A Buddhist Epic from Thailand

·期刊原文
The Tale of Prince Samuttakote: A Buddhist Epic from Thailand
Reviewed by Michael W. Charney
The Journal of the American

Vol.116 No.1 A

Jan-March 1996

P.180

Copyright by American Oriental Society

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In The Tale of Prince Samuttakote, Thomas John Hudak offers us a
useful translation of a Thai poetic version of the tale of Buddha's
previous incarnation as Prince Samutthakhoot, one of the fifty
apocryphal jataka tales known as pannyatsachadok. To my knowledge,
this is the first time that an English translation of this Thai epic
poem has been published. The translation will thus be of great
interest and usefulness to scholars of early modern Southeast Asian
texts, especially for those who work in Southeast Asian languages
other than Thai.
While authorship of the epic is controversial - each of the epic's
three parts was written by a different poet, but the first two poets
have yet to be identified with absolute certainty - the
periodization of the poem's composition is less doubtful.
Seventeenth-century poets (one of them may have been King Narai)
composed the first two sections of the poem and Prince Paramanuchit
Chinorot finished the third and last section in 1849. This
periodization is important, because the first two sections of the
epic provide the reader with useful information on
seventeenth-century court society and culture. The epic version, for
example, departs from the jataka story at numerous points, providing
new elements, values, and references to the story, which are rooted
in the cultural context of the time and place in which the epic poem
was constructed. Scholars of early modern Southeast Asian literature
will be more interested in the actual framework of the story's
presentation, as it provokes inquiries concerning whether the
presentation used shadow puppets or living actors. Hudak also
provides a useful analysis of the use of both kaap and chan meters
in the poem, as well as extensive and useful annotations.
If there is any criticism to be made of Hudak's project, it would
concern his brief preliminary commentary to the translation. Some
discussion, for example, would have been useful of how Hudak's
translation is influenced by his own context. Nancy Florida, in a
forthcoming publication, has made clear the need for translators to
understand that the translation of texts really involves the
intersection of new as well as old contexts.
Despite this major lacuna, however, Hudak's translation is important
and useful, and certainly provides a useful contribution to the
study of both Southeast Asian literature and early modern Southeast
Asian history.
M. W. C.