
does not single out women. Nor are only women described
limb-by-limb in Sanskrit poetry.
At 2:61 a couple problems occur. Mr. Heifetz translates
the word atmd there with the word "Self," when what it
really means, and what would be clearer, is "son," as both
Vallabhadeva and Mallinatha say. This meaning for dtman is
also in the Sabdaratndvali.
The other problem concerns the meaning of veni. The
Sanskrit is:
tasydtmd sitikanthasya
saindpatyam upetya vah
moksyate surabandTnim
venTrvTryavibhutibhih
And the translation given is:
Taking command of your armies, the Self
of the blue-Necked God, through his power in war,
will free the women of heaven to loosen
their long hair again for their husbands.
Part of the note on this verse states: "Traditionally women
were supposed to loosen their hair only in front of their
husbands; but here, the words may refer to the notion that
women separated from their husbands allow their hair to