An older and little-known copy of the Poem of the Student
July 2024
Aglaia Iankovskaia
Figure 1. First extant page of the poem in EAP EAP329/1/11. Source: Mau'izah and Adab al-Muta'allim, British Library, EAP329/1/11, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP329-1-11
This post follows on an earlier one from December 2022, in which I discussed an anonymous didactic poem in Arabic that was copied in early twentieth-century Aceh for Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) and labelled as ‘Poem of the Student’ (Gedicht v. d. student). The copy (Or. 7075) is found in Leiden University Library, while the manuscript it was made from is nowadays housed in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta (ML 341). The poem instructs on the principles of learning and virtues of a good student and is still used in traditional Islamic education in the Indonesian-Malay and wider Islamic worlds. However, despite the text’s relative popularity, its origins and authorship remain uncertain. Its handwritten copies and printed editions are scattered in different libraries and private collections and are hard to identify, as they occur under different titles or with no title at all, and are often hidden between other texts contained in a manuscript. Among the titles are Naẓm al-maṭlab, Fatḥ al-qayyūm fī ādāb ṭālib al-‘ulūm, and Adab al-muta‘allim, but none of these is likely to be the original one. Under the latter title, or rather a genre description, the poem appears in two earlier manuscripts dating back to between the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries (EAP329/1/11, digitised by the British Library Endangered Archives programme; and DS 0043 00014, DREAMSEA digital repository). This post looks into the former copy, which demonstrates an interesting connection to Snouck Hurgronje’s version of the text.EAP329/1/11 contains two different texts, the ‘Poem of the Student’ being the second in order and occupying five pages of the manuscript (pp. 7–11). The first page is missing, so that the poem starts abruptly with what is line 8 in the later copies. At least a century older than ML 341 and its Leiden copy, EAP329/1/11 proves that the poem was already in circulation in the 18th century. Same as ML 341, it originates from Aceh where it is found in Teungku Mukhlis private collection in Calue, Pidie Regency. Also same as in the other known handwritten copies of the poem the Arabic text is provided with interlinear translation to Malay. This translation is traditionally placed under the line, but demonstrates casual inconsistency in the organisation of the interlinear space: most of the Malay text floats horizontally between the lines of the main text, but translations for four random lines are for some reason placed diagonally at an angle to the source. On the first page translation even finds itself above the line as a result of inattention on the part of the scribe, who apparently missed the translation for the previous line and later inserted it in the margin as a footnote. Appearing as an imperfection to a modern reader, this sloppiness of the interlinear translation embodies its dynamic and inconclusive nature as opposed to the more static and thoroughly reproduced matn (main text).
Juxtaposing the interlinear translations in ML 341 and EAP329/1/11 reveals an interesting correlation between the two versions of the Malay text: they are too different and too similar at the same time— too similar to be unrelated and, at the same time, too different for the differences to result from corruption in the process of recopying. This ambiguity brings up questions around the practices of transmitting interlinear translations, which appear to have differed from those of reproducing the matn. How can two texts be this much different but still related? A possible explanation is that the interlinear text might have gone through multiple stages of both written and oral transmission, which involved a teacher dictating the translation looking into a written copy, but feeling free to slightly modify or complement the text during the dictation—adjusting to the students’ level and anticipated need for additional elucidation. Frozen on the page of a manuscript, this interlinear text captures the translation as it was performed in the classroom, demonstrating one of the many ways in which orality and literacy were entangled within Malay manuscript culture and Islamic educational practices.
References:
Collective volume with two texts in Arabic with interlinear translation in Malay, Leiden University Libraries, Or. 7075, http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3128072
DS 0043 00014, DREAMSEA Repository, https://www.hmmlcloud.org/dreamsea/detail.php?msid=1403
Mau'izah and Adab al-Muta'allim, British Library, EAP329/1/11, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP329-1-11
Mawaiz al-Badiah Waghairiha, ML 341, National Library of Indonesia