An Old Javanese Epic Poem

The book is subdivided into five main parts. The introduction by S. Supomo includes a summary of the Old Javanese epic poem with reference to its Sanskrit model, the Raghuvaṃsa, in addition to information on the poet, the work’s reception history, and the manuscript tradition. The second part, which is a collaborative effort by S. Supomo, Peter Worsley, and Margaret Fletcher, comprises the translation of the Sumanasāntaka and a commentary. In the third part, Thomas Hunter compares Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃsa and Mpu Monaguṇa’s Sumanasāntaka, showing that the Old Javanese epic poem is an original reworking of the Sanskrit model rather than a translation. Peter Worsley is responsible for the fourth part, in which he maps out the imaginary landscape of the Old Javanese social world. The fifth part, also authored by Peter Worsley, is a discussion of a late nineteenth or early twentieth century Balinese painting that depicts important moments in the Sumanasāntaka and the way the narrative was reimagined in a different artistic medium several centuries after it had first been written.

S. Supomo’s introduction of Mpu Monaguṇa’s Sumanasāntaka not only acquaints the reader with the structure and the content of this epic poem, but also provides the background and places it in the context of Old Javanese literature more generally. The initial summary of the poem’s eleven episodes is helpful for navigating the translation itself, in which it can be difficult to find a particular passage due to its length of more than eleven hundred stanzas. Furthermore, S. Supomo presents the reader with information on the thirteenth century context of the writer, Mpu Monaguṇa, his status as a poet, and his relationship with the king. He comments on the transmission of the narrative across time and its history as an originally Sanskrit text written by the fifth century Indian poet Kālidāsa that inspired Mpu Monaguṇa’s epic poem, and was eventually forgotten in Java but lived on in copies of the prototype as well as other types of texts and art forms on the neighboring island, Bali. S. Supomo finally transitions to the translation of the the Sumanasāntaka by commenting on the selection of manuscripts that were used and their relationships to one another.

Easily the most extensive part of the book, Part Two comprises the original Kawi text of the Sumanasāntaka in transliteration and its translation, as well as comments on the translators’ choices, ambiguous passages, and aspects of the culture and history that may be unknown to the reader. The translation follows the text line by line, thus making it easier for the reader to follow along, and is written in accessible modern English. The meter of the original epic poem in Kawi, which is of course lost in translation, is indicated in the beginning of every new canto. The translators have not attempted to preserve the artistry of the original, intending their translation more as an aid to reading the Kawi than as an approximation of the experience of the original for those without a knowledge of the language. Granting the necessity of this limitation, a reader will find that the translation and notes more than adequately convey the possible nuances of meaning in the Kawi original.

Thomas Hunter is responsible for Part Three, in which he traces some of the main similarities and differences between the Raghuvaṃsa and the Sumanasāntaka. When composing the Sumanasāntaka, Mpu Monaguṇa had access to more Sanskrit texts than Kālidāsa’s. Early thirteenth century Java was open to a wide range of literary influences from the Indian subcontinent, including commentaries on the epic texts themselves. Furthermore, Hunter shows that not only the literary, but also the pedagogical tradition of the Indian subcontinent shaped the language and discourse of the kakawin. However, while absorbing these traditions, Javanese poetic praxis transformed these Indian sources by employing the figures, tropes, and meters of the kakawin tradition. Notable differences include the daily and ritual life of the court, intimate details of marriage and sexuality, and the way the theme of battle is addressed in the two literary traditions. By comparing the aesthetic sentiments of the two versions of a key scene in the narrative, Hunter also shows how the emphasis has shifted from an aestheticization of the mythic dimensions of a royal lineage in Kālidāsa’s work to Mpu Monaguṇa’s concentration on Princess Indumati as the focal point as the Javanese ‘cult of beauty’ (kalangwan).

Part Four, written by Peter Worsley, focuses on an identification of how the Sumanasāntaka and a Javanese elite in the early thirteenth century imagined the space of their lived environment. He locates this understanding of space and time socially in the courtly world of eastern Java. Mapping out the different kinds of poetic spaces, Worsley shows that the narrative world of the epic poem is viewed from inside the palace which, along with the countryside, represents the two aspects of human society. Seashore and forested mountain denote a wilderness beyond the reach of royal rule and ordering, a world that is at once dangerous and spiritually potent and erotic. Finally, the world of the gods is physically separated from the world of humans. Despite its remoteness from the narrative center stage of the epic poem, the palace, the world of the gods was modeled in the image of the court itself. Particularly interesting is Worsley’s interpretation of aspects of the poem’s narrative that are unlikely to represent a social reality at the poet’s time. These counterfactual elements point to particular anxieties at the time that the heroes of the narrative were able to surmount.

Part Five, also by Peter Worsley, discusses the afterlife and a particular artistic reverberation of Mpu Monaguṇa’s epic poem: a Balinese painting, likely from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, that depicts four scenes from the Sumanasāntaka. While the painting depicts key moments from the story in a manner that is faithful to the epic poem, the selection and visual representation of the respective moments goes beyond a mere reproduction of Mpu Monaguṇa’s narrative and highlight a concern that is typical for the cultural context in which it was produced. The painting draws attention to the distinction between the world of the kings characterized by a competition for political power and sexual desire on the one hand, and the world of priestly authority that completely lacks those two characteristics of the world of kings, but is crucially important for the sustenance of the royal and social realm.

This work is a valuable resource for both those who are already well acquainted with Old Javanese literature, as the translation includes a detailed commentary, and for those who are just beginning to familiarize themselves with the subject at hand, since it provides a lot of context. It is also a wonderful example of scholarly cooperation, which gives this textual and intertextual project not only width in terms of content that is covered, but also depth.

Verena Meyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison (vhmeyer@wisc.edu)