The Transcription of Sound
June 2024
Keiko Kamiishi
If a text uses the interlinear method, what is its purpose? Probably one of the main purposes is to make it clear at a glance which words/phrases in the target language correspond to which words/phrases in the source language when translating from one language to another. This allows the readers to know the meaning of the source text word for word or phrase by phrase, and can also be useful in learning the source language.
In this blog post, I would like to focus on a manuscript, Or. 2174(E), which has an interlinear text that may point in a different direction from the above-mentioned purpose. The manuscript has only 7 pages in which a Modern Javanese interlinear text is inserted in a smaller script below the Old Javanese text. The interlinear Modern Javanese text is attributed to Panĕmbahan of Sumĕnĕp (Pigeaud 1968: 80). He is known to have provided the knowledge of Old Javanese to the British colonial official Thomas Stamford Raffles for his early 19th century study of Javanese history and culture. Therefore, the manuscript might have been an outcome of this project.
Figure 1: Leiden University Library, Or. 2174(E). The Old Javanese text is written on the odd lines, the Modern Javanese text on the even lines.
The content is taken from the ancient literary work Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin, which is believed to have been completed no later than the first half of the 10th century AD and is the oldest known Old Javanese work. The Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin contains 26 chapters (sarga) in all, of which the manuscript extracts stanzas 125-154 from sarga 21. The stanzas retell the scene where the sages from heaven sing a hymn to the hero Rāma to encourage him to revive and fight against his enemy after he was fatally damaged.
I would now like to focus on one unique aspect of this manuscript which is the theme of this blogpost: the transcription of sound. The point is that the manuscript’s author adapted the metre used in the Old Javanese text into a more modern metre. The stanzas in the Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin follow a metre consisting of 4 poetic lines that have the same definite number of syllables with fixed positions of long and short vowels. For example, stanza 128 follows the metre called wīralalita which is supposed to have 16 syllables in a line, hence 64 syllables in a stanza. On the other hand, the more modern macapat metre called dhandhanggula that the Old Javanese text in the manuscript adopts contains a stanza consisting of 10 lines. In this case, the final vowel of each line is specified. The number of syllables and the final vowel of each dhandhanggula line are as follows; 10i, 10a, 8e/o, 7u, 9i, 7a, 6u, 8a, 12i, 7a (84 syllables in total).
Therefore, what is needed to adapt wīralalita to dhandhanggula is to increase the number of syllables in a stanza from 64 to around 84 and to change the vowels of the final syllable of each line as necessary. Let us compare a sample stanza from the Old Javanese text in the manuscript and its counterpart in Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin. As a source for the Romanized edition of Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin, I refer to Kern’s critical edition (published 1900, republished 2015) . A specific example from the manuscript is shown below.
Figure 2: Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin, Sarga 21, stanza 128 line 1 to stanza 129 line 1 in Kern’s critical edition (Kern 2015: 447-448) on the left. Old Javanese text in Or. 2174(E) on the right.
On the right side, the final syllable of each line according to dhandhanggula is underlined. As you can see, by lengthening the vowel in the last syllable of each line. For the purpose of increasing the number of syllables in a stanza, the scribe takes 5 lines from the Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin as one stanza, and adds syllables after that. Also, note that several underlined vowels are changed from the left-hand column for the purpose of changing the vowels of the final syllable of each line.
Tuning our eyes to the Modern Javanese interlinear text, it follows the metrical pattern of the Old Javanese text above it. However, it is further divided into smaller parts (caesuras). These caesuras are represented by physical spaces whereas the breaks between lines are represented by long vowels without physical spaces in the Old Javanese text. Following the caesuras in an example of a Modern Javanese text in the fifth stanza, the pattern is 10ī 4a 6a 8e 7ū 9ī 6a 6ū 8a 4a 8ī 7a (83 syllables in total). Therefore, it is even more detailed than the pattern of dhandhanggula metre, and attempts to match the rhythm of the Old Javanese text written above with that of the Modern Javanese translation.
The translation from Old Javanese to Modern Javanese does not always appear semantically precise. The word kita, expressing the second person both singular and plural in Old Javanese, is consistently translated as ingwang, representing the first person singular in Modern Javanese. From the point of view of pronunciation, however, kita and ingwang are words with the same number of syllables and the same vowels in the same positions.
To summarise, employing the interlinear model in the manuscript was likely intended to make it easier for the scribe, upon making a translation, to confirm the number of syllables and each final vowel in the Old Javanese text, and to compose a Modern Javanese text, also in dhandhanggula, that was as close to the older version’s sounds as possible. This example is valuable for the following three reasons: (1) it shows that a modernization of the sound of the Old Javanese text was performed (2) it presents in visual form the process in which modernization was first carried out through the Old Javanese text, and then the Modern Javanese translation was made according to the rhythm of the Old Javanese text, and (3) it adopts the interlinear model for this process. Hence, it reveals that the interlinear model was not only used for the general purpose of rendering the meaning of the source language text, which is divided into words or phrases, into words or phrases in the translation language but rather it may have had additional purposes, as in this case.
Becker and Ricci, upon analyzing the translation from an Indian Rāmāyaṇa into the Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin,refer to the ancient Javanese court poets’ adjusting the translation language of Old Javanese to the metres derived from the source language, Sanskrit, as “translating forms along with content” (Becker and Ricci 2008: 20).What then should we call the adjustment of the source language, Old Javanese, to the metre of the translation language, Modern Javanese? Can this also be called a translation of form?
At least for the person who composed the text of this manuscript (not necessarily the scribe), the task of “translation” seems to have also been to transcribe the sounds. The example of this manuscript shows us the broader concept of “translation” and the versatility of the interlinear model.
References:
MS. Or. 2174(E), Leiden University Library.
Becker, A. L. and Ronit Ricci. 2008. “What Happens When You Really Listen: On Translating the Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa: Ramayana Kakawin, Translation and Essay” In Indonesia 85: 1-30.
Kern, H. 2015. Rāmāyaṇa. The story of Rāma and Sītā in Old Javanese. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Romanized edition by Willem van der Molen. Javanese Studies 1.
Pigeaud, Theodore G. Th. 1968. Literature of Java: Catalogue raisonné of Javanese manuscripts in the library of the University of Leiden and other public collections in the Netherlands. Volume II: Descriptive Lists of Javanese Manuscripts. Leiden: Bibliotheca Universitatis Lugduni Batavorum. Codices Manscrupti X.