Just a place to jot down my musings.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Lightness and heaviness

Re(re)ading Gwendolyn Lane’s translation of Bāṇabhaṭṭa’s masterpiece Kādambarī, I suddenly recalled a fascinating anecdote about how Bāṇa decided to permit his son Bhūṣaṇa to complete the work. I fear I cannot remember the source of the tale.

The story goes that Bāṇa was on his deathbed without having completed the Kādambarī, and wished to entrust one of his sons with the job of finishing it. But how to decide which one would be worthy of the challenge? He called them both to his bed, and, pointing to a small stack of firewood nearby, asked them to describe it.

The elder son (whose name escapes me, and perhaps history too) said: 
śuṣkaṃ kāṣṭhaṃ tiṣṭhaty agre
“A dry piece of wood stands in front.” 

The younger, by name Bhūṣaṇa, came up with this: 
nīrasa-tarur iha vilasati purataḥ
“A sapless tree manifests itself before me.”

Both statements are factually correct, but only Bhūṣaṇa’s possesses the lightness (lāghava) and multiplicity of meaning that Bāṇa so prized in his work. Specifically:

  • The two statements are both 16 morae long, but Bhuṣaṇa’s version crams 14 syllables in by using light syllables throughout (except at the beginning and the end). His brother’s, on the other hand, uses 8 syllables, each one heavy.
  • The elder brother’s statement attempts to repeat in three consonant clusters, but two of these are the same, being the heavy and somewhat unattractive ṣṭh cluster. Bhūṣaṇa does not have any clusters at all, but lightly dances amidst repetitions of s, t, l, and r.
  • Bhūṣaṇa’s first word, nīrasa, evokes the literary concept of rasa (about which Amazons’ worth of paper and Superiors’ worth of ink have been spilled).
  • Bhūṣaṇa’s statement can be understood as referring not just to the firewood that his father has asked about, but also to his elder brother who lacked literary judgement but who stood before him in time and in the hierarchy of the Indian family.


Bhūṣaṇa was given the privilege of completing Bāṇa’s work. Scholars hold, however, that his effort lacks the mastery of his father’s. History is the harshest critic of all.


Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Grammar and enclitic pronouns

natvā sarasvatīṃ devīṃ śuddhāṃ guṇyāṃ karomy aham |
pāṇinīya-praveśāya laghu-siddhānta-kaumudīm ||

Having bowed down to Goddess Sarasvatī,
        pure and virtuous,
I compose the Laghusiddāntakaumudī as an introduction to the Pāṇinian system.

With this invocation to Sarasvatī, Goddess of Knowledge, does Varadarāja begin his Laghusiddhāntakaumudī, the “Brief Moonlight of [Grammatical] Principles”. Varadarāja’s work is an annotated, abridged version of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Siddhāntakaumudī, which rearranges the whole of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭâdhyāyī into a format that is pedagogically usable by the student. The English translation of the invocation to Sarasvatī does not capture an interesting ambiguity in the original: the adjectives “pure and virtuous” could [and therefore did!] describe the Laghusiddhāntakaumudī itself.

Much can be said about this work, but for now I wish to note just one pair of verses from its haL-anta-puṃliṅga-prakaraṇa, the chapter on (the declension of) consonant-final masculine nouns:

śrîśas tvâvatu pîha dattāt te me ’pi śarma saḥ |
svāmī te me ’pi sa hariḥ pātu vām api nau vibhuḥ ||
sukhaṃ vāṃ nau dadātv īśaḥ patir vām api nau hariḥ |
so ’vyād vo naḥ śivaṃ vo no dadyāt sevyo ’tra vaḥ sa naḥ ||

May the Lord of Śrī protect you and me;
        may He give delight to you and me.
That Hari is the master of you and of me;
        may He, All-Pervading, guard you two and us two.

May the Lord grant happiness to you two and to us two;
        for Hari husbands you two and us two.
May He defend y’all and us;
        may He bestow auspiciousness to y’all and to us;
        He is to be served by y’all and us here.

Why would this verse show up in a grammar text? Because the underlined forms are the enclitic forms of the first- and second-person pronouns! This verse contains examples of the enclitic pronouns for the second, fourth, and sixth cases, in the singular, dual, and plural, in that order. These optional forms are permitted by a small set of Pāṇinian sūtras:

  • yuṣmad-asmadoḥ ṣaṣṭhī-caturthī-dvitīyāsthayor vāṃ-nāvau [Pā 8.1.20]
  • bahuvacanasya vas-nasau [Pā 8.1.21]
  • te-mayāv ekavacanasya [Pā 8.1.22]
  • tvā-mau dvitīyāyāḥ [Pā 8.1.23]

Pā 8.1.20 permits the use of vām and nau in place of the regular second- and first-person pronouns, respectively, in the sixth, fourth, and second cases. (As stated, this is a general rule, utsarga, that applies to all these pronominal forms regardless of number.)

Pā 8.1.21 then carves out an exception (apavāda) to this rule, saying that in the plural, the forms vas and nas, respectively, should be used. [These are indeed cognate with Spanish vosotros and nosotros and French vous and nous.]

Pā 8.1.22 carves out another apavāda, saying that te and me should be used in the singular. (Thus, taking these two exceptions together, we automatically restrict vām and nau to the dual.) But this rule, while being an apavāda to Pā 8.1.20, is in itself an utsarga.

Pā 8.1.23 is the apavāda to Pā 8.1.22 in turn, saying that tvā and  should be used in place of te and me for the second-case forms of the singular pronouns. 

This is an extremely brief look at one of the ways in which the Pāṇinian system works, by creating utsargas and apavādas. One of the side-effects of this is that no Pāṇinian rule can be understood in isolation from all other rules, for everything interacts with everything else. 

To know the whole, know the parts; to know the parts, know the whole.


Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”