I fell in love with Sanskrit in Dr John Smith’s office in the ‘Oriental Studies’ building (as it was then still called) in Cambridge in early October 2002, now somewhat over 20 years ago, a bit like I fell in love with Hardy standing in Shenfield library in about 1991.1 It was a coup de foudre. There wasn’t a textbook and Dr Smith’s method made few concessions: we’d been told to do our best to learn the script in advance, and that morning we started with the first sentence of a story from the Hitopadeśa in Lanman’s Sanskrit Reader, first published in 1883. The Hitopadeśa is a collection of animal fables a little like Aesop. I discussed the Latin Aesop in this post, since it was a core part of the beginners’ curriculum in Shakespeare’s time; the Hitopadeśa plays a similar traditional role in elementary Sanskrit.
Dr Smith wrote up the words on the board one by one and, at considerable length, explained what they were in terms of case, number, gender, tense, aspect, person and so on, diverging to show us the full declension or conjugation in particularly useful instances. Here’s my first page of notes (of many!) from that first class:
His room that first morning was quite full — Sanskrit was one option at that point for the compulsory ‘scriptural language’ for first year theologians (who mostly took New Testament Greek), and there were several students who’d spent time in their gap year in India and turned up to try Sanskrit. Dr Smith was a very good teacher, of all the many excellent teachers I’ve had probably the one I recall most often, but Sanskrit has a complex morphology: in other words, a massive amount of grammar. By the end of a week or two the group had thinned very significantly, and most if not all of the budding theologians had dropped out. Sanskrit was also an undergraduate degree in its own right in Cambridge at that time, though to the university’s abiding shame it no longer is; and in addition one or two of my fellows were graduate students who needed Sanskrit for their research. I think that first year the group settled at about six or seven students.
Starting a new language is always exciting, and personally I find language study one of the purest pleasures there is, but I’ve never again had an experience quite like I did that morning: I found the language, immediately, so beautiful and so satisfying that I felt breathless. This passion for Sanskrit, a pleasure which is both solace and excitement even in just thinking about it in the abstract, or fondling a declension in my mind, has never left me, and unlike my enthusiasm for most of the other literary languages I have studied, including Latin and Greek, it preceded any exposure to its literature or poetry. In the final stages of labour with all three babies, far past the point of being able to recite poetry to myself, the stage at which almost all language falls away, I could still think kanta, kantam, kantena, kantaya, kantāt, kantasya, kante: the most common form of the masculine singular declension, but also a word meaning beloved. (All three of my children are boys.)
How did I end up in Dr Smith’s classroom? Though I had had some difficulties deciding what to study, I had finished a straightforward classics undergraduate degree in 2001: I took all the (very limited) medieval options I could, and a fair amount of modern as well as ancient and medieval philosophy, but otherwise it was a determinedly traditional four-year course in Latin and Greek language and literature. I didn’t enjoy being an undergraduate but I was mostly well-taught (above all by Denis Feeney, now long since Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton, during his fairly brief period in the UK) and I emerged with an excellent grounding both in philosophy and in the Latin & Greek “classics” as they were understood in the 20th century in the UK and America. (The continental tradition has always been a bit different.)
Right after graduation, I was very fortunate to spend a year of graduate school in the States, free to pick and choose courses from English, Comparative Literature, Philosophy and Modern Languages. I had thought of myself as a literature person, not really a linguist, and I was surprised to discover during this year how much I missed the “language work” side of being a classicist: preparing a text, looking up words, thinking about grammar and syntax. My plan was to continue to a masters and, I hoped, ultimately a PhD in Renaissance English literature back in the UK, but I realised that I would miss language study too much if I moved purely to English. I toyed with staying in the States for another year or two to study Hebrew or Arabic, but in the end, I decided to continue to the MPhil as planned but to see if I couldn’t acquire a new language at the same time. In practice, of course, any serious beginners’ language class meets 3-5 times a week, and I had a fairly full timetable myself. The practicalities quickly ruled out any classes scheduled in advance: so much, then, for Arabic or Hebrew (I did pick up some Hebrew, which is very useful if you work on early modern Protestants, later on). In the huge university lecture list, though, then a tantalising doorstop of a volume, beginners’ Sanskrit simply said “to be arranged”. After cycling round a bit to make some inquiries, I realised that if you turned up for the “arranging”, you got a say in the times of the classes; and I remembered a schoolteacher who had once remarked “if you ever get a chance to learn Sanskrit, you should take it”. It had been third on my list, so I thought, why not.
I spent a long time studying Sanskrit and for many years my passion for it seemed to have nothing much to do either with the rest of my life or with my “job”: the overlapping circles of Latin, Greek and early modern English literature on which I wrote my doctorate and which I have been paid to teach and research about ever since. It was what I did “on the side”. I attended Sanskrit classes several times a week throughout the four very happy years of my MPhil and PhD in Cambridge, and then the three (conversely, rather unhappy) years that I had a Junior Research Fellowship in Oxford.2 My gratitude to the two departments who welcomed me to all those hours of classes over seven years, though I was never officially registered for any degree in Oriental Studies in either institution, is boundless.3 (I should register, too, my gratitude to the relaxed indulgence of my PhD supervisor, Colin Burrow, who politely pretended not to know where I was spending almost all my time as long as I produced the occasional chapter.)
Sanskrit has been a linguistic and literary passion for me that has not dimmed, but it was also an extremely salutary immersion into an entirely separate, though fascinatingly parallel, set of scholarly assumptions. When we first read some of the Rig Veda, we were taught that it had been passed down orally, but without changes, over a long period — exactly what I had been taught absolutely could not have been the case in the transmission of Homer, described as a constantly evolving and re-improvised text until the point at which it was committed to writing. Moreover, the texts that we read in Sanskrit were from hugely disparate periods: what in Western, classical terms I would think of as pre-classical, classical, late antique, medieval and early modern. Our teachers spoke eloquently of the enormous range of Sanskrit literature and writing, the impossibility of being an expert in all these various types and genres, but they spoke of and taught it as a unity: as one tradition. Of course different teachers had their own particular areas of interest and expertise, but being “a Sanskritist” meant being happy to have a go at reading and indeed teaching texts from the full gamut.
This contrasted sharply with how I had been taught to think about Latin and Greek at Oxford: as a classical core, with a handful of honorary pre-classical members, everything else to be treated with more or less condescension. When the professor of ancient history in my college, who had never taught me, heard that I had chosen medieval Latin literature and philosophy options for the final years of my degree, he sought me out in the university library and declared — in a stage whisper audible throughout the reading room — that I was wasting my mind. It was sort of a joke, I suppose, and no doubt meant to be affectionate in its way, but I think he meant it too.
When as a graduate student I became interested in so-called ‘neo-’Latin, after writing a paper about Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis, his astonishingly beautiful elegy for his friend Diodati (and indeed for Latin poetry itself), I was advised by everyone to tread cautiously: fine as a side interest, but keep it to a minimum, it’s bad for your career prospects. Everyone I spoke to implied that though there were perhaps a handful of genuinely interesting exceptions (like Milton), there was no real intellectual or aesthetic interest in early modern Latin literature: it was the stuff of juvenilia and the schoolroom. Never a hint from anyone of the thoroughgoing bilingualism of early modern literature and culture — of the absolute penetration of Latin reading and writing into the culture of the day — or of the thousands of neglected works. No-one pointed out — indeed, no-one seemed to know — what eventually became obvious to me: that far from being a prodigious exception, Milton’s use of Latin was in fact typical, and indeed rather conservative. Milton’s Latin verse is unusually good, but in every other respect — genre, metre, form, occasion — it is exactly what you would expect him to have produced given his moment, and just the kind of thing that hundreds of others were writing at the same time. Nothing in Milton’s Latin is as original as, for instance, George Herbert’s Latin and Greek verse sequence on the death of his mother, the Memoriae matris sacrum.
It took me a long time to connect my commitment to later Latin, and my determination to persist with it despite all advice to the contrary, with my formation as a Sanskritist: I think the first time I articulated it clearly was for this short biographical essay for the RELICS network, one of the most exciting Latin-linked initiatives in Europe at the moment, to which I am proud to contribute. But I am convinced that all those years of study, and exposure to a quite different way of thinking about the literary history of a classical language running alongside my work as a graduate student on so-called “classical reception”, was what allowed me to think in a fresh way about the Latin literary culture of early modernity.
If Malherbe is impossible to translate because his diction is so straightforward, his stye so essentially plain, some of my favourite Sanskrit poetry belongs to the opposite end of the spectrum. Kālidāsa’s Raghuvamśa, for instance, a poem not about one person but about the royal dynasty of Raghu, is an example of a mahākāvya, or ‘great poem’. These are long poems characterised by highly embellished language: the absolute opposite of plain diction. Any action progresses only slowly, with lingering description. Long compound terms, often analysable in more than one way, create a kind of semantic oscillation, and individual words, too, can often be understood in more than one way. Vamśa, the part of the title that means ‘lineage’ or ‘line’ (as in ‘Raghu’s line’), also means a cane or beam or flute — not so much the ‘stump of Jesse’ as his pipe. I tried to write a little more about the aesthetic effect of Sanskrit compounds here.
The first Sanskrit translations I published were part of a set of translations I made of a handful of poems attributed to women in the huge anthology of Sanskrit verse known as the Subhāshitaratnakosha, compiled by a Buddhist scholar named Vidyākara around 1100 AD.4 It contains 1738 short poems and extracts by over two hundred named poets (as well as very many anonymous items), with most pieces seeming to date from between the eighth and eleventh centuries. It includes several poems attributed to women. Here is my version of number 815, attributed to a woman called Śīlabhattārikā:
The first man I lay with is my husband nowAnd this evening is just the sameAs those nights when I felt filledBy moonlight, and the breeze cameDown from the Vindhya hills thickWith the scent of jasmine opening for the first time.And I too am the same. So whyDoes my heart so yearn again to lieBehind a screen of reeds, in pleasureSo tender and so long to takeOn the slope of the bank, on the rise of my waist.
In this poem, the word rodhasi in the final line means primarily ‘on the bank’ (of a river). Sanskrit has a special case, the locative, for indicating ‘in’ or ‘on’ something, and the i at the end of this word is the locative ending).5 But the noun rodhas can also refer to the curve of a woman’s hips or waist. Given the erotic nostalgia of these lines, both meanings are relevant, so in this instance I translated the word twice.
It is only very recently, in the last few years, that I have begun to write and publish verse translations of Sanskrit, so it has taken nearly twenty years for my love affair with the language to pull through into creativity, and perhaps it’s not accidental that these were the first proper set of translations I made. The Sanskrit literary tradition of erotic poetry is very rich — vastly more so than classical Latin, which is rather impoverished in this respect — and it is always moving to encounter a woman’s voice from the distant past, when so few have come down to us. But really I think I started with these poems of longing for the simplest of reasons: because, though it will always be more remote to me than Greek or Latin or French, Sanskrit is a language and a literature which I love.
The faculty is now the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Its Oxford counterpart, then the ‘Oriental Institute’, is now also the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Needless to say, I was the most fortunate kind of graduate student: fully funded, intellectually well prepared (with four years of undergraduate and one of graduate study already complete before I began the MPhil) and without any additional responsibilities whatsoever. My health was fragile throughout this period, but that was mitigated by the support of my college, St John’s, who allowed me to live “in college” for all of my graduate work.
Over several years I was taught mainly by John Smith and Eivind Kahrs (at Cambridge); Christopher Minkowski, Jim Benson and Ulrike Roesler (at Oxford) and also (for Pali, also in Oxford) a teacher whom I remember very vividly but whose name I’m ashamed to say I have forgotten. Both institutions at the time worked on the principle that if you were a registered student in any part of the university, you had a right to attend whichever lectures you wanted to, though language classes (not being lectures) were a grey area and at the discretion of the teacher. I had already benefited from this as an undergraduate in Classics, free to attend English or History lectures if I felt like it.
Four of these translations were published together in Modern Poetry in Translation, 2020, number 3.
The locative is also the usual case for absolute constructions in Sanskrit (for classicists, the equivalent of the ‘ablative absolute’ in Latin and the ‘genitive absolute’ in Greek). If you are truly interested in the comparative study of absolute constructions, I can recommend Antonia Ruppel’s fascinating and surprisingly readable monograph on the topic.
Lovely essay. The first time I opened Lanman, in a similar context, I had such an overwhelming sense of recognition, of being at home in what I expected to be a much more distant language (after Greek and Latin). It's nice to read this and remember that.