Translating Buddhist Verse David Rounds Abstract: The author examines the versification of a passage in the Avatamsaka Sutra, both in the Sanskrit original and the Chinese translation. The author suggests a model for translating Sanskrit and Chinese scriptural verses into English verse so that the English rendering can convey faithfully the intensity of expression of the original and its suitability for chanting.
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salient characteristic of Buddhist scriptural literature is its abundance of verse. These verses are of two kinds. The gāthā, or hymn,1 occurs when there is an overflow of religious feeling at the moment of resolve, gratitude, or accomplishment—when prose becomes inadequate for the expression of intensity. The second kind of scriptural verse, the reiterative verse, or geya,2 serves to restate a teaching or narrative that has just been concluded, when the speaker, as the texts frequently put it, “wishes to restate his meaning.” These reiterations usually abridge the prose that precedes them; the language is considerably more terse and elliptical. Both these kinds of verse, like verse in general, are easier to memorize and to recite than prose, and they are often sung. The question I wish to raise in this brief inquiry is this: confronted with these geyas and gāthās, what is a translator to do? One answer that has guided many translators—whether of Buddhist texts or otherwise—has been simply to translate verses in the source language into prose in the target language. According to a widely accepted convention, translators will begin a new paragraph, capitalizing its first word, for each new line of verse in the source text. In this way the formatting offers a rough visual semblance of the original verse. But that does not mean that the translation actually is in verse. An example may make my meaning plain. In the third roll of the Gandavyuha, India’s great spiritual epic, which comprises the penultimate chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra, we first meet the youth Sudhana at the very moment he sees through the vanity of ordinary life. He will undertake a journey in search of enlightenment. He tells of his resolve in a gāthā of 100 lines. Here are the first twelve of those lines as rendered by the American
Issue 11, October 2012
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