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The Literary Reception of Herman Hugo's "Pia Desideria" in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Author:
This book is available in Open Access thanks to the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
This is the first monographic study of the reception of Herman Hugo's emblematic book "Pia desideria" (1624) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It discusses ten different translations and adaptations, showing how the engravings, elegies and exegetical extracts of the original volume were used by Polish-speaking authors (a little space is also devoted to the painting reception of the engravings). The author examines too the reasons for the phenomenon of the volume's popularity, proving that it was determined by the interest of women who did not know Latin, who constituted the most important target group for these numerous and varied Polish adaptations.
This is the first monographic study of the reception of Herman Hugo's emblematic book "Pia desideria" (1624) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It discusses ten different translations and adaptations, showing how the engravings, elegies and exegetical extracts of the original volume were used by Polish-speaking authors (a little space is also devoted to the painting reception of the engravings). The author examines too the reasons for the phenomenon of the volume's popularity, proving that it was determined by the interest of women who did not know Latin, who constituted the most important target group for these numerous and varied Polish adaptations.
The Literary Reception of Herman Hugo's "Pia Desideria" in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Author:
This book is available in Open Access thanks to the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
This is the first monographic study of the reception of Herman Hugo's emblematic book "Pia desideria" (1624) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It discusses ten different translations and adaptations, showing how the engravings, elegies and exegetical extracts of the original volume were used by Polish-speaking authors (a little space is also devoted to the painting reception of the engravings). The author examines too the reasons for the phenomenon of the volume's popularity, proving that it was determined by the interest of women who did not know Latin, who constituted the most important target group for these numerous and varied Polish adaptations.
This is the first monographic study of the reception of Herman Hugo's emblematic book "Pia desideria" (1624) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It discusses ten different translations and adaptations, showing how the engravings, elegies and exegetical extracts of the original volume were used by Polish-speaking authors (a little space is also devoted to the painting reception of the engravings). The author examines too the reasons for the phenomenon of the volume's popularity, proving that it was determined by the interest of women who did not know Latin, who constituted the most important target group for these numerous and varied Polish adaptations.
New Explorations in Javanese Literature
Volume Editor:
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
New Explorations in Javanese Literature
Volume Editor:
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
Author:
Abstract
Opening with a discussion of a controversial painting by the contemporary Muslim cleric and artist, Mustofa Bisri, this essay reflects upon the role that artistic expression can play in the spiritual life of Javanese Muslims. The focus of the essay turns upon an exploration of the performance of Sufi poetry (suluk) in song and dance as it is portrayed in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, an early nineteenth-century masterpiece of Javanese literature that narrates the imagined adventures of several seventeenth-century wandering students of Islamic religion (santris). These poems, activated through their performance by both men and women as a form of devotional practice, disclose the embodiment of spirit that characterized much of the metaphysical life of Javanese Sufis in earlier times and that still reverberates into the present.
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Storied Island
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Abstract
As a contribution to the study of emotions and ambience in Javanese literature, drama, and culture more generally, I argue that there is a Hamza affect, or more precisely a complex affect-in-action paradigm, which is intrinsic to how plots in the epic of Amir Hamza are built. In the sixteenth-century Java Sea world, where this paradigm was established, it stood out, as other narrative works featured rather different relations between feeling and action. This paradigm became typical of Javanese Hamza storytelling. It found its way into puppetry with other narrative repertoires as well, and helped to promote an action-oriented sensibility in society.
In:
Storied Island
Author:
Abstract
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions, yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literatures written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay, and Dutch, its often-symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world, as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The Introduction briefly explores the history of the field. It also introduces the essays in this volume which take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
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Storied Island
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Abstract
The Panji Paniba (1817) can be read as an early protest against the colonial occupation of Java by the Dutch (1816–1942). Channels to voice political opinions, like journals or pamphlets, were not available to the Javanese at the time. Instead, the anonymous author turns to literature to convey his view, creating a new story in the well-known genre of the Panji tale. Panji tales are notorious for their endless entanglements, around a central plot shared by all (that a given Javanese kingdom is attacked by a foreign power, with the aim to seize the daughter of the king). To make sure his main point does not escape the attention the author of the Panji Paniba alerts his readers by an unusual step: by borrowing and building into his own text the central plot of a completely different but no less well-known story, that of Rama and Sita. This famous epic from India in various local guises had enjoyed uninterrupted popularity since it introduction to Java more than a thousand years before. The role of the enemy in the Panji Paniba quite traditionally and in this case perhaps also cautiously is assigned to some regional entity. Gradually, by various narrative and stylistic means in the course of the story the enemy betrays more and more traits of the Dutch.
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Storied Island
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Abstract
The study of Javanese history offers significant examples of both legacies and new interpretations which have transformed how we see the past and present circumstances of the Javanese over the centuries of Islamisation and, consequently, how we might imagine their future. Not so very long ago, Islam tended to be viewed as marginal to ‘mainstream’ Javanese culture: that was the legacy. Now we see it as a topic of major significance in the history of the Javanese: that is the new interpretation. In this chapter, we will look at both the legacy and the new understanding, to see how we have been led to new views of Javanese history, society and culture and to a clearer understanding of how Islam is understood and lived in the real world.
This examination of both the legacy and the new interpretations of Javanese history provides us with a fine example of how our views of the past are often shaped by our experience of the present. It also reminds us how beguiling, misleading and analytically dangerous stereotypes can be and how important it is actually to do research to test such ideas. These are hardly new observations, of course, but it is rather remarkable how hard it has been to arrive at them in the case of the history of the Javanese.
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Storied Island
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Abstract
Raden Sasrakusuma (b. 1848) was a teacher and well-published writer who at the request of his first-born child, namely Raden Sasrasuganda, also a teacher and well-published writer, wrote a first-hand account of his life, entitled Layang Raga Pasaja (Book of My Unadorned Self), penned in intervals between 1901 and 1906. Although this memoir is classified in academic literature as an early example of modern, Western-influenced Javanese literature, it only had a most limited circulation, known to only a few people. In fact, it is only on account of a few Dutch Javanologists who happened to have access to a Romanized copy of Sasrakusuma’s reminiscences that his text became part of the canon of modern Javanese literature. This chapter argues that the existent categorization of Sasrakusuma’s narrative as a supposedly unique and innovative autobiography should be problematized, advocating to understand Javanese literature on its own terms, looking beyond the narrow confinements of “biography and history” with Western and modern biases.
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Storied Island
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Abstract
This chapter investigates one of Java’s most popular yet little studied textual traditions, the Sĕrat Ambiya. These “Tales of the Prophets,” which appear in numerous manuscripts inscribed in palaces and villages, in poetry and prose and in various scripts, depict the lives of the many prophets of Islam leading up to Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets. The chapter examines two manuscripts produced in the mid-19th century Javanese pĕsantren milieu, focusing on scenes in which, I suggest, the life of an Ambiya figure echoes with that of a Javanese wali. Thus, for example, the episode of nabi Ibrahim constructing the first mosque in Mecca shares much with the well- known story of Sunan Kalijaga’s role in the erection of Java’s first mosque in Demak. Hence the chapter points to a “wali-Ambiya interface” through which two great Islamic traditions – those of the walis and nabis – were intertwined and mutually constituted in major Javano-Islamic pedagogical settings.
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Storied Island
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Abstract
Since the middle of the nineteenth century there has been continuous interest in one of Java’s most famous poetic texts written in macapat metres, the 1815 Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten or Major Cĕnthini. That interest has been focused on the poem’s encyclopedic array of information about Javanese culture, not its quality as arguably the greatest expression of literary art ever written in Javanese. In this essay I examine one aspect of the text’s literary greatness with the help of Alex Woloch’s innovative analysis of minor characters and literary narrative. My close reading of one episode from the adventures of Mas Cĕbolang demonstrates that, contrary to a view widely held in Javanese and Indonesian studies, fictional characters in Javanese literature, based, however indirectly, on real, thinking, religiously devout (or impious), and sexually active people in the everyday world, are centrally important for understanding how literary narratives in Java have been created and what they mean.
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Storied Island