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A Surplus of Meaning: the Intent of Irregularity in Vedic Poetry

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A Surplus of Meaning: the Intent of Irregularity in Vedic Poetry A surplus of meaning : the intent of irregularity in Vedic poetry Knobl, W.F. Citation Knobl, W. F. (2009, September 30). A surplus of meaning : the intent of irregularity in Vedic poetry. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14036 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the License: Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14036 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 :HUQHU.QREO 0,1'5($',1*7+(32(7 &$6(62),17(1'(' 0(75,&$/,55(*8/$5,7< ,19(',&32(75<* L’espace entre les arbres est l’arbre le plus beau Between the scholar and the poet, there is something like a pre-established harmony. As the former has a predilection for laws and rules, so the latter appears to dislike what is unruly and lawless. Having undergone a similarly severe training in discipline, the two of them seem to be made for each other. The scholar, used to formulating order, may sometimes try to find it where it cannot be found. He may be tempted to cry eureka even when he is all at sea. The poet, too, is used to formulating, but to formulating a different kind of truth. He too is all at sea, but he knows it. And knowingly he tries to establish an instant of order in the middle of that incorrigibly creative chaos which is the source of his inspiration. The scholar, if he is favoured by Luck,1 can respond to that instant of order in a moment of recognition. Vedic meter and grammar are so overwhelmingly regular that every excep- tion to the rule requires an explanation. Many irregularities are only apparent and allow for easy restoration, by anyone who knows the rules, to metrical and grammatical normalcy. They need not detain us. Only those cases that defy every attempt at reduction to regularity deserve all our critical interest. * This is the revised and extended version of the first part of a paper that I presented at the Second International Vedic Workshop held at Kyoto University, 30 October – 2 November, 1999. I am eternally grateful to Diwakar Acharya, Masato Kobayashi, Catherine Ludvik, and Thomas Oberlies for their generous help, advice, expertise, and encouragement. Nor shall I ever forget the kind appreciation I was so fortunate as to receive for my modest ef- forts from Tatyana J. Elizarenkova, Jared S. Klein, Leonid Kulikov, and a few other friends and colleagues, at the Kyoto Workshop. 1 Or by LakŴmī, the Goddess of Luck. 6WXGLHQ]XU,QGRORJLHXQG,UDQLVWLN 45 106 _:HUQHU.QREO The cases I have chosen for a detailed study in this paper belong to two different types. They are A. The Catalectic Line and B. The Hyper- metrical Line.2 Many more cases belonging to these and to other types might be considered. They must wait to be taken up in the future.3 The principle at work in all the cases I treat may be called “Sprachma- lerei.”4 This term was coined by Thieme in analogy with the well-known expression ‘Lautmalerei,’ and was meant to cover a particular poetical tech- nique — that of symbolically representing the intended meaning by means of a Sprachbild. The parallelism that was aimed at is not the familiar relation between sense and sound, but the far less noticed correspondence between sense and image. After Thieme’s innovative article of 1972, “Sprachmale- rei” as a technical term has come to be used indiscriminately, as if it had not been designed clearly to distinguish this from other forms of onomatopœia. Because of that misuse and confusion I should prefer to speak of the ut-pic- tura-poesis5 principle. In every single case of supposedly intended irregularity, it would be in- cumbent on us: 1. to specify the kind of irregularity we are confronted with by descri- bing it with all necessary precision, 2. to determine the exact degree of deviation from a norm that was much used by the poets and is well known to us, 3. to demonstrate that this degree is so exceptionally high as to exclude any coincidental occurrence of the aberrant form, and 4. to detect the hidden motive the poet may have had in mind when in- tentionally offending against a well-established metrical convention. Evidently, the difficulty of the task increases yathāsaŔkhyam.6 2 Each of the two types will be illustrated by two examples. 3 Several cases pertaining to four categories of a different type have been discussed by me in the meantime. See Werner Knobl, “ The Nonce Formation. A more-than-momentary look at the Augenblicksbildung.” The Vedas: Texts, Language & Ritual. Proceedings of the Third International Vedic Workshop, Leiden 2002. Edited by Arlo Griffiths & Jan E.M. Houben. (Groningen Oriental Studies: Volume XX). Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2004, 261–283. The four categories are: 1. Cross-Breeds of Tenses and Moods, 2. Blends of Verbal and Nominal Forms, 3. Re-Reduplication, and 4. Double Ending. 4 Paul Thieme, “ Sprachmalerei.” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 86, 1972, 64–81 = Kleine Schriften II. Herausgegeben von Renate Söhnen-Thieme. (Glasenapp-Stif- tung: Band 5, II). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995, 994–1011. 5 This oft-quoted phrase is taken from Horatius, De Arte Poetica 361: ut pictura poesis ... 6 For these and a few further desultory remarks on method, see my 2002 Leiden paper “The Nonce Formation” referred to above, in footnote 3, especially pp. 264–265 of the published article. 46 0LQG5HDGLQJWKH3RHW_107 None of the examples discussed is an open-and-shut case. Sometimes the sagacity and resourcefulness of an eminently gifted detective would be needed to satisfy even the exquisite taste of him who committed the offense. And that might never be the case. For, the offender is always ahead, not only in time. Were he ever to be caught and brought to justice, that justice would have to be a poetical one. In what we have come to call ‘poetic licence’ — a term that is redolent of licentiousness and moral laxity — cases of a higher necessity are included. It is this necessity that must have compelled the poet to sin against metrical, and even grammatical, regularity in order to express something he could not have expressed with equal cogency by using a regular form. We have to feel this cogency. Once felt, it will make us try to find a plausible motive for the poet’s deviation from the norm. It will cause us to ask: What may have induced him to choose an apparent mistake in preference to a correct form that should have come easy to him? After all, though being a poet, he is still a competent speaker of his language. And before aspiring to be original he must have been conventionally learned. He must have learnt the tradition of his trade before daring to use its tricks. Once again: What may have made him make mistakes? Did sudden drowsiness cause him to doze off for a wink, as even great Homer is said to have taken a nap sometimes? Or is it, on the contrary, a state of heightened wakefulness, an out-of-the-common alertness that incited him to venture ex- traordinary forms of the language? If we were to be noble, we would give our poet the benefit of the doubt and opt for the second alternative. However, noble-mindedness is not needed. Mere insight into necessity will do. Sometimes you may wonder whether the Vedic poet is really as con- scious as I would make him out to be. But is it not preferable to err on the side of lucidity? Much greater is the danger that our poeta doctus has wasted his learning on us, that his efforts have been lavished in vain, that we have proven unable to sound the depths of his mind — while floating on the surface of its expression — with the most excellent tool at our disposal. No Case: But a Cage Without mind-reading the poet we cannot expect to reach the center of his poetry. By mind-reading I mean: reading his mind with our mind. The poem is a cage. Description of that cage, after it has been left open and the bird has flown away, is not the only task imaginable. As it happens, our bird 47 108 _:HUQHU.QREO has a habit of secretly returning to its cage, and we may, if we are cautious enough, sometimes catch a glimpse of it. The bars are not to be broken. Nor shall we neglect the work of the descriptionists, who like to think of their results as ‘hardware.’ (To be sure, the prisoner is softer than the metal that shuts him in.) The object of our understanding shines only intermittently, it glimpses. And we must patiently learn how to read between the lines that are the bars of the cage before we may hope to discern with ever-growing clarity, in the dimmer light on the other side of the bars, the shining figure of a shy inhabitant. It is a worthwhile task for the human intellect also to understand in this way. In order to make quite clear what I mean by mind-reading and in- tended irregularity, I shall first give two examples — one imagined, the other one real — before discussing four potential cases taken from Vedic poetry. A Case of Noʼs: Nine Times ‘Nein’ Imagine someone in a negative mood shaking his head from left to right to left like a mechanical manneken and saying, for emphasis’ sake, nine times no.
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