Earliest Texts. How to interpret them

EAR L I EST TEXT S. HOW TO INT E RPRE T T H E M Elena Mucciarelli University of Milan 1. Introduction T he methodological issues involved within the possibility of interpreting and translating texts which are far from us with regard to space, time and culture constitute the big picture of this section. The panel has not been structured around the philosophical problems and implications of the action of “translating”, nonetheless it could be useful to keep in mind all the diferent meanings that have been given to the word “interpret”, a term strictly related to the idea of translating, while we focus on the actual problems that a speciic kind of translation involves. J. Ortega y Gasset suggested that the language has three levels of restriction. According to his speculations, a irst “border of inefability” is produced by the fact that every language makes a selection. Gasset was not the only one addressing this aspect of the language, among others we may recall also the semiotics of L. Hjelmslev and his stress upon the connotative element of the language. It is indeed just the process of selecting which enables the language itself to arise; languages are born from the self-amputation of the speech in its possibilities, there is no way around: someone who wouldn’t be able to refrain from saying many things, leaving them out, would then be unable to speak, that is to say something. Moreover, the language is also burdened with the inefatus: that is whatsoever a language could express, but every language – and may we add, every language in its own way – just omits because the listener should be able to surmise it. Hence, every instance of speech is deicient, in as much as it says less than intended, and is “exuberant” as well: it suggests much more than what is on purpose. When we succeed in understanding a text, we touch lightly that universe of silences and unexpressed ields that words cut to give that universe a shape. 2. Studying Ancient texts: problems Studying an ancient culture often means dealing with ancient texts, and this, in turn, means a long voyage, trying to outline the actual meaning of the words we ind in those texts. The vocabulary, for instance, represents a complex issue. Sometimes there are terms we will not ind in the following literature: besides the cases of hapax legomena, there is plenty of words which are to be found only six to ten 312 elena mucciarelli [2] times in a deined corpus, and always in contexts that do not allow to guess the meaning of the word, or that only give a vague idea of it.1 Other words are to be found in the later literature, but it is clear that their meaning has developed in a way that has nothing to do with this archaic level of the language. As long as we do not have other sources to get a clearer picture of the actual meaning, we have to speculate. One of the most important means that supports the translators of, e.g., contemporary texts is the material culture and circumstances, the knowledge of the diferent contexts that lie underneath the written as well as the spoken word. This is indeed what we lack in the case of ancient texts: we do not know the realia, that were the concrete referents of those texts. Somehow, the procedure is the other way round: we look into the texts seeking for the light they could shed on their culture, on the complex world that produced them. Sometimes other kind of diiculties, e.g., on the morphological as well as on the syntactical level, step into the path: it is then necessary to ind diferent ways to approach the text. These roads are sometimes quite twisted and even hazardous, nonetheless they seem to be the only practicable route. Indeed, along the development of historic linguistic, e.g., Indo-European studies, there have been many diferent approaches to this problem. There are studies with an attitude which is more oriented towards the strict rules of grammar and linguistics in general; those kind of works try to stick to a paradigm often fascinated by the idea of superimposing some “hard science” system to the language; on the opposite side of the “spectrum” there are scholars who allow themselves to set free the power of an analogical thought, seeking for the common elements without paying too much attention to the spatial or chronological gaps between the diferent entities that are compared, and this procedure may lead to slippery conclusions, turning into an auto-referential vision. Just to give an example, we can recall the hazardous and yet interesting theory of the comparative philologist G. Dumézil who speculates a tripartite organization of the ancient Indo-European societies, based on the possibility to trace back in most of the I.E. cultures a tri-functional structure as represented by the leading roles of the priest, the warrior and the commoners connected with productivity. This hypothesis has been much disputed and criticized, most of all because it seems to just overlook speciic elements within the single cultures in order to draw a wider and comprehensive picture. 1 We may recall here, among many possible examples, the interpretation of the word murá. The term seems to refer to a category of persons excluded from the brahmanic religion – the persons we would call “heretics”, or perhaps simply people considered too stupid, who do not come up to the standards necessary to have access to what is right, an interpretation that its with the idea of error (the term could be interpreted etymologically as ‘he who fails’). However, the meaning of the term remains somewhat unclear in the light of analysis of all its attestations in the Rgvedasamhita. [3] earliest texts. how to interpret them 313 Much more could be said about the manifold approaches to those archaic levels of language, but this glimpse already points to a very important characteristic: both these methods represent two possible ways – among many others – to ind a path into a ield which does not let anybody follow consistently only one way. We will see below how this issue is actually the same involving all the papers of this section. To turn to a concrete task, if we are dealing with ancient ritualistic texts and we try to argue for a link between the diferent passages and uses of, e.g., a set of numbers, placing them in a consistent mythological and symbolic milieu, which boundaries do we have to respect with regard to our imagery? And what should not be respected? Which methodological sources can we look for and deploy? Which kind of cultural landscape, which diferent developments could we discover, if we try to deal with the Indo-European religiouspoetical language? An extremely interesting answer to those question, is, e.g., C. Watkins’ comparative study on the Indo-European poetical language. The title of his most important work is indeed How to kill a dragon: in this work the author tries to demonstrate how the mythological defeat of the enemy par excellence has been described using a set of stylistic devices which is shared by many ancient Indo-European languages. This is just one of many traces that are to be found in those texts, pointing to a common poetical language. The earliest textual stratum of the Indian culture, for instance, has a liminal position within the history of the Indian literature, being on the threshold of two cultures: on one side, it is one of the few attestations of the ancient Indo-European oral tradition that developed an eulogistic poetry of high literary quality, whose traces can also be found in the Avestan literature as well as in the Greek odes of Pindar and in the production of the Celtic bards. On the other side, these texts represent at the same time the beginning of the Indian tradition of savant poetry, that will have its highest point in the kavya literature, as recently argued by S. Jamison in The Rig Veda between two worlds (Paris: de Boccard, 2007). The purpose of this section is, thus, to give rise to a debate about the act of interpreting: when we are dealing with texts that are almost the only attestation of the beginning of a culture, sometimes even abiding between two worlds, how much freedom are we entitled to have in the efort of understanding their words? As already said in the General Introduction of this volume, this section has a narrower focus, and this entails a further challenge, the present author is happy to be confronted with. A very speciic topic can produce a fruitful discussion on the general methodological approaches, but in order to attain such a result, we have to bring forward the research on a deined speciic topic always focusing on the wider context in which it is framed. If the methodological line that guides the investigation is clear and intentionally conceived, then, consistently, the investigation itself will comply with it; at the end even 314 elena mucciarelli [4] a very speciic topic may result useful, without getting lost in a heap of technicalities. To sum up, if we consider that the textual evidences we have are like the burrs after the shaving of a table, we have to assume that they need a speciic and very specialized approach; then, the challenge is to use these very tiny pieces of wood and try to extract from them the underlying rationale. Are they just – useless – leftovers? They are. But they tell us something about the absent shape, the void left. As W. Knobl has written commenting upon Goethe’s saying “Denken ist interessanter als Wissen, aber nicht als Anschauen”: “If we apply this pithy apophthegm – which epitomizes, with maximal terseness, a great poet’s and natural scientist’s experience of a full lifetime – to linguistic and philological research, the following adaptation can be made: It is most interesting for us scholars attentively to look at individual word-forms and text-passages, and let ourselves be inspired by them to thoughts that will go well beyond what we think we already know […]” (W.F. Knobl, A Surplus of Meaning, The Intent of Irregularity in Vedic Poetry, PhD Diss., Leiden, 2009, p. 5). The efort of this section is to use only details in order to know something about the whole. It has not always been successful, neither was intended to be. Being such a “paradoxical” aim, what we hope for it is to keep on discussing it and ind new and still probably wrong2 approaches. 3. Into the practice Whereas the following papers focus mainly on the Vedic culture, already a small and pretty deined ield of study, nevertheless they present diferent kind of approaches and hence diferent issues, that allows, as said before, to consider the matter from a broader point of view. If we take into account how to interpret a single religious hymn seeking principles for its internal unity, a place for the investigation to start may be, as in Köhler’s article, the poetic persona beyond the text; then, we have to face the diiculty to connect the single elements of the poetic work within a possible structure. Hence, the method we are looking for must enable us to value the original use of stylistic devices that are displayed in order to create the strong awareness of a subject and to challenge the listener with the enigmatic references that are so common within such hymns. At this point our methodological problem takes place: how far from the actual text can we go in order to reveal, to interpret these references? Moreover, when we try to follow the semantic development of one of the terms most connoting the Indian culture, as ®akti is (see Ronzitti’s and Rossi’s articles), we have to try to ill the gaps that the diferent stages of the attestations present, and consider if 2 As Brecht has stated, once for all. [5] earliest texts. how to interpret them 315 we can maintain a semantic link between them. Is it, then, legitimate to analyse singular stanzas, torn from their context, and not to consider their relationship and position within the whole text, using as interpretative grid the concepts of macro-meso-micro-cosmos as the three levels of an endless exchange (as suggested in Rossi’s article)? Leaving beyond the Vedic Culture, we will consider the relationship between a text as a whole and the tradition in which it represents an authoritative source. In this case it is then possible to take advantage of the cultural and social environment that are not unknown to us. The text examined in Compagnone’s article seems to give us clues for a representation of the work itself and its position which are diferent from that the tradition itself claims. In this case, the issue does not concern anymore the meaning of a single word or the development of sets of words, but yet again the interpretation is what we have to question. We are speculating on the real reasons of the production of a text, leaving apart what its own tradition says: once more we have to consider, then, the approach we use, the means of investigation we deploy and how much can we rely on the actual features and concepts within the text and connect them to the historical background. Interpreting texts which are the earliest attestations we have on a culture presents us with diferent degrees of data, but whether the problems concern single words or the position of the text within its own canon, it is very diicult not to use all means and approaches when trying to interpret them. The risk to go beyond the limit is a risk that has to be taken, otherwise, as it can been seen in the following papers, we are bound to be silent.