Seminar
on Sanskrit and European languages, Delhi, 9 -10 October 2016
SANSKRIT -
ROMANIAN CORRESPONDENCES
by Dr.
George Anca (Romania)
Summary:
Abstract – MANGALAM (1. Hindu Dharma for Romanians 2. The only leader of
revolutions 3. Ramayana Play ) -
SANSKRIT-ROMANCE ONTOPOETICS ( 1. A Sanskrit mantra 2. Tagore' s
"O fire, my brother" 3. Indo-Latin Kavya Purusha. 4. Last years the Vedic and Buddhist
inspiration 5. The Indian poets answer
today 6. Anthropology of New Recognition
7. Feminine Theoanthropoetics.) - L'IMAGINATION
DE BAUDELAIRE (1. After his unfinished
voyage 2. Reading Baudelaire within
Sanskrit context 3. For the modern poet
) -
IDOEMINESCOLOGY (1. Mihai Eminescu's Rasa-dhvaniah. 2. Eminescu and
Jayadeva. 3. Dyachronically, the best spirits
4. Public Address to the President of India 5. International Academy Mihai Eminescu ) -
NOTES ( Some Indian Writings and Authors in Romanian -
Some
Romanian Books on India - Some topical studies)
ABSTRACT
Personally, I began in 970's, opening
the series “Sanskirt Studies in the West” initiated by Delhi Arts Faculty's
Dean, Satya Vrat Shastri. And last year, after participating to International
Indology Conference at Rashtrapati Bhavan, and translating and publishing in
volume a selection from books authored
by Honorable President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, I have an unforgettable
Sanskrit encounter.
Sanskrit studies in Romania, started
in 19th century and, passing through
country's avatars, revived and declined, under fruitful distant
influence of India, and remaining far from a desired closeness eternally founded
with Mihai Eminescu's work. If Tucci saw the first Romanian Indologist in
Mircea Eliade, corresponding also with Sergiu Al-George, the new solitary
comers increase Pāṇini followers, while
overcoming commercialized mantras
engross culture Sanskrit.
The
accomplished Sanskrit Poet-Kavi and Scholar-Acharya Satyavrat Shastri will
always be remembered in Romania. During his visit in 2001 to receive Honoris
Causa Doctorate of Oradea University and to lecture in Bucharest and Ramnicul
Valcea, he could evaluate and stimulate Indian studies in Romania. Previously,
as Dean of Arts Faculty in Delhi University, he helped empathically the
teaching of Romanian language in India, started by myself in 1977.
This paper eulogize practice and
study of Sanskrit in/through India (my case), less Western schools. Students
returned from Varanasi, Pune, Delhi, Haridwar use to visit
Orthodox-heishiast-yogin monasteries home, as if Sanskrit spirit acts more than
for a life.
Some topics on focus here:
Sanskrit-Romanian Correspondences (Ahimsa-Mioritsa/Memna, Nasadya Sukta –
Memento mori – teaching Sanskrit by
Morse in Romanian Communist jails); Indians for Romania (Satyavrat
Shastri, Amita Bhose, Urmila Rani Trikha, Zricha Vaswani...); Abhijnana
(Kalidasa, Goethe, Eminescu; what for posthumous author of Sanskritikon?); Not
Sanskrit – Not Romanian.
MANGALAM
1. Hindu Dharma for Romanians.
Romanians are Orthodox Christians in their majority. One would be not surprised
to hear that some say all Indians are Buddhist. Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), who
“made India immortal in his country”
(Amita Bhose) may be taken as a
name of Dharma, saying that Buddhism is another more intense form of
Christianity. Together with religions and movements originated in Vedas –
Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism – or in relation with these first revealed
scriptures of the mankind, as the Buddhism.
On the path of Eminescu, Romanians
climbed up to their subconsciousness, sensitive to Vedas themes (Epistle I,
Evening Star, The Prayer of a Dacian) and also in the fruits of their
spirituality. Twined Mantras (Zricha Vaswani):
Odă – Kathaopanishad; Glossa – Sutta-Nipata;
Rugăciunea
unui dac (Nirvana) – Rig-Veda; Scrisoarea I – Rig-Veda; Luceafărul – Srimad
Bhagavad Gita; Kamadeva – Abhigyan-Shakuntalam; Mortua est! - Buddha-Karita
Constantin Brancusi, Mircea Eliade, Lucian Blaga are among the universal modern
creators of Romania, and also bearers of Romanian-Vedantin message.
As Sanskrit is the saint language
of holy books and people, one will enjoy original prayers starting with Gayatri
:
AUM bhur
bhuvah swah. Tatsavitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi. Dhiyo yo nah
prachodayat.
Om Jai
Jagadish hare, swami jai Jagadish hare
Mata pita
tum mere, sharan gahun mein kiski
Tvameva mata
cha pita tvameva
Tvameva
bandhuscha sakha tvameva
Tvameva
vidya dravinam tvameva
Tvameva
sarvam mama deva deva
Sarve
bhvantu sukhena
Sarve santu
niraamya
Sarve
bhadraani pashyantu
Ma kaschit
dukhbagh bhavet
Asato maa
sad gamayaa
Tamaso ma
ajyotir gamayaa
Mrityorm amritam gamayaa
2. The only leader of revolutions.
Romanian priest and scholar Constantin Galeriu speaks on Mahatma Gandhi as the
only leader of revolutions who discovered the Saviour, through Sermon on the
Mountain preaching to love one's
enemies. He proved to his enemies that he loved them, even dying as a martyr.
In his own words: “I think only evil should be hated not evil-doers even when I
could be the victim”; “Not to admit and to detest your enemies’ mistakes should
never rule out compassion”,
and even
love for them”.
In his book The Gandhian Mode of Becoming, Gujarat
Vidyapith, Ahmedabad, 1998, Dr. Catalin Mamali includes also satyagraha,
ahimsa, aparigraha statements: I think that the most efficient means to have
justice done is to do justice to my own enemy; I think that each and every
person should give up the desires to possession of as many things as
possible; In my opinion any person who
eats the fruits of the earth without sharing them with the others and who is of
no use to the others is a thief.
A talk in Bucharest by Deepak
Maheshwari , 29/5/12, mentioned
that degeneration of the Sanskrit
language as the primary spoken language went hand in hand with the rise of the
caste system, over a long period that began before 1,000 B.C. The Vedic
scriptures were sealed off and codified. The common people could no longer read
them, and a special class emerged of those who could still read Sanskrit and
therefore recite and interpret the body of scriptures. The freedom of all
individuals to worship God with songs of praise was replaced by the
"ritualization'' of the society under brahmin control.
Gandhi's war against untouchability
started with his "epic fast'' of
Sept. 20-26, 1932.
"We do
not want on our register and on our census untouchables classified as a
separate class,'' declared Gandhi in his statement of protest. I will not
bargain away the rights of the Harijans for the kingdom of the whole world. I
cannot possibly tolerate what is in store for Hinduism if there are two
divisions set up in every village.''
What is a Guru? Asked Swami Chidanand
Saraswati, on Guru Purnima A Guru is one who removes our darkness. In Sanskrit,
Gu means “darkness” and ru is”that which removes.” A Sanskrit sloka says: The
Guru is Brahma, the Guru is Vishnu, the guru is Shiva, the God of gods, / the
Guru is verily the Supreme Brahman.
Salutations to the adorable Guru.
3. Ramayana Play (theory and
practice). Valmiki, Kamban and Tulsidas are universal revealers of Rama, but
also of Hanuman. Devotees of Ramayana meet bhakti. The ramayanic spring bring
the thirsted receiver to an ever fresh newness of divine spirit and beauty. The
music of Hindi Ramcharit Manas, an Indian Divine Comedy, is heard also far out
from temple in the hearts of different believers, beyond dry ecumenical talks.
The joy to re-tell Raamaayana and awakening from a dream when it is over, made
Rajagopalachary to equal in a subliminal way Raamaayana with Seeta herself:
“When the Prince left the city, he
felt no sorrow; it was only when he lost Seeta that he knew grief. So with me
too. When I had to step down from high office and heavy responsibility, I did
not feel at a loss or wonder what to do next. But now, when I have come to the
end of the tale of the Prince of Ayodhya, the void is like that of a shrine
without a god.” ( C. Rajagopalachari, Ramayana, Bhartya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbay,
1996, p.313).
Srimad Valmiki Ramayana is smriti („
memory”), an epic poem which narrates the journey of Virtue to annihilate vice.
Sri Rama is the Hero and aayana His journey.
In almost all of North India, the
Tulsidas Ramayana, also known as the Ramcharitmanasa, is the most popular.
Goswami Tulsidas rewrote the Valmiki version in Hindi in about 1574, changing
it somewhat to emphasize Rama as an avatara (incarnation) of Vishnu. Another
notable change was that Sita had a duplicate, who was kidnapped while Sita
remained safe. In the Kamban Ramayana, popular in the state of Tamil Nadu,
segments of the story were changed to better reflect Tamil ideas, including
Ravana not being as cruel to Sita.
The easiest way to attain Lord Rama
is to worship Hanuman: “Tumhare bhajan Ram ko pavae”; “Nothhing exist but God”;
“You are the whole I am a part”; “I see that you are I and I am you”. One can
see firstly an impish young monkey flying to the sun, becoming distracted and
falling, thus earning his name which means “broken chin” (Li Min). Think also
to Sun Wukong’s Journey to the West, and also to Hobbits journey through the
wilderness, into maturity.
The ancient message of the Ramayana
continues to be relevant for the human race. It is not surprising that Mahatama
Gandhi was tremendously influenced by the teachings of the Ramayana. If
Gandhiji is still relevant for the world so is his guidebook – Ramayana.
SANSKRIT-ROMANCE
ONTOPOETICS
1.A Sanskrit mantra among the euphonies
of any Romance utterance puts a peculiar question of poetics. Because that rasa appeals there to the global
mythological imagination. Neither Sanskritization and nor the least, in turn,
Latinization here, these literatures can be compared in the good Indo-European
tradition. But at the same time both Pan-Indian poetics and subjective
Europocentric modernity have to be regarded not only as registration of some
assimilated influences but also in a specific individualized perspective. Thus, through an ontologic
poetics - and not compulsory Heidegger's Dasein — we see beyond satyasya satyam
(the reality of the real) or superintellectual reality of the mystery, the poet
as such, as poet to poet, as Tagore's personalized upanishadic advaitam (the
mystery of one) which is anantam (infinite) and which is anandam (love).
2.
Tagore' s "O fire, my
brother" sounds as Franciscan "il mio fratello sole".
Transcribing in Latin the Buddha's
fourth noble truths-suffering, origin of suffering,
cessation of suffering, the eightfold way leading to the cessation of
suffering as - dolor, doloris ortus, doloris interims, octopartita via
ad doloris sedationem Dhamapada -, Artur Schopenhauer has
identified morally the bikkhus and mandicant order of St.
Francisc. Sometime, the philosopher's disciple, Mihai Eminescu, took again the
way from Latin to Sanskrit, looking to change, for instance, the name of one
his Romantic character called Mors
(Death) into Nirwana.
Significant enough, Jawaharlal Nehru confessed he didn't know more
Sanskrit than Latin. May be what meant Sanskrit creative unity to Tagore was
for & as the Latin one for Ezra
Pound in whom "Cantos" flows
as if same Ganges of Petrarch, while, on the other
hand, last century Mirza Ghalib didn't
spend time any more for reading
Sikandar's life. Now, from poetics to poetry as an order of
Welt-literature could be observed as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin. Ontologically the mechanism looks freer, the
theme of love for example trying to be one either as ecstatic knowledge or as disorder of human
rational equilibrium.
3. Indo-Latin Kavya Purusha. A Latin
ecce India still keeping in the beginnings 'Java' of "Mahab-harata' resounds
from Catullus "India's arid land' and Horace's peace of mind' with no gold
nor tasks that India yelds' to Cavalcanti's chiostra/ Chel's sente in India
ciascun Unicorno'. Camōes' 'o illustre Ganges que na terra celesta tenho o
berco verdadeiro' or Góngora, from Baudelaire and Eminescu to Dario, Pessōa.
Montale. On a modern Sanskrit ground we can attend - as Pound said about
Brancusi - that 'exploration toward getting all the forms into one form' -
Latin satires, epodes, odes, epistles, sermons continued into Italian sonetto.
French chanson, Spanish romancero, Romanian doina, Portuguese redondilha. For,
said Michael Madhu Sudan, ‘ cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet would in
the time rival the Italian'. With such thought to a Sanskrit-Latin sonnet I
published in my book of poems -Ardhanariswara" (International Academy
'Mihai Eminescu', Delhi, 1982). Lope de Vega's Cuando el mejor planeta en el
diluvio'. Baudelaire's Correspondances' and Eminescu's 'Venetia', in Sanskrit
version done together with U. R. Trikha, from Spanish, French, Romanian
respectively,
'Ganga Dnnuvyava saha samgachhati'
Lope de Veffa
'niseva
vidyutiva rasarupani
dhvanayah
prativadanti parasparam
Baudelaire
'sthiram jivanam vishla venitsyayah'
Eminescu
One verse by
Eugenio Montale,
'cio che non
siamo, cio che non vogliamo'
is
transounded as follows into Sanskrit by Satyavrat Shastri,
'na vayam
smo na ca tatha yadvayam kameyawaho'.
Otherwise,
J. M. Masson confesses also a Sanskriturn-Latin smriti paral-lelling within a
Proustian memory a Sanskrit sloka with one of Dante's,
kavinam
manasam naumi taranti pratibhambhasi
yatra
hamsavayamsiva bhuvanani caturdasa
Nel mezzo
del camin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai
per una selva oscura
4. Last years the Vedic and Buddhist
inspiration in Mihai Eminescu's poetry now more than an experiment in
translating but an ontic sat. "Scrisoarea 1" ("First Epistle")
was published in 1881 in "Convorbiri literare" ("Literary
Conversations") and then soon translated into German and after some time
into Latin, Italian. Polish, Hungarian, English, French, Armenian. Bulgarian,
Spanish, Russian, Greek, Bengali. The Vedic cosmogony and the Apocalypse both
under the ray of the moon superposing the vision of Old Guru and the
construction of the poem, it's springing at infinitum from one point as
Beethoven's Vth Symphony were transposed affinitively by some professors and
poets from the Department of Modern Indian Languages of Delhi University
increasing so the creative knowledge of the poem - for instance the tantric
Shiva-Shaktis union observed through Mahendra Dave and O.M. Anujan versions.
With the Sanskrit translation of Rasik Vihari Joshi, Indo-Latin roots restart
the poetic universe again. Because, in Eminescu's mind-differing by his own
translations from German, French, English. Swedish, Latin, Greek literatures -
in the case of Sanskrit like of Romanian itself it seems to be realized an
identity between affinity and creation And with only a (half) sloka opening
the Hymn of Origin from Rig Veda we face onto-poetry's source.
4.1.
Rig Veda ("Hymn of
Creation" starts):
nasad asin,
no sad asit tadanim
4.2 Mihai Eminescu:
La-nceput,
pe cind fiinta nu era, nici nefiinta
4.3. Sanskrit (re-)version by Rasik Vihari
Joshi:
adau
sampurnasunye na hi kimapi yada
sattvamasinna
casi
4.4
Hindi, by Usha Choudhuri :
Pranihina.
sattarahita. ajiva
4.5 Gujarati, by Mahendra Dave:
Tyare natun
ko Sat, na asat
4.6 Punjabi, by Gurbhagat Singh:
Jadon
thakian akhan nal main mombati
bujhaunda
han
4.7. Malayalam, by O.M. Anujan (Dravidian
languages, as Pali, taken with Sanskrit):
Adiyilekku
nissunyata nannile
4.8.Tamil,byP.Balasubramanian:
MudhanMudhalil.thodakkathil,
Onrumatra
verumaiyil
5. The Indian poets answer today,
rather than old Latin continent, some Latin American creators, themselves
looking forward personal Sanskrit poetic
myths. Otherwise, the Sumitranand
Pant's inner sorrow keeps the journey in
universal Sanskrit jar and to
recommend tale-quale the doctrine
of the correspondence, the symbolism and
any synesthetic bend seem to be a work of a distant poetics, maybe far away from
the poetry itself. Those poets renouncing apparently the
registration of the aesthetic
truths and following their genuine destiny are signaling the
eternity of poetry, as such more-or-less no
analyzable by the means of the poetic.
In the context of the Indian
literature, looking upon some trends, spheres of influence amongst groups and
generations - beyond the perception of common essences and inspirations
summarizing a complex originality—there are new concomitantly universal and
Indian personalities; so it's to be contemplated that creative process, given
impulse by the Sanskrit root growing up under the sun of the whole world. The incommunicable inner drama of the poet
lets itself be shared through the directness of language, the ideal of beauty
and human participation.
All are transfigured within the
art, as if
divine, and of the
Prajapati (creator). After all,
the poets are one, but through the communion the poet can perhaps renounce the
lyricism of his own person; the Thou installs the contradictory infinity of
love; not the world but the ego is expressed as a theater, multitude of human
sorrows, spiritual differentials of the same mind; the third person exists,
thus, as autonomous inspiration and whole transcends the
unreconcilable plurality to let open
the way of creation.
It's a communing self, within the
neighbour, the idea, the solitude, a
responsive and, in the same time, fully
passionate: the technique is denied sometime through an obsessional
geometry; the motive dictates or is
dictating itself as a leitmotiv; the poem is the fruit of one violent and
tender radiance; the images
are remembering the really seen
and, maybe, conquered worlds: A poem is sorrowful, another answers it;
a book is the memory of a sound,
another is a chorus, preserving the
silences of the
soul on the poetic planet: and the cosmos validates itself tantrically
in the communion of the fecundity
with self creation; the light
of sadness and the hymn
of joy castellated
in a time
indifferent to the primordiality of sorrow: the communing
salvation is the name of synchronicity of the song with the transcendence of the person through an unsinful message.
The poetic discourse originated
in a dream homologue with reality
adapts to rare destiny, preserving
the old temptation of searching for
the lost happiness of
the Paradise, which is
now just disappearing or emptying itself
out; the existential
fullness is saved through the freedom of the singing; the awareness
doesn't follow the poem,
it is synchronistic with it; and
so another poem waits its avatar; many more lives in a literary
intuition are finding utterance, the
world recognizes its
miracles and injustices. The questions are put deeply
into the answers of the communion; the poem guesses the salvation; the
poetical dedication is like an adoption;
the Logos passes through moods without
words; the secret of
the death follow all
the former lives; Saphic women flows toward the pose
of the one
like a hibiscus.
The resurrection of the hymn is
written in itself, with a decent passion of the glory through love and sorrow,
through the lyricism of the unhappiness in love and world. To write the poetry
of being - over the obsession of
life as such or musicalised myths, classicisms on
Anglo-American modernisms - is to have the essential receptivity of
the world through
untransfigurable symbols, to reach one infinite familiarity with the tragic
self, to produce a purificatory purity.
The poetic excellence arises, then,
through a concurrent vibration: there is a back -ward path towards the finesse
and the tender power of vital light: the ancient Indian aura is interior to the
poet and the metronomic moves the hearing towards the luminous sounds; thus,
the primordial moods are everydaynesses of a poetic destiny; the communion
fascinates the lyric work and so the love can still be the progression in the
series of the great feelings.
6. Anthropology of New Recognition.
There is no need to say that making literature as anthropology and anthropology
as literature one loses one’s chance to be recognized within either of them.
But the theme of recognition itself can be a joint topic, on top of it may be
Kalidasa’s “Recognition of Sakuntala” (Abhijnan Sakuntalam). Even after some
two thousands or two thousands and a half years it seems that Dushyanta
recognizes his deserted wife almost for the sake of their child, successor to
the throne.
A XIX
century’s replica is Cãlin poem by Mihai Eminescu, in which the recognition of
the deserted wife, after years, starts by meeting the child.
Philosophy
of recognition in modern times includes patterns drawn by Hegel, Pascal or Lacan.
An anthropology of recognition would record also discrimination between
cultures and their representatives to the extend of cultural cannibalism,
colonialism-globalism, localism, etc. To be recognized during or after demise
is very little related to one’s will. It seems rather an outer concept. It is
quite hard to enjoy the non-recognition, but after all, then it is time to find
God. Does God recognize a person unrecognised even by self? Is it possible to
get God’s message when all expectations are transformed in lost obsession of
Divinity?
Two poems of
different ages and others reveal the devotion-recognition to Goddess or simply
Woman. Shankaracharya’s Saundaryalahari and Dylan Thomas The Ballad of Long
Legged Bite are almost at the antipodes one from the other, yet they may meet
either in Shakta cult or in surrealistic mysticism of woman. Sanskrit
worshipper makes a cosmic prayer to the Divine Mother on the whole and part by
part, while the Welsh balladist thinks of woman in pieces thorn apart by sharks
and lovers. While the religion – recognition of Uma, Daughter of Himalaya
attracts hotly tantric and advaitin followers, the woman-bite is recognizable
only through song recreation of the victim in tune with legions of raped and
kidnapped heroines like, for instance: Kira Kiralina of Romanian ballads and
Panait Istrati’s novels, in which the heroine kills herself in order not to be
captured by the rapists. In another ballad by Ionel Zeana, hundred virgins
chose to kill themselves instead of entering the harem of the invaders.
The woman is
recognized as Goddess and as a bite almost in the spiritual inspiration, once
an enthusiastic devotion, twice even still more literary as empathically
ballad. The joy and sorrow come together as the characters are concerned, but
both works convey either advaita-nondual, or Don’s love recognition in the same
move as prayer and chatarsis causes-effects.
From
thousand to thousand years, from Sakuntala to Saundaryalahari and ballad
Goddess-bite other characters and feelings are transformed or forgotten also as
recognition of the fact that recognition is not possible.
Cătălina-Kate-Christina love, up to
avataric identification, the soft and all powerful Morning Star in his cosmic-erotic double. By 1980, when Eliade saluted
in a letter to us the Sanskrit version of Eminescu's Luceafarul / Divyagrahah
by Urmila Rani Trikha, would have had in mind his character Miss Christina - …
avatara diviagraha – but also divine Arundhati, embodiment of Vedic Morning Star and of spiral kundalini serpent,
ideal wife – of Vashista – invoked by Sita in Ramayana by Walmiki. At D. H.
Lawrence, Kate abandons herself to the Morning Star beyond military world,
beyond the good and the wrong, in role of Malintzi: „So, when she thought of him
and his soldiers, tales of swift cruelty she had heard of him: when she
remembered his stabbing the three helpless peons, she thought: Why should I
judge him? He is of the gods. And when he comes to me he lays his pure, quick
flame to mine, and every time I am a young girl again, and every time he takes
the flower of my virginity, and I his. It leaves me insouciante like a young
girl. What do I care if he kills people? His flame is young and clean. He is
Huitzilopochtli, and I am Malintzi”
7. Feminine Theoanthropoetics. The
anthro-poetry (I have proposed the term in 1970, at the 10th ICAES, New Delhi)
may deal with a transcendental deputation of man as creator and of the creator
as god but also with the human share of the supreme creation through the
poetical cosmogonies. Some Indo-European creative myths are quite separated
from the current theories of the universe
but not so within poetry. For instance, the cosmic symbolism of woman's
hair grows independently fromKalidasas's Usha/Dawn (Sanskrit-Romanian
trans-soundation: ava yoseva suna/urusa yati prabhunjati/ave ei eva juna
aurusa-n pridvor de zi" - George Anca. Ardkanariswara, International
Academy Eminescu, Delhi, 1982) in the Veda or the Milk Ocean to Eminescu's
blonde Indian princess or Brancusi's La negresse blonde.
The ambiguity between divinity and
hair-fairness is obvious in the appellations of Krishna as Krishna (derived
from ka - Brahma, ica - Siva, vo - one that goes before Brahma and Shiva; or
from kesa-hair, and va - who possesses, fair-haired) or as Vasudeva meaning
dark-blue or brown (M.N. Dut). And everybody enjoying, reading, commenting,
dancing, translating (what be in that case a sort of trans-translation)
Jayadeva's Gitagovinda, remembering or not the ten opening avatars of Vishnu
will witness differently the climax-reproach of Radha speculating on Krishna's
name (as -'dark"). While the avatars of Hyperion in Eminescu's poem are
marked in the eyes of moon-like girl, Catalina, just by changing color of his
hair (6). "Thus Rāma banished will be no-Rāma"' ("not
charming") says Manthara to Kaikeyi (Rumayana by Valmiki). Sanskrit
nymphs, poetesses, characters can be paralleled with blonde avatars in modern
poetry, from Kalidasa's Urvasi to Giraudoux' Ondine.
A. K. Warder, Indian Kavya
Literature, vol. 2, Motilal Banarsidas,
Delhi, 1974: "The travelers look with unblinking eyes peasant's
daughter made pale with flour. ' With
desire, as if at Fortune coming forth from the Ocean of Milk" (Maharastri
verse from 2 A. D.) "The allusion here is to the myth of the
churning of the Ocean by the gods, which produced among other precious things
the Goddess Fortune (Laksmi), moreover Fortune is
symbolized by the color white. It is a commonplace that the gods' eyes do not
blink, thus the travelers' stares would suggest that they were gods' (p. 192). Vol. 3, 1977: From Kalidasa's Urvashi:
- "At the rite of her creation was the Moon the Creator, giving his charm? ' Was it Pleasure himself with the sensitive
as the one aesthetic experience? Was it the Moon who is the source of
flowers? ' - For how could an ancient
sage, dull through studying the Veda, his interest averted from sense objects,
create this delightful form?" (p. 139).
An almost feminine theoanthropoetics
of the vision is retained by Abhinavagupta from a yoga tradition in which the
eye is populated by many goddesses differently colored . Kami Chandra
Pandey, Abhinavagupta. Chowkhamba.
1963, p. 533; "each eye has four orbits (Mandala) (i) white (ii)
red (iii) white-black (iv) black. The first is the abode of the group of
sixteen goddesses, the second of twelve, the third of eight and the fourth of
four. In each of these four orbits one of the four powers, of creation,
maintenance, annihilation and of manifesting itself in indefinable form,
respectively predominates and so does one of the four, object (Prameya), means
(Pramaaa), subject (Pramata), and knowledge (Pramiti)".
Rajasekhara's argument of the blind
poet sustaining the theory of poetic imagination, pratibha, meets Eminescu's
blind sculptor as well as Brancusi's sculpture for the blind - one with the
beginning of the world, the golden embryo - Mihai Eminescu: Memento mori. Geniu
pustiu / The Deserted Genius; Ion Barbu: Oul dogmatic/The Dogmatic Egg. Blond
women avatars in Eminescu's "The Avatars of the Pharaoh Tla" and in
Liviu Rebreanu's Adam and Eve. George Bacovia: "All chaos is a gaiety of
the ether" (Autumn Notes); "In the ideal night the blond princess in
white" (Ballad).
The feminine rhyme of the Ganges in Romance
poetry recalls an endless flowing creation over the human phalanges . Gongora's
(and many other poets') "el Ganges/falanges" sending to the nritti
sequence Ganga springing from the head of Shiva. Pierhyme cosmic dance in
Camōes : "Eu sou o illustro Ganges, que na terra /Celeste tenho o berço
verdadeiro". Al. Philipide still baroque "picioroange falange".
Giambattista Marino: "De la vene de Gange il fabro scelse / Il piu
pregiato et lucido metallo. Virgil in Georgica: "usque coloratis amnis
deuxus ab Indus./ et uiridem Aegyptum nigra fecundant harena" (the river
flowing down from the colored Indians / and fertilizes green Egypt with its
black sand - tr. David West). Sanskrit-Portuguese rhyming in Mariano Garcias:
"Terra de Sabios, e imortaes poetas / Philosophos, videntes e
ascotas./Valmiki. Somadeva, e Kalidasa, / Budha, Manu, Panini e Vynssa /
Durgavati. Maytreyi e Kalinatha Dvantari e Soma e Aryabratha /. Kaverajah.
Jayadeva o Vedanta, E tanto genio, tanta gloria, tanta. Surréaliste natya rhyme
in Apollinaire : "L'époux royal de Sacontale / Las de vaincre se rejouit /
Quand il la retrouva plus pâle / D'attente et d'amour pâlie/ Caressant sa
gazelle mâle".
L'IMAGINATION
DE BAUDELAIRE
Sanskrit
Correspondence
A few
expressions here, like Anandavardhana's kavi-prajapatih or Baudelaire's, could
be related, somehow, to Kamala Das' "when you learn to swim do not enter a
river that has no ocean".
1. After his unfinished voyage to Bharata
Varsa, as if out of Camoens steps, the young punished Charles Baudelaire did more than imagining India. As a now
adikavi - or, in T.S.Eliot's words, the greatest archetype of the poet in modern age and in all the countries -, as a critic, too, he refound on an endless path that "ordre et
beauté" corresponding to Sanskrit aucitya and ramanyia.
With this
alliterative modern-maudit Baudelaire, but also acarya or padah, like the old
Abhinavagupta we speak of poetry and poetics /metaphysics/science/dandyism,
etc. poetry in correspondence /unnaya/ symbol/verse/ prose,etc., poetry within
logos/rasa-dhvani etc. Poet, daemon and lecteur/sahrdaya are one, the
Swedenborg's heaven-man. And beyond a Jesuit ballet of forgiving-conviction
around, the Parisian poet living between 1821-1867, we see again "Les
Fleurs du Mal ", opened in 1857, while Flaubert published 'Madame Bovary',
Dostoievsky and Tolstoy gathered their momentum, Wagner ended the second act of
'Tristan'; "such a year matters in the history of spirit" (André
Suares).
Some
"substantives" passed obssessively into the bibliography of this now
tragic sophist, now virgin poet now the best critic of this century: the
madness, the world-index, the autobiography, the influence of Poe, the mystical
symbolism, the city, the cathacresys, the originality, the muse, the aesthetics
of individualism, the revery, music, etc."Substantif, adjectif, verbe, on
correspond alors que le grand trinité" - profondeur, transparence,
mouvement, - qui est celle de l'être baudelairien lui-meme"(Jean-Pierre Richard)."Cinque
sostantivi"(Lorenze Maranini): "Le tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,/Luxe, calme et volupté".
As
kavyapurusha (spirit of poetry) meets
sahityavidya (appreciative criticism) making her his bride in Vidarbha and
creating Vaidarbhi Riti, the modern poetic
mind travels within the
temple of the nature -
correspondence/ lila (play) of
the heaven with the
earth - in Cythere, Icaria,
Lesbos, to a Limbus,
a sunset, a mist mixed with rain, a Paris,
a Cocagne Land, a Capua,
a Parnassus. But in the island of Venus, the temple is changed in a
hanged alter ego. Like following descendita ad inferna of Ulysses, Aeneas,
Jesus, Dante, 'Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d' un pas', and
analogically to Bhavabhuti introducing the
scene of Madhava's selling flesh in the crematory, in the course of development
of Rasa of love, Baudelaire contemplates the divine essence in the corpse
of Venus. Being the correspondence of the life with the death, of the spleen
with the eternal ideal, the journey never ends. Diabolical or paradisaical, the
poetic correspondences reveal through the prayoga of the poet a self-poetry as
rasavada and sarasvatyastattvam, an alchemy of grief which will be transformed
by Rimbaud in an alchemy of verb. Over versed poetics - like in Horace and
alamkara sastra -, among dense perfumes, with vaporized and, in its divine
momentum - before the loss of paradise -, centralized self, the poet remains
the stranger, the mysterious of his first prose poem, the lover as in
Kalidasa's 'Meghaduta', of the clouds,
the going clouds, the marvelous clouds, clouds which are imitating his life and
are thinking through him as also he thinks through the things, the clouds like
the perfumes of the 'Correspondences', "ayant 1' expansion des choses
infinies".
2. Reading Baudelaire within Sanskrit context,
beyond the poet as voyant in the temple of clouds, the correspondences are to
be felt individually from both Indian and Latin carmen-kavya through the
ancient epos, Camoens' epic India,
Eminescu's rig-vedic romanticism,
even if it is said, for instance, about Edwin Arnold's translation of 'Gitagovinda' that is "so unrecognizable
baudlerized". To remember Baudelaire as a translator, "People accuse
me, of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I translated Poe so patiently?
Because he was like me. The first time I opened a book of his I saw, with
horror and delight, not just the subjects I had dreamt of, but
sentences I had thought of, and written by him twenty years before"(1864).
3. For the modern poet - Rimbaud: "Je suis un autre" - on
reading-Mallarmé could contradict one reading - Baudelaire, a continent's
apophatic avantgardism could be secretly rebelled by the ancient diction of
another universe but through such unfaithfulness within
confidence he creates the fidelity of the poetry to itself. The
critical mind seems to mingle the poet and poetry, from Thibaudet's stake on
Baudelaire or Paul Bourget's enjoyment to Brunetiere's protest, last century, and in our age between a programmatic bio-bibliographical exhaustiveness (George Blin,
Henri Peyre, Claude Picnois, Marcel Raymond, W. T. Bandy, Robert T.Carge, Alfred Edward Carter
a.e.) and "attemptative"(Sartre) or simply
existentialistic work (Buter), esoteric (Pierre Emmanuel) or semiotic
isotopic (Roman Jakobson and Claude
Levy-Strauss). Poet of the poet - as
Holderlin interpreted by Heidegger -, through his spiritual encounters -De
Maistre, Poe, Delacroix, E.T.A. Hoffmann, de Quincey, Wagner -,Baudelaire
revealed his own aesthetics having as
a method the sincerity of
self, and the new as ultimate
aesthetic obsession. What he
said about Poe could have been written at the first person. Between asatya (non
- existent) and utpadya (created by imagination) to Te Deum / opium sahitya and to include
verse in
the most of prose-critical glass is
to transfer stanzas from" "Correspondences" or "Les Phares" in antara-sloka.
In
Kalidasa's comparison of poetry to Ardhanariswara (the symbolic image of Siva representing one half of his body as Parvati) the goddess Parvati is Vak or Jalva (parole)
and god Paramesvara is Artha (logos/conventum), their union as Ardhanariswara
signifying, as V.Raghavan reminds it, the greatest ideal of poetry variously
emphasized as sahitya, sammitatva,
etc. For Baudelaire, the poetry
- this fruit of the sensitivity of imagination - is absolutely true only into
another world. But the poet himself, in and out of the two halves for two
persons of symbolon or the Lohengrin's
secret of Graal, comes self devouringly to another world as Heautontimorumenon, that
Greek-Latin comic character bantered by Goethe as
anologen of poetes from his
age, of a tragic irony after
Baudelaire.
The words
from the dictionary of external nature, says Baudelaire, have to be selected and
arranged by the creative
artist using the
imagination, "la reine des facultées", an
almost divine faculty,
giving to the poet
or to the musician
the capability of translating the hieroglyphs
of the spiritual reality. Only the imagination
comprises the poetry. The true imagination of the true poet, who is also always
a critic and a reader. As mystery of creation either in written word, music or
painting, there is a blank, lacuna, to be fulfilled by the imagination of the
reader or listener, which suggests similar ideas in different minds. And
through which we can find in different times and spaces Kalidasa's
corresponding imaginative sympathy of the audience, the whole Sanskrit emphasis
on sahradaya, - l' homne de lettres,
l'homme d'esprit -,
answering "le poète, le
prêtre et le
soldat, l'homme qui
chante, 1' homme qui
bonit, l'homme qui
sacrifie et se
sacrifie".
IDOEMINESCOLOGY
1. Mihai Eminescu's Rasa-dhvaniah.
The Sanskrit correspondence with the Romanian culture and poetry culminates
with Mihai Eminescu, a reader of Vedas and Upanishads in original. In Romania,
it is taught at school that "The First Epistle" or "The Dacian's
Prayer" (Nirvana) are connected with Rig Veda. Of course the analogy is
fundamental but the correspondence lies both in the common or community
cosmogony mind and particularly in the universal intuition of real life, of sat
(meaning "village" – in Romanian, "truth" in Sanskrit).
Eminescu
speaks of human reality and reverse nostalgia, reciprocal metamorphosis,
intensive voluptuousness and general transparency, the retrospective lucidity
and the para-nymph and we can deduct an anthro-poetry and anthro-poetics by
reading his "Anthropomorphism", "Tat tvam asi", "God
and Man", "From Berlin to Potsdam" etc. There is a
theo-anthropomorphosis in his poems of which 'Dumnezeu/god' is also 'om/man',
and, through the evoked Indian forest, the Sanskrit Om. Eminescu's dream of Carmen Saeculare - like in Horace's
'dulce ridentem Lalagem amabo/dulce loquentem' - is also of mahakavyas and of
mahavakyas, as he entitled a poem 'Tat twam asi', and through 'Eu sunt
Luceafarul' (I am the Evening Star) comes in mind 'Aham Brahma asmi' or his
melancholy turns into verse - 'melancolia-mi (...) se face vers' - like
Valmiki's soka into sloka. As "Rig Veda" entered even his journalism,
one may say, as alamkarika. 'raso vai sah'.
Most frequent key-words in Eminescu's
poetry are, 'ochi'/eye, lume/world, viaţa/life, umbra/shade, faţa/face,
dulce/sweet, lună/moon, mînă/hand, noapte/night, alb/white, mare/sea,
negru/black, suflet/soul, vis/dream, inima/heart, cer/sky, cap/head,
frumos/beautiful, stea/star, floare/ flower'. There are Latin words, Romanian
ramanya, where the rhyme itself could affect the flexion, at Eminescu, Ind' rhyming
with gerundive forms or with nouns and getting its own flexion euphonically,
'lnde decinde/Indic vindec/Indicele vindice-le Indici vindici/Inzi colinzi'. In
his universal Romanian dictionary of rhymes (edition Marin Bucur, Victoria Ana
Tauşan), colored by classical Greek-Latin and Romance sounds, the Indo-rhymes
answer chosen words and compounds : "Vede/revede. Gangele/falangele,
coline/bramine, carmine/latine, increde-i/Vedei, dat mi-i Atmei, Elorii/norii,
ateismul/budismul. iubi-va/Siva, bengalic/italic, predic/Vedic, naframa/Brahma,
Kama/ iama, aurora/ Elora'.
A "restituendo' (Rosa Del Conte)
work is the Sanskrit version of Eminescu's "Luceafărul'/"Divyagraha''
bv Dr. Urmila Rani Trikha in collaboration with the present author. As the names of Brahma and Buddha are
written rhymed in manuscript variants of "Luceafărul" and the
association with it of "Katha Upanishad" (Nachiketas-Yama compared
with Hyperion-Father) is familiar by now to the eminescologists as well as to the
Indian students in Romanian, when translating we found ourselves close to
Sanskrit and Buddhist atmosphere as such. To "Rig Veda": Brahma and
the identity of everything with god: the feminine Ushas compatible with the
male Luceafar (seen by Sergiu Al-George as a Bodhisattva from Ellora): the
young and at the same time ancient twin, brothers Ashvina; Agni as Varuna in
the evening; the golden son of the waters Apam-Napat consounding with Romanian
Latin apă (water) with bright rays; the king Varuna making path for sun and constellations:
the golden bright-rayed Savitr; Yama as the god of death and of life wearing
nilāmbara: Purusha as Jivatma separating himself from Virat: Sarama crossing
the waters of Rasa. To "Brahadāranyaka Upanishad": "O Maytreyi,
a wife is dear to her husband not for her sake, but for the sake of his own
Atma". To other correspondences with Kalidasa's "Raghuvamsam",
"Rtusamhara", Shakuntalam. "Meghadutam', with refrains from
Bhavabhuti, Amaru, Jayadeva. Thus, if in Romania concluding her book
"Eminescu and India" Amita Bhose stated that Eminescu is the only
European poet who made India immortal in his country, in India, Urmila Rani
Trikha transposed in ballad-sloka meter "Luceafarul" within a
symbolical gathering of immortal Sanskrit sounds and feelings known by any
sahrdaya as any Romanian recites stanzas from Eminescu.
The union of kavyapurusha with
sahityaviya in vaidarbhi riti could be for a modern poetical mind the
correspondence of heaven with earth. Diabolical or paradisaical, the poetic
correspondences - rasa-dhvaniah - reveal through the prayoga of the poet, a
self poetry as rasavāda ad sarasvatyasattvam, an alchemy of grief and verb. In
Kalkdasa's comparison of poetry to Ardhanariswara, the goddess Pārvati is vāk
or śabda and god Parumeśvara is artha, their union as Ardhanarishvara
signifying, as V. Raghavan reminds it, the greatest ideal of poetry variously
emphasized as sāhilya, sammitatva etc. Or, the love between Hyperion and
Catalina in Eminescu's "Luceafărul" evokes beyond the myths a neoteric
Anlhanarishwara. One can see Lucypherus as a biblical Ravana, but Eminescu's
Hyperion is closer to Jayadeva's Krishna and one can read
"Luceafarul" as the "Gītagovinda" of Romanians.
From a Romanian point of view, we
consider that under the light of recent researches, poems by Mihai Eminescu.
Ion Barbu, Emil Botta a.o., the cosmic temple of Indore projected by Constantin
Brancusi could be not absent from any anthology or ontology of Sanskrit and
Buddhist world poetry, that at least Eminescology and Brancusology matter for
Indology and Sanskrit studies, as in the works of George Calinescu, Mircen
Eliade, Rosa Del Conte, Alain Guillermou, Constantin Noica, Perpessicius, Marin
Bucur, Sergiu Al-George, Zoe Dumitrescu-Busulenga, Amita Bhose a.o. Following
the continuous modern Indo-European scientific tradition we looked forward to
bringing out, beyond theoretical studies, a living Sanskrit-Latin sahitya
through an anthology of masterpieces inspired by India in Greek, French,
Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish.
Both poetical work and thinking of
Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), the national poet of Romania, “the last romantic”
of Europe, are connected with Indian culture.
The complete series of Eminescu’s Works published by Editura Academiei
includes in the XIVth volume –
“Philosophical, historical and scientific translations” (1983) - also the translation into Romanian from
German of Franz Bopp’s Sanskrit Grammar
after Kritische Grammatik der Sanskrita-Sprache in kurzerer Fassung von
Franz Bopp, Zweite Ausgabe, 1845. Perhaps most mysterious manuscript of
Eminescu, was published for the first time in 1983, after 100 years of its
conception, but only in facsimile, due to lack of printing Devanagari letters
in Romania, at that time.
The editors, Petru Creţia and Amita
Bhose, introduced the researchers and readers in the laboratory, all suprizing
for Romanian culture, of Mihai Eminescu, the translator. Preocupation for
Sanskrit could appear like a final of
work in eternity. Gramatica sanscrită în versiunea lui Eminescu (Sanskrit
grammar in version of Eminescu) appeared for the first time in printed
devanagari, in 2004, at Bibliotheca Publishing, editors - Dimitrie Vatamaniuc,
George Anca and Vlad Sovarel, under care of Romanian-Indian-Cultural-Association.
2. Eminescu and Jayadeva. Choosing to
speak of Jayadeva and Eminescu - Poet to Poet - does not mean to compare
automatically the 12th century last Sanskrit classic to the l9th century last
great European romantic.
About Jayadeva I can speak only as a
translator of 'Gitagovinda' into Eminescu's language and meters. My Romanian
version was released within a gathering organized by the Association of Indian
Comparative Literature and the Department of Modern Indian Languages on 3rd May
1983 at the University of Delhi. I am grateful to all who were attending the
same and to those who commented it always encouragingly. I am grateful, of
course, to Jayadeva and Eminescu.
My version was begun as a sort of
trans-sounding syllable by syllable from Sanskrit into Romanian but
increasingly it became a dhvani, turning the dhvani (sound) into the dhvani
(suggestion) in respect to the two languages. The 'Gitagovinda' in Romanian may
be compared to the Sanskrit version of Mihai Eminescu's 'Luceafarul' (Hyperion)
signed by Urmila Rani Trikha in 'Latinitas' published as a book under the
International Academy Mihai Eminescu having as a president Amrita Pritam. It
was hoped that these translations will open new trends for comparative
discussions on Jayadeva and Eminescu. But the ultimate test of this Gitagovinda
in Romanian will have to be related to its own poetic quality.
This is a part of a project started
in 1981 as 'Patterns in Modern Indo-Latin Kavya Purusha'. By following a quiet
utopian concept of integration and migration of poetical mind we enter the
temple of nature, of its correspondences. On the other hand, looking precisely
now and again to the poetic being, to the poet as such, we could easier
rediscover analogies of apparently unconditioned symbols through unusual
addresses of the poet to the other, to the cosmos, to god. Thus, any regional
anthology could be seen as a part of an onto-poetry, a universal kavyapurusha.
An essential reader was intended in this vision in Indian and Romance poetry
and poetics from the classics to contemporary poets writing in Indian
languages, in French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish. In terms of
comparative literature, Indian themes as avatar or sati and in poetics, rasa
and dhvani were to be analyzed in Romance literature as an argument of a
Sanskrit-Latin poetics.
Mihai Eminescu's 'Luceafarul'
(Hyperion) appeared in 1883, in Vienna. Out of a genuine smriti, we have
printed in Delhi the Urmila Rani Trikha's Sanskrit version. Divyagrahah".
This translation from Romanian has been appreciated by well-known Sanskrit
scholars like Satyavrat Shastri, Kapila Vatsyayan, Sergiu Al-George, enjoyed by
literary audience and students.
There are many Romanian studies on
Eminescu and Rigveda, Katahaupanishad, the Buddha Kalidasa, Tagore, and India
as such, which like Max Muller he hadn't seen physically. 'Luceafarul' is the
'Gitagovinda' of the Romanians. The anustubh is Dr. Trikha's version, like in
Veda and Avesta. Recalls also Eminescu's original meter on a 'story' like
Jayadeva's. At the same time, the meters of the "Gitagovinda' are to be
reimagined through all Eminescu's
poetry. The Sanskrit and Romanian aren't perhaps the two closest languages in
the world but one can think so on this ground. And if Urmila Rani Trikha did
know a better Romanian after accomplishing her Sanskrit Hyperion, one can get
closer to Eminescu by translating Jayadeva into Romanian. The illustrations to
the both first editions of Eminescu's 'Luceafarul' in Sanskrit and,
respectively, Jayadeva's 'Gitagovinda' in Romanian were intended accordingly.
The two prabandhas - the
9th and the 18th - recited at the beginning of our Gitagovinda-release - belong
to the sakhi, which I've translated into Romanian with 'surata', meaning also
'little sister' and evoking by contrast or not the Sanskrit Jayadevian meaning
of "surata", as for gaining that dreamt dhvani from the original into
translation, to let the veena sounds of the creator be heard among the tabla
sounds of the interpreter. Actually, sakhi herself is an interpreter with a
triple speech and the translation is like her, her brother.
In both 'Gitagovinda' and
'Luceafarul' gods speak directly, as Govinda and Demiurgos Radha and Catalina
are in love with gods. The ten avatars evoked in one, at Jayadeva are three
simultaneous avatars - Demiurgos, Hyperion, Catalin - at Eminescu. The double
reading of 'Jaya jaya Deva Hari' speaks for, both poems of the belonging of the
poet to god or of the belonging of god to the poet. Yamuna speaks of
Gitagovinda as if the river has read it, and not only the original but all the
translations and especially those to be done again and again until the original
will repeat itself in the waters of the river. The water is, at Eminescu, that
of the primordial, Vedic ocean.
The translation of Gitagovinda in Romanian
was thus done in a very daily life, culture and language in India. In the same
very room where we gathered, one afternoon in 1981, October, after Dr. Sergiu
Al-George, the translator of the 'Bhagavad Gita' into Romanian, had lectured on
Rupaka, I've asked him why not Gitagovinda. But one week later he was no more.
With his death, the Sanskrit became for me not a foreign language any more. So,
naturally, my translation is dedicated to Sergiu Al-George. Listening to Dr.
Trikha's translation into Sanskrit from Eminescu, he also told us that it was
as if he had heard for the first time 'Luceafarul' (Divyagrahah).
3. Dyachronically, the best spirits of
Romanian culture were attracted by Indian thought (Blaga, 1945). There is a
confluence (Al-George, 1981), a correspondence with perennial India. Our
pre-christian Dacian deity Zalmoxis was interpreted for instance by Keith in
connection with the Hindu doctrine of immortality. Alexandria, Sindipa, Varlaam
and Ioasaf are amongst fundamental of Romanian medieval readings. The Buddha is
represented as Ioasaf in Christian murals. The ‘antibarorea’ synthesizes in the
18th century Ion Budai-Deleanu’s masterpiece Tziganiada the forms of government
as envisaged by gypsies claiming their origin from Jundandel of India. (By the
way, the ruler patronizing the talkative governants to be is nobody else than
Vlad Tsepesh, alias – according to many – Drakula).
Synchronically,
during the 19th century, newspapers and magazines from all Romanian provinces
wrote on Indian widows (1829), Csomo de Koroszy (1830, 1842 – the death of ‘our
patriot’ recorded in ‘Gazeta de Transilvania’), maharaja Ranjit Singh and
Martin Honigberger (1838, 1839, 1857), morals of Indians (1840), caves from
Ellora (1846), Ostindia (1857), etc. On the old paths of Dimitrie Cantemir or
Miron Costin, polihistorians of the same century like Ion Eliade Radulescu and
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu have shaped both romantic and Indo-Europeanistic
renaissance while the great classical writers – Mihai Eminescu, Ion Creanga,
Ion Luca Caragiale, George Cosbuc, Titu Maiorescu – created in correspondence
with Indo-universal values. At the same time, the school came into existence –
the first course of Sanskrit was begun by Constantin Georgian in 1876 at the
University of Bucharest -, and grew up during 20th century trough generations
of students in philosophy, letters and Indology having – in the universities of
Bucharest, Iassy, Cernowitz, Cluj-Napoca – as professors: B.P. Hasdeu, C.
Georgian, N. Iorga, V. Parvan, N. Ionescu, I. Iordan, A. Frenkian, A. Rosetti,
L. Blaga, G. Calinescu, T. Vianu, M. Eliade, A. Graur, T. Simenschy, V.
Banateanu, N. Zberea, C. Poghirc, S. Al-George, V.P. Dyal, I. Pandey, I.N.
Chaudhuri, A. Bhose, S.B. Singh, Y. Tiwary, S.Kumar, G.Anca, L. Theban, M.Itu,
N. Samson, S. Fanar, P. Lazarescu a.o.
The second
classical age of Romanian culture and literature between the two world wars
strengthened a new correspondence through the creations by C. Brancusi, L.
Blaga, I. Barbu, M. Sadoveanu, L. Rebreanu, M. Eliade, V. Voiculescu, I. Pillat
a.o. In all, the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and Buddhism seem to lead to
correspondence (through Eminescu, Brancusi, Blaga, Eliade, Galaction,
Voiculescu), but epics, natya, lyrics of Sanskrit, Dravidian or modern Indian
languages works are shared rather through synchronistic studies and
translations. For the future (these are considerations rendered as such from
1970’s), the knowledge and openness to Panini and Abhinavagupta, Bhartrihari,
Gunadin and Jayadeva are likely to be correspondingly approached by new comers.
(“Future” was –it is – much of Shankaracharya and advaita). Up to this point
(bindu?), many translations from Mahabharata for instane have been done by
George Cosbuc, Psychora, Irineu Mihalcescu, Theofil Simenschy, D. Nanu, M.
Eliade, G. B. Duica, A. E. Baconschi, S. Al-George, I.L. Postolache, C. Filitti
– many versions of Bhagavad Gita, one published in 1944, during the war.
Tiruvaluvar Tamil’s kurals appeared in Romanian as early as 1876.
Traditionally, Eminescology and Brancusology include always larger indological
comments. Leading personalities of Romanian culture have written about
Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi as representatives of whole Indian and
world culture
After years,
even psychoanalyzable, above vague hiding concepts of correspondence and
school are but fact and desiderata in
absence of real possibilities of, with Dandekar’s term, ‘exercises of
Indology’. There were a few others, e.g.: natya rhyme, Sanskrit-Latin
Onto-poetics, feminine anthropoetry, inverse nostalgia, crawfish… Yet a freedom
of Indology like freedom of expression seemed flooding in 1990’s in Romania,
with a start of a new Indological school – MA dissertations in philosophy,
history, philology on Indian themes, Hindi courses in Bucharest university,
Romanian-Indian Cultural Association on the steps on Centre of Indian Studies
projected by late Dr. Amita Bhose, broadcastings, publications, Indian Library
and so on. International Academy Mihai Eminescu, after being founded in Delhi
in 1981 and existing for three years, restarted in Bucharest after 1990. But
old coherence of classicity followed by
‘coherence’ of repression, made room to postmodern destruction or sect
brain-washing. Many diaries form already a field Indology confirming diversely
chronic views of cultural shock. Confusing enough are rash of some self styled gurus, artificial puja culture,
para-psychological Indology. Individual Indology of solitary adventurers of the
fields may prove fruitful especially with growing quality leading to solidarity
in long run research forming and reforming a genuine school based on Eminescu
and Eliade heritage.
This is a
very personal outlook, of a writer who preferred to make ‘indological’ novels
(the series Indian ApoKALIpse is in 9 volume) and books of poems.
It can work
a saying of retiring at time from anything but Indology. There are born
Indologists. Wars, jails, repression keep aware that spirit of abhijnan in
them. A try of symbolic recognition was the lecture tour in Romnia of prof.
Satya Vrat Sastri, in 2001, at our invitation, with award of Oradea University
Honoris Causa Doctorate to Indian scholar. In the beginning of the new
millenium an option for Sanskrit as leading chapter in further studies became
obvious. What a passeist step, at best, some may say.
Sergiu Al-George
died in Octomber 1981, one week after he returned to Romania from India where
had participated to International Congress of Sanskrit in Varanasi. I said then
he was too happy, that happiness killed him. All suffering of his life was
dispersed by translating Gita. So may have it been. I discussed many things
with him. Or could he have died for Sanskrit?
4. Public Address to the President of
India, H.E. Shanker Dayal Sharma, at ceremony
of Receiving Honorary Doctorate, Bucharest University (by
George Anca, 1994)
Your Excellency Mr. President of
India, Sharmaji,
Your
gracious meeting offered to Romanian specialists in Indian studies, mainly from
Bucharest, here, it's a high honor, a stimulation and also a consolation. For
it's a tragic issue of Stalinist-Communist dictatorship that best thinkers,
Indologists included, were jailed. But riks and slokas from Vedas and
Upanishads were still communicated by Morse alphabet.
We feel getting, at last, a free way
to knowledge of Indian spirit and culture. Perhaps the moksha/salvation was the
most appreciated quality of Indian spirit, together with Christian, Indian and
universal dharma and shanti.
Mihai Eminescu, Romanian national
poet, declared himself a Buddhist as an empowered Christian. During more than
15 years I had talks and letters about Mihai Eminescu, mainly in and from
India, but also other continents; they make some personal and
Indo-eminescological history in an epistolar novel I had honor to dedicate to
your excellency, Mr. President of India, Dr. Sharma ji.
Kind of field researcher, I taught
Romanian, between 1977-1984, at University of Delhi, while Prof. dr. Prabhu
Dayal Vidyasagar was teaching Hindi at Bucharest University.
My mother has just died before and so
India became my mother – now it was no problem how good India was to me, but
how good was I to her.
I am grateful to legions of people in
India, from great writers and professors like Amrita Pritam, Ageya, Nagendra,
R.C. Mehrotra, Gurbakhsh Singh – former vicechancellors of Delhi University –
to my colleagues and students in the university.
Surely the exchange of teachers
between universities is a must.
Suppose India and Romania would have
their cultural centers in Delhi and in Bucharest respectively, smaller and in a
way more cultural cities like Iaşi, Cluj, Timişoara, Râmnicu-Vâlcea, for
Romania, and Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Trivandrum for India
may be taken in consideration.
Romanian-Indian Cultural Society, started
recently, in 1993, beyond university and formal scientific research on
Indology, is trying to gather interested people in different topics of Indian
culture. Many young and gifted persons are eager to study Indian arts, dance
and music, to be on scholarship in their dreamland.
We can only slightly open a door
toward an endless realm.
Finally, I will dare to evoke a very
special Indo-Romanian tradition dealing with human freedom and make a call for
your judgment.
Early 1990's Romanian new press
acknowledged both India's international support to political prisoners and
their recognition to pundit Jawaharlal Nehru who provoked a visit of then UN
Secretary General U Thant.
Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, when vice
president of India, made shorter the sentence of poet Radu Gyr.
As a representative to UN
International Association of Educators for World Peace, I request now, Mr.
President of India, your high intervention that Mr. Ilie Ilaşcu,
parliamentarian, jailed in Tiraspol, for only guilt of being Romanian, to be
liberated.
5. International Academy Mihai Eminescu
Founded in 1981 in Delhi by George
Anca. Presidents: Amrita Pritam (1981-1984), Eugen Todoran (1990-1994),
Alexandru Surdu (1994-1996) Dimitrie Vatamaniuc (since 1996). Publications: Latinitas (Delhi),
Bibliotheca Indica (Bucharest – with Romanian Indian Cultural Association),
indological, anthropological and fiction books.)
First draft – 1981 – to be completed
by acknowledgments, other names of poets, thinkers, artists, translators,
eminescologists, educators, desiring to be together unto poetry/shanti.
Albania, Argentina, Australia,
Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Chile, China,
Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungarx, India, Iran, Irak,
Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria,
Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, United Kingdom, USSR, USA, Yugoslavia
MEMBERS / HONORARY INVITED
Rafael Alberti, Robert Bly, Emil
Cioran, Rosa del Conte, Yolanda Eminescu, Evgheni Evtushenko, John Fowles,
Vaclav Havel, Daisaku Ikeda, Eugen Ionesco, Octavio Paz, Amrita Pritam
(president since 1981), Salman Rushdie, Leopold Sedhar Senghor, Bogdan
Suhodolsky, Grigore Vieru.
MEMBERS AT LARGE
Anna Aalten, B. Abanuka, Tawfik El
Abdo, Prachoomsuk Achava-Amrung, Ioan Alexandru (organizer), Ion Andreiţă, O.
M. Anujan, Lourdes Arizpe, Werner Bahner, Andrei Bantaş, Romano Baroni, Georges
Barthouil, Al Bayati, Enric Becescu, Eva Behring, Amita Bhose, Danuta
Bienkowska, Carlo Bernardini, Eveline Blamont, Ana Blandiana, Lucian Boz, Ion
Caramitru, Margaret Chatterjee, Mary Ellen-Chatwin, Mihai Cimpoi, Silvia
Chiţimia, Henri Claessen, Georges Condominas, Lean-Louis Courriol, Robert
Creeley, Petru Creţia, Marco Cugno, Nicolae Dabija, Rodny Daniel, Nilima Das,
Sisir Kumar Das, Mahendra Dave, Guenther Deicke, Francis Dessart, Stanislaw
Dobrowolski, P. Vidyasagar Dayal, Metoda Dodic-Fikfak, Mihai Drăgan, Livia
Drăghici, Jules Dufur, Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga, Anton Dumitriu, Monika Egde,
Christian Eggebert, Didona Eminescu, Roland Erb, Jiri Felix, Galdi Laszlo, Roy
Mac Gregor-Hastie, Al Giuculescu, Allain Guillermou, Herbert Golder, Klaus
Heitmann, Helena Helva, Gerard Herberichs, Carmen Hendershott, Anna Hohenwart,
Peter Hook, Alexandra Hortopan, Kazimiera Illakowiczowna, Philip Iseley, Judith
Isroff, Ion Iuga, Vilenka Jakac-Bizjak, Rafik Vihati Joshi, Elena M.
Koenigsberg, Maria Kafkova, Iuri Kojevnikov, Henrik Konarkovski, Omar Lara,
Leonida Lari, Maria Teresa Leon, Catherine Lutard, Keshav Malik, Muhamed
Maghoub, Fidelis Masao, Liliana Mărgineanu, Pino Mariano, Constantin Mateescu,
Anna Mathai, Dumitru Matkovski, Charles Mercieca, Ion Milos, Baldev Mirza,
George Munteanu, Chie Nakane, Ion Negoiţescu, Wanda Ostap, Ayappa Panikar,
Sheila Pantry, Daniel Perdigao, Augustin Petre, Irina Petrescu, Max Demeter
Peyfuss, Jane Plaister, Franco Prendi, Carlos, Queiroz, Zorica Rajkovic, Lisa
Raphal, Peter Raster, Ruprecht Rohr, Marcel Roşculeţ, Mario Ruffini, Angelo
Sabbattini, A. M. Sadek, Zeus Salazar, Patricia Sarles, Monika Segbert, Joachim
Schuster, Vinod Seth, Satyavrat Shastri, Andrei Simic, Norman Simms, William
Snodgrass, Mihai Stan, Dumitru Stăniloae, Sygmunt Stobersky, Sanda Stoleru,
Sorin Stratilat, Arcadie Suceveanu, Eric Sunderland, Bathelemy Taladoire, Akile
Tezkan, Eugen Todoran, Fernando Tola, Mona Toscano-Pashke, Urmila Rani Trikha,
Kliment Tsacev, Mihai Ursachi, Bruno Uytersprot, Nelson Vainer, Isabela
Valmarin, Dimitrie Vatamaniuc, Romulus & Mihu Vulcănescu, J.L. Vig, Brenda
Walker, Xu Wende, Reinhold Werner, Rudolf Windish, Mario Zamora
MEMBERS IN MEMORIAM
Anna Ahmatova, Sergiu Al-George,
Gheorghe Anghel, Tudor Arghezi, George Bacovia, Ion Barbu, Lucian Blaga, Samson
Bodnărescu, Alexandru Bogdan, N.N. Botez, Petre Brânzeu, Victor Buescu, Anta
Raluka Buzinschi, George Călinescu, I. L. Caragiale, Iorgu Caragiale, Toma
Chiricuţă, Pompiliu Constantinescu, Aron Cotruş, Ion Creangă, Dimitrie Cuclin,
Mihail Dragomirescu, Mircea Eliade, Gheorghe Eminescu, Gheorghe Eminovici,
Franyo Zoltan, Galgi Laszlo, Gala Galaction, Mozes Gaster, Onisifor Ghibu,
Petre Grimm, Ion Goraş, N.I. Herescu, G. Ibrăileanu, Nicolae Iorga, Petru
Iroaie, Josef Sandor, Ivan Krascko, Mite Kremnitz, Franco Lombardi, E.
Lovinescu, Titu Maiorescu, Alfred Margul-Sperber, Veronica Micle, Matei Millo,
Gheorghe Nedioglu, Constantin Noica, Ramiro Ortiz, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vasile
Pârvan, Perpessicius, Ioana Em.
Petrescu, Gheorghe Pituţ, Miron Pompiliu, Augustin Z. N. Pop, Cornelui M.
Popescu, Aron Pumnul, Salvatore Quasimodo, Ianis Ritsos, Mihail Sadoveanu,
George Bernard Shaw, Ioan Slavici, Nichita Stănescu, Carmen Sylva, Carlo
Tagliavini, Fani Tardini, Vasile Văduva, Tudor Vianu
Notes
Some Indian
Writings and Authors in Romanian (apud Latinitas, No 2, October 1982, Delhi):
Vedas (Rig-,
Atharva, hymns), Mahabharata (Savitri, and Damayanti, Bhagavad Gita, Bhima,
Dasharatas, Tilotama, Urvashi), Ramayana, Upanishads (Kata, Mundaka), Manava
Dharma Shastra, Tirukurral, Panchatantra, Hitopadesha, Vetalapanchashatika,
Shakuntala, Gitanjali, Discovery of India, Amaru, Sri Aurobindo, Ageya, Mulk
Raj Anand, O.M. Anujan, Muhamad Alvi, Manik Banerji, Baren Basu, Vasant Bapat,
M.A.Bhagavan, Bhabani Bhatacharya, Lokenath Bhattacharya, Shukanta
Bhattacharya, Sisir Bhattacharya, Amita Bhose (Ray), Prem Chand, Margaret
Chatterjee, Nirendranath Chakravarti, Rani Chanda, Krishna Chandar, Kamala Das,
Nilima Das, Sisir Kumar Das, Prabhu Vidyasagar Dyal, Anita Desai, Maitreye Devi
(Sen), Rajlakshmi Devi, Nissim Ezekiel, Nida Faazli, Mahatma Gandhi, Sarath
Kumar Gosh, Bimal Chandra Gosh, Ibrahim Gialis, Muhammad Iqbal, Jayadeva, Ali
Sardar Jafri, Kalidasa, Humayun Kabir, Prabhjot Kaur, Krishna Kripalani, Jiddu
Krishnamurti, Ananda Kumarasvami, P. Lal, Prabhakar Machwe, Rupendra Guha
Majumdar, Keshav Malik, Pari Makalir, Kamala Markandeya, Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra, Kansal Mishra, Anna Sujata Modayl, Sitakant Mohapatra, Dhan Gopal
Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru, R. K. Narayan, Pritish Nandi, Kedar Nath, Amrita
Pritam, Palagummi Padmaraju, Anvayiar Ayappa Panikar, Induprakash Pandey, K. M.
Pannikar, Deva P. Patnaik, N. Pichamurti, Phanishvaranath Renu, Z. Zahher
Sajjad, Vinod Seth, Satya Vrat Shastri, Madan Gopal Sinhal, Shahryar, Harbhajan
Singh, Navtej Singh, Anant Gopal Shorey, Pillai Thakazhi Sivasankara,
Tiruvalluvar, Rabindranath Tagore, Valmiki, Vyassa, Narayana Menon, Valathol,
Mahadevi Varma, Srikanta Varma, Kapila Vatsyayan, T.S.Venugopala, Martin
Vikramasinghe, Syed Sajjad Zaheer.
Some
Romanian Books on India (apud Indoeminescology, 1994, Bucharest):
Sergiu
Al-George: Indian Philosophy in Texts. Bhagavad Gita, Samkhyakarika,
Tarka-Samgraha, 1971; Language and thought in Indian Culture, 1976; Archaic and
Universal, 1981
George Anca:
Indian ApoKALIpse, I-VII, 1997-2003, Indo-Eminescology, 1994; The Buddha, 1994;
Mamma Trinidad, 2001; Manuscripts from the Living Sea1996; Sanskritikon, 2002
Tancred
Banateanu: Life and Work of Rabindranat Tagore, 1961
Amita Bhose:
Eminescu and India, 1978; Bengali Proverbs and Thoughts, 1975
Ion
Budai-Deleanu: Tziganiada, 1800
Ion
Campineanu-Cantemir: Sati or Pikes of Love, 1928
Al. N. Constantinescu:
The Buddhism and the Christianism, 1928
George
Cosbuc: Sanskrit Anthology. Fragments from Rig-Veda, Mahabharata, Ramayana.
Lyrical Poems and Proverbs, 1897; Kalidasa – Sacontala, 1897
Mircea
Eliade: India, 1935; Workshop, 1935;Maitreyi, 6th edition 1946; Asian Alchemy.
Chinese and Indian Alchemy, 1935; The Myth of Reintegration, 1939; Yoga, 1936;
Patanjali et le Yoga, 1962
Irineu
Mihalcescu: The Cosmogonies of Indians, 1907; Bhagavad Gita, 1932
Cezar
Papacostea: The Ancient Philosophy in Mihai Eminescu’s Works, 1932
Cicerone
Poghirc: Origins of a Civilization: The Ancient India, 1972;
Theofil
Simenschy: The Grammar of Sanskrit Language, 1959; KathaUpanisad, 1937,
Mundaka-Upanisad, 1939; Bhagavad Gita, 1944; Story of Nala. Episode from
Mahabharata, 1937; Panciatantra, 1931/1969
Iuliu
Valaori: Elements of Indo-European Linguistics (1924); Main Indo-European
languages, 1929
Some topical
studies
Le mythe de
l’atman; the semiosis of zero, la fonction révélatrice des consonnes;l’Inde
antique et les origines du structuralisme; Brancusi et l’Inde (Sergiu
Al-George); Tagore – a Skeleton Poem (Tudor Arghezi); le naga dans les mythes
populaires roumains (Tancred Banateanu); new contributions on a ‘proto-Indian’
language (Vlad Banateanu); Rabindranath Tagore in Europe; Mahatma Gandhi as I
knew him (Lucian Blaga); classical Indian literature in poetry of Eminescu;
classical Indian literature in poetry of George Cosbuc (Sergiu Demetrian);
carols and Vedic hymns (Aron Densusianu); influence of ancient Indian culture
on Romanian contemporary literature (Ion Dimitriu); Indian demonology and a
Romanian legend; bi-unite et totalite dans la pensée indienne; la concezione
della liberta nel pensiero indiano; contributions to the philosophy of yoga;
cosmic homology and yoga ; Durga-Puja; Duryodhana and the Walking Dream;
pre-Aryan elements in Hinduism; mystic erotic in Bengal; woman and love;
philology and culture; introduction in Samkhya philosophy; introduction en
tantrisme; magic and métapsychique; la mandragore et les mythes de la naissance
miraculeuse; the metaphysic of the upanishads; religious motives in upanishads;
mudra; symbolisme aquatique; il problema del male e della liberazione nella
filosofia Samkhya Yoga; erotic rituals;
il rituale hindu e la vita interiore; sapta padani kramati; les sept pas de
Bouddha; the symbolism of sacred tree; symbolisme indien de l’abolition du
temps; Indian humanism; secret languages; vernamala; Bhagavad-Gita in Romanian
(Mircea Eliade); Purusa-Gayomard-Anthropos; Greek skepticism and Indian
philosophy; la theorie du sommeil d’apres les Upanisad et la Yoga; wherever
there is smoke there is fire (A.Frenkian); a Romanian exorcism and an Indian
exorcism from Veda; Die philosophischen und religiosen Anschauungen in ihrer
Entwicklung; (B.P.Hasdeu); reflection on India in Romanian Popular Litrature Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
(Keith Hitchins); divinites indo-européennes aux populations de l’Asie
Antérieure et de la Mediterrannee; the formation of Vedic Pantheon; errors in
the analysis of phonetic sequences of
primitive Indo-European (G.Ivanescu); Veda, the oldest Indo-European text
(Henri Jacquier); due pessimisti romantici sotto l’influssi del pensiero
indiano antico; influsso del pensiero indiano antico sull concetto di uomo in
Mihai Eminescu; influsso del pensiero indiano sull concetto di donna di Mihai
Eminescu (D.Marin); Eminescu and Indian philosophy (Cezar Papacostea); lat.
Nubo-nubes et le mythe d’Indra; the morals of Nirvana (Ion Petrovici);
Indo-Traco-Dacica; sur les traces du transylvain Martin Honigberger, médicin et
voyageur en Inde; Constantin Georgian, the founder of Romanian Indology (Arion
Rosu); the origin of universe in the conception of Indians and Greeks; supreme
being in Hindu mystic (Theofil Simenschy); researches of Indo-Aryan
linguistics; actualité de la Grammaire de Panini; Indo-romanica estruturas
sintacticas an contacto (Laurentiu Theban); Romania me hindi; puridhan ka
phalahari baba; Romaniya ka yayavar Aleku Ghika (N.Zberea)
Energetic
nonviolence and non-possession - main
themes of the master course in psychology-sociology (by George Anca);
Exploring
social violence. Motivation of violent behavior (protection, „fight or flight”,
groups and identity). Conflict prevention – systemic (globalization, international
crime), structural (predatory states, horizontal inequities), operational
(accelerators and detonators of conflict – e.g. Poverty of sources, affluence
of small guns, elections).
Anthropology
of nonviolence: Jain ahimsa and aparigraha. Buddhist karuna. Christian pity.
Gandhian nonviolence. Principles of anekanta (relativity).
Ancient
Mahavira has classified people in three categories: having many desires
(Mahechha), having few desires (Alpechha), having no desires (Ichhajayi). The
economy of nonviolence, along with poverty eradication, applies also Mhavira's
concept of vrati (dedicated) society. He gave three directions regarding
production: not to be manufacturated weapons of violence (ahimsappyane), not to
be assembled weapons (asanjutahikarne), not to be made instruction for sinful
and violent work (apavkammovades). Following anekanta, the philosophy of
Mahavira synthesizes personal fate and initiative.
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