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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARI
[JANUARY 5, 1872.
" Whose is the umbre!la, smelling of wine, bril- liant in wrath." The remaining part of the line अलि भूरि आछादिता “ canopied with a cloud of bees," is clear enough.
If it be objected that the context and general sense of the passage will generally decide which of several possible ways is the right one, I am constrained to reply, that these rhapsodical old authors are often so very vague that little help can, in most instances, be obtained from the context. Their verses were, especially in the case of bards like Chand, meant to be sung, and the tone aad gestures of the singer were relied upon to express the meaning as much as, if not more than, the strict grammatical construction of the words, Chand's epic is in the main historical, though often extravagantly legendary and hyperbolical. In his tamer passages some connected sense may be traced, but when he soars into religious or descriptive altitudes, one may say of him with Bassanio; “Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of whcat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search."
It is still worse wlien we come to purely religious or quasi-philosophical poems like Kabir's Rekhtas, where there is no regular narrative or chain of events to guide us. In such cases the luckless translator founders in deep mire with no landmarks by which to direct his course
The value of this Old Hindi literature consists, to my mind, almost entirely in the assistance it renders to philology: for purposes of philosophy, history, or anything else, it is not of much worth.
Secondly, even if the task of dividing the words rightly be at last achieved, tant bien que mal; leaving only one or two doubtful places to be settled hereafter, the translator's troubles hare after all only begun. The language of all but the most modern of these poets is in a transitional stage.
Sanskrit and the Prakrits are, as every one knows, purely inflexional languages, while the modern vernaculars are all more or less analytical. In the Indo-Aryan, as in the European cognate gronps, a time came when the case and tenseendings of the old synthetical system had become so abraded and corrupted that they no longer sufficed to distinguish clearly the relations between words in a sentence. After a time, a remedy was unconsciously found for this diffi-
culty in the introduction of particles, pre-or post-positions, and auxiliaries, whose use constiintes the distinguishing characteristic of the analytical stage. But between the decay of the old and the rise of the new system, here intervenes a period of the greatest obscurity, and it is unfortunately just at this period, both in India and in Europe, that modern literaturo takes its rise. This period in Europe is occupied by the Trouvires and Troubadours, of the tongues of Oil and Oc, by the Juglars of Spain, the Minnesünger of Gerniany and the like, and oceurs, historically, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. In Germany, (where however the synthetical system never suffered so much decay as in other countries) the rise to power of the Swabian dynasty in the person of Konrad III. in 1138 A, D, marks the commencement, as Walther von der Vogelweide (1220), the Nibelungenlied, and Wolfram von Eschilbach mark the zenith, and a host of minor writers the decay of this brilliant period. Almost exactly contemporaneous with these writers, as al with the nameless Juglars, who wrote the Romano of the Cid in Spain, are our early Hindi poets, and their language is in the same transitional and undefined stage, as that of their Enropean compeers. It is marked by a great scarcity, at times by a total absence, of what the Germans call Verbindungswürter, and by a general neglect, and capricious misuse of tense-endings in the verb and case-endings in the noun. It abounds with archaisms which are only to be rendered at all intelligible by the tedious process, impossible to all but experts in philology, of restoring them by reversing the order of phonetic corruption, and so tracing them back to some known Sanskrit word.
But here occnrs another difficulty. Sanskrit as a language, does not cover the whole ground of Aryan speech. Many old Aryan words remained in use among the lower orders but were never admitted into literary composition, either because they were stigmatized as vulgar, or because Brahmanical literature, confined to religion, philosophy and ritual, had no need of them. The Hindi poets, however, receiving ench words Prakritized by lapse of time, from their fathers, make no scruple of using them, and if, as often happens, they are no longer in use in modern times, their meaning is excessively difficuk of discovery, because neither the ancient. Banskrit nor the modern llindi afford any clue to their origin or sense.
To illustrate this point, I will lere give the
