Abstract
In the days when an author’s work became the property of the community as soon as it was completed, an author understandably was not obliged to say anything of the sources from which he derived the themes or even imagery of his work. Now and then the author of an Old Javanese work refers to another work as an authority for an opinion he is about to express, but in general authors seem to have regarded mention of the sources of their works as superfluous.
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In Old Javanese parwa is used as a technical term referring to a prose work with the epic contents (see Ensink 1967: 1).
Pigeaud (1967: 122) correctly states that `the subject matter [of the Arj.] is found in the Uttara Banda, the last book of the Sanskrit Râmâyana’; but he is erroneous when he says that the poem contains `the struggle of the epic heroes Arjuna Sahasra
The OJ Utt. as a whole has not yet been published. Almost half of the work, however, has been critically edited by Zoetmulder (1958: 9–61). The quotations of the unpublished parts of the OJ Utt. in the present work are taken from the microfilms of Professor Zoetmulder’s unpublished transcription.
This is evident from the following quotation from the mangala of the OJ Utt.: (Z: 1) Ri t¨¦las nin L¨¦nkâpurakanda cinaritak¨¦n de bhagawân Bâlmiki, tumuluy to sirânik¨¦t w¨¦kas nin Ramayana, inaranan Uttarakanda. (After sage B¨¤lmiki had finished narrating the L¨¦inkâpurak¨¤nda, he immediately composed the final part of the R¨¤m¨¤yana, which is called the Uttarak¨¤nda).
In the subsequent lines of this mangala the anonymous translator of the OJ Utt. invokes bhagawân B¨¤lmiki and sri Dharmawaitsa f ¨¨guh (for tëguh?) Anantawikrama as the mangalya (patron) for rendering the Ramayana into Old Javanese. The former is referred to as salt pinakadidewa nin sarwakawi (he who is regarded as the foremost god of all poets), and the latter is referred to as ratu cakrawarti siniwi rift Yawadwipa (the supreme king reigning in the island of Java). Since we know from other sources that Tzguh Anantawikrama ruled over a kingdom of East Java from 991 A.D. to 1016 A.D. (see Buchari 1965: 57) the rendering of this kanda may be assigned to this period. Recently Pigeaud (1967: 116) and Berg (1969: 99 sqq) stated that the rendering of the Old Javanese works, i.e. the parwa and the kanda, from Sanskrit took place during the reign of Erlanga, the successor of Tëguh. I do not wish to go into the question of the acceptability of Berg’s arguments, for it would lead us too far from the scope of the present work, but even if his proposed date is correct, the difference of the dates would not be too significant for the study of the Arj., because the two decades involved would not make any difference for Tantular, who wrote his poem more than three centuries after Erlanga.
For example, the north-western version (Shastri 1947) has 112 sarga; Chokamba Vidya Bhawan edition (Vasistha 1957) has 111 sarga; Shastri’s translation has 111 chapters. Following Zoetmulder (1958), who apparently used the north-western version for the comparison of Sanskrit quotations in the OJ text of the Utt., the north-western version is referred to in the present work, unless otherwise stated. When this work reached the typist (in 1971), only the first five kânda of the Critical Edition of the Râmâyana edited by Oriental Institute of Baroda had been published. For the future study of the OJ Utt. the critical edition of this Institute is indispensable.
Before and after the names of the sarga of the OJ Utt., there is a sentence that reads: Iti Ramayana Uttarakanda¡ [number] sargah. In the Skt. Utt. it reads: Ityarse Rdmayana Uttara-kânde¡ nama [number] sargah.
The number in brackets after the OJ Utt. indicates the approximate number of words in each sarga; after the Skt. Utt. they refer to the number of stanzas. The marigala preceding the first sarga of the OJ Utt. is not counted; nor are the Sanskrit quotations followed by Javanese translations scattered throughout the Old Javanese text.
It should be stressed here, however, that we do not know the exact Sanskrit version used by the author of the OJ Utt.; accordingly, we cannot be sure whether the name Gandabhindika which occurs in this north-western version also occurred in the version used by the OJ Utt. author. The editor of this north-western version gives a variant: Gâmdatimdika, and Shastri (1959: 413) gives Samyodhakantaka (cf. SED: 1112 Samyodhakantaka).
For a closer comparison of the contents of both works, see Ch. 3. Numbers in brackets in this table show the approximate number of words in the relevant sarga and cantos (see note 26). While numbers in () indicate that the cantos of the Arj. are more or less comparable to the preceding sarga of the OJ Utt., those in [] indicate that the cantos of the Arj. have no counterpart in the OJ Utt., or vice versa.
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Supomo, S. (1977). The Origin of the Arjunawijaya. In: Supomo, S. (eds) Arjunawijaya. Bibliotheca Indonesica, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4963-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4963-3_2
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