Читать книгу The Rise of Wisdom Moon - Krishna mishra - Страница 51

introduction

prominence among classical Indian works studied in the West that it enjoyed more than a century ago.

The Play’s Languages and the Present Translation

As is the norm in Sanskrit drama, “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” includes characters who speak not in fact Sanskrit, but dialects of Prakrit, the literary languages that were inspired by the colloquial tongues of North India during the last centuries bce and for some time thereafter. The use of these languages in the theater was typically subject to strict codification: men of status spoke Sanskrit, while the women spoke the Shauraseni Prakrit that was associated with north-central India, but sung their verses in Maharashtri, the language of the southwest that was renowned for poetic beauty. Lower class characters and some others, such as adherents of the Jain religion, however, used Magadhi, derived from the speech of the northeastern regions around modern Bihar.34

“The Rise of Wisdom Moon” was clearly composed with these standards in mind, but it departs from them in a number of ways. As is the case in many other plays, the “Magadhi” we find here is not really Magadhi Prakrit at all, but rather Shauraseni modified by the introduction of a small number of Magadhisms. The r-s, for instance, are usually converted to l-s, in imitation of the Magadhi accent. The effect is perhaps a bit like that made by the character of a Parisian waiter in an English sit-com, who speaks “French” by saying such things as, “Mais, Madame, zer eez no fly in zee soup!” And just as our use of stereotyped accents in this way is a device for suggesting foreign speech to audiences ________

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