Twenty-Two Goblins

Rating:
Summary: Ian Myles Slater on: Sanskrit Tales from a Cemetery
Review: Classical Sanskrit literature (beyond the many religious and philosophical texts) includes a number of story collections, in which, inside a larger frame story, characters tell stories to each other, some of the stories containing stories told by characters in those stories, and so on. (This is not unknown in the west, of course; Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is only one example.)

Although most make some claim to a moral or doctrinal purpose, their primary function is to entertain. Some Indian examples, like the present work, "Twenty-Two Goblins," are fairly brief. A few, like the well-named "Ocean of Story" of Somadeva, are immense. (The full title is "Katha sarit sagara," more exactly "The Ocean of Streams of Story."). There are translations, and similar works, in many of the vernacular and other learned languages of India.

Some are really anthologies, with the opening frame merely a device, a form of organization. To judge from its extant texts, the "Panchatantra," a very well-known collection of fables, never returned in a conclusion to its opening of a wise teacher giving sugar-coated advice to some dull-witted princes. (Original version from around 300 C.E. For a modern translation, with an up-to-date introduction on its complex history, see Patrick Olivelle, "The Pancatantra.") A simple, and elegant, approach is that of the Buddhist "Jatakas," in which each main story concerns a pre-enlightenment incarnation of the Buddha, so that the collection seems to move toward an historical destination, despite variations in the selection, number, and order of tales in different versions.

Others are more like novels, with a plot that is introduced at the beginning, advanced from time to time in a return to the frame, and in some way resolved at the end, even if the individual tales are what remain with the reader; at least some of the tales contribute to either the theme of the frame story, or the plot development.

The anonymous "Twenty-Two Goblins" (*Vetalapanchavimsati*), while not all *that* tightly structured, is an example of this latter genre, and, in my experience, one of the most consistently entertaining as well. While not quite in the usual line for Wildside, it is a welcome addition to their list; and a welcome new edition of a translation originally published before World War I, and long out of print (although a Gutenberg e-text has been available for several years). Whether regarded as a novel or an anthology, it is close enough to modern fantasy literature to appeal to adventurous readers.

Its framing device bears a close resemblance to that in another novel / collection which is fairly well known in English, translated in part by Sir Richard Francis Burton as "Vikram and the Vampire." In both works, a king, at the request of an apparent holy man, enters by night a cremation ground or other place of death, and there encounters a demon which subjects him to an ordeal of courage and endurance, while also telling a puzzle story which will serve as a test of the king's ingenuity and moral discrimination. The process is repeated with variations on subsequent nights. (This, again, is not unique to India, although the elaboration seems to be; in an Irish parallel, a monarch offers a reward to someone who will go out at night, etc., with a similar result.) The title of this work suggests how many such supernatural raconteurs are involved in this case.

"Twenty-Two Goblins" however, is a only a bit shorter than Burton's "Vikram," even though the latter contains eleven of an original twenty-five stories. (According to the 1893 posthumous edition and its reprintings; I haven't seen his rather rare 1870 edition!)

"Goblins" is quite different in the details of events and characterization, and has a different set of tales. I read both, in library copies, many years ago; on re-reading parts in preparing this review, I found that I been lumping them together in memory, but had remembered more of Ryder's book than I realized. Judging strictly by Ryder's and Burton's translations, "Twenty-Two Goblins" is rather more gracefully told, and presents fewer obstacles to the reader. (It is also more clearly based on an identifiable Sanskrit edition; Burton is remarkably hazy about how much use he has made of the Sanskrit and how much of vernacular versions of the collection which he also mentions.)

Unlike Burton's work, Ryder's is designed to be read as a charming (although occasionally grim) book of stories, instead of as a source of ethnographic information on ancient or medieval India, with nuances of Sanskrit represented by odd varieties of English. Ryder successfully conveyed through his translation his conviction that he was working with a work of literature which could be read for entertainment, and needed no additional justification.

(Note that this is NOT a comparison of the two *Sanskrit* works as such. Burton, who usually worked with a -- silent -- collaborator, tried to explain *everything* to stay-at-home Victorian readers. This is good in itself, but he sometimes took it to extremes. He had a tendency to re-invent English, often to suit his impression of an exotic "Oriental" tongue -- to be fair this also is true of his style in translations from several European languages as well. The extreme example of Burton at work -- not from Sanskrit -- is his eccentric and often densely annotated translation of another structured collection, "The Thousand and One Nights." Burton's gibe that a predecessor's work should have been titled "The Arabian Notes" instead of "The Arabian Nights" was soon applied to his work instead.)

As already suggested, Ryder seems to have worked hard at making the translation appealing. Although the language is formal, he never resorts to dressing up even plain statements in the pseudo-Biblical English preferred by many Indologist-translators in the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth. The flowery literary Sanskrit -- to modern tastes, perhaps excessively flowery -- is not further distanced by a profusion of obsolete verb forms and Elizabethan (or pseudo-Elizabethan) vocabulary.

Arthur W. Ryder (1877-1938) was part of the founding generation of Sanskrit studies in American universities. He worked extensively with the major literary forms of classical Sanskrit, both prose and verse. He has a certain renown outside the field for having, late in his life, taught Sanskrit and Hindu ethics to a fellow-professor at Berkeley, a young physicist, who in turn seems to have paraphrased Ryder's translation of the "Bhagavad-Gita" while watching the first atomic blast -- see, on-line, James A Hijiya, "The *Gita* of J. Robert Oppenheimer."

Ryder is probably best known to readers in recent times for a translation (textually obsolete, but, once again, pleasant reading) of the "Panchatantra" (his transliteration; reprinted several times in the 1950s and 1960s by the University of Chicago Press, including a Phoenix Paperback edition), and a collection of works by the great Indian playwright Kalidasa, "Shakuntala and Other Writings," published in the popularly-priced Dent "Everyman's Library" series in 1907, and reprinted in the U.S. by Dutton, in paperback from the 1960s onward.

Ryder translated at least one other work in the novel / story-cycle genre, the sixth or seventh century "Dandin's Dasha-Kumara-Charita: The Ten Princes," originally published by the University of Chicago Press in 1927. One of two surviving works by Dandin, an acknowledged master of literary Sanskrit, the "Dasha-Kumara-Charita" is, perhaps, better known by the shorter cover title, "The Ten Princes." An older translation, by the nineteenth-century scholar H.H. Wilson, was recently reprinted in India as "Dasakumara Charita: Adventures of the Ten Princes."

Ryder's version of "The Ten Princes" may be worth reprinting as well -- perhaps Wildside is considering it as a companion to "Twenty-Two Goblins." However, New York University Press has announced a forthcoming (February 2005) publication of "The Ten Princes," edited and translated by Isabelle Onians (see the listing on Amazon), which may render the whole question moot, at least for readers interested in more up-to-date scholarship.