SANSKRIT - ROMANIAN CORRESPONDENCES

by Dr. George Anca (Romania)

Seminar on Sanskrit and European languages, Delhi, 9 -10 October 2016

SANSKRIT - ROMANIAN CORRESPONDENCES  

by Dr. George Anca (Romania)

Summary: Abstract – MANGALAM (1. Hindu Dharma for Romanians 2. The only leader of revolutions 3. Ramayana Play ) -  SANSKRIT-ROMANCE ONTOPOETICS  (  1. A Sanskrit mantra 2.  Tagore' s   "O fire, my brother" 3. Indo-Latin Kavya Purusha.  4. Last years the Vedic and Buddhist in­spiration  5. The Indian poets answer today  6. Anthropology of New Recognition 7.  Feminine Theoanthropoetics.) - L'IMAGINATION DE BAUDELAIRE (1.   After his unfinished voyage 2.  Reading Baudelaire within Sanskrit context 3.   For the modern poet )  -  IDOEMINESCOLOGY (1. Mihai Eminescu's Rasa-dhvaniah. 2. Eminescu and Jayadeva. 3. Dyachronically, the best spirits  4. Public Address to the President of India  5. International Academy Mihai Eminescu ) - NOTES ( Some Indian Writings and Authors in Romanian  -

Some Romanian Books on India - Some topical studies)

ABSTRACT

          Personally, I began in 970's, opening the series “Sanskirt Studies in the West” initiated by Delhi Arts Faculty's Dean, Satya Vrat Shastri. And last year, after participating to International Indology Conference at Rashtrapati Bhavan, and translating and publishing in volume  a selection from books authored by Honorable President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, I have an unforgettable Sanskrit encounter.

          Sanskrit studies in Romania, started in 19th century and, passing through  country's avatars, revived and declined, under fruitful distant influence of India, and remaining far from a desired closeness eternally founded with Mihai Eminescu's work. If Tucci saw the first Romanian Indologist in Mircea Eliade, corresponding also with Sergiu Al-George, the new solitary comers increase  Pāṇini followers, while overcoming  commercialized mantras engross culture Sanskrit.

The accomplished Sanskrit Poet-Kavi and Scholar-Acharya Satyavrat Shastri will always be remembered in Romania. During his visit in 2001 to receive Honoris Causa Doctorate of Oradea University and to lecture in Bucharest and Ramnicul Valcea, he could evaluate and stimulate Indian studies in Romania. Previously, as Dean of Arts Faculty in Delhi University, he helped empathically the teaching of Romanian language in India, started by myself in 1977.

          This paper eulogize practice and study of Sanskrit in/through India (my case), less Western schools. Students returned from Varanasi, Pune, Delhi, Haridwar use to visit Orthodox-heishiast-yogin monasteries home, as if Sanskrit spirit acts more than for a life.

          Some topics on focus here: Sanskrit-Romanian Correspondences (Ahimsa-Mioritsa/Memna, Nasadya Sukta – Memento mori – teaching Sanskrit by  Morse in Romanian Communist jails); Indians for Romania (Satyavrat Shastri, Amita Bhose, Urmila Rani Trikha, Zricha Vaswani...); Abhijnana (Kalidasa, Goethe, Eminescu; what for posthumous author of Sanskritikon?); Not Sanskrit – Not Romanian.

MANGALAM

            1. Hindu Dharma for Romanians. Romanians are Orthodox Christians in their majority. One would be not surprised to hear that some say all Indians are Buddhist. Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), who “made India immortal in his country”  (Amita Bhose)   may be taken as a name of Dharma, saying that Buddhism is another more intense form of Christianity. Together with religions and movements originated in Vedas – Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism – or in relation with these first revealed scriptures of the mankind, as the Buddhism.

            On the path of Eminescu, Romanians climbed up to their subconsciousness, sensitive to Vedas themes (Epistle I, Evening Star, The Prayer of a Dacian) and also in the fruits of their spirituality. Twined Mantras (Zricha Vaswani):  Odă – Kathaopanishad; Glossa – Sutta-Nipata;

Rugăciunea unui dac (Nirvana) – Rig-Veda; Scrisoarea I – Rig-Veda; Luceafărul – Srimad Bhagavad Gita; Kamadeva – Abhigyan-Shakuntalam; Mortua est! - Buddha-Karita Constantin Brancusi, Mircea Eliade, Lucian Blaga are among the universal modern creators of Romania, and also bearers of Romanian-Vedantin message.

            As Sanskrit is the saint language of holy books and people, one will enjoy original prayers starting with Gayatri :

AUM bhur bhuvah swah. Tatsavitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi. Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat.

Om Jai Jagadish hare, swami jai Jagadish hare

Mata pita tum mere, sharan gahun mein kiski

Tvameva mata cha pita tvameva

Tvameva bandhuscha sakha tvameva

Tvameva vidya dravinam tvameva

Tvameva sarvam mama deva deva

Sarve bhvantu sukhena

Sarve santu niraamya

Sarve bhadraani pashyantu

Ma kaschit dukhbagh bhavet

Asato maa sad gamayaa

Tamaso ma ajyotir gamayaa

            Mrityorm amritam gamayaa

            2. The only leader of revolutions. Romanian priest and scholar Constantin Galeriu speaks on Mahatma Gandhi as the only leader of revolutions who discovered the Saviour, through Sermon on the Mountain preaching to  love one's enemies. He proved to his enemies that he loved them, even dying as a martyr. In his own words: “I think only evil should be hated not evil-doers even when I could be the victim”; “Not to admit and to detest your enemies’ mistakes should never rule out compassion”,

and even love for them”.

           In his book  The Gandhian Mode of Becoming, Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad, 1998, Dr. Catalin Mamali includes also satyagraha, ahimsa, aparigraha statements: I think that the most efficient means to have justice done is to do justice to my own enemy; I think that each and every person should give up the desires to possession of as many things as possible;  In my opinion any person who eats the fruits of the earth without sharing them with the others and who is of no use to the others is a thief.

          A talk in Bucharest by Deepak Maheshwari , 29/5/12,  mentioned that  degeneration of the Sanskrit language as the primary spoken language went hand in hand with the rise of the caste system, over a long period that began before 1,000 B.C. The Vedic scriptures were sealed off and codified. The common people could no longer read them, and a special class emerged of those who could still read Sanskrit and therefore recite and interpret the body of scriptures. The freedom of all individuals to worship God with songs of praise was replaced by the "ritualization'' of the society under brahmin control.

          Gandhi's war against untouchability started with his  "epic fast'' of Sept. 20-26, 1932.

"We do not want on our register and on our census untouchables classified as a separate class,'' declared Gandhi in his statement of protest. I will not bargain away the rights of the Harijans for the kingdom of the whole world. I cannot possibly tolerate what is in store for Hinduism if there are two divisions set up in every village.''   

          What is a Guru? Asked Swami Chidanand Saraswati, on Guru Purnima A Guru is one who removes our darkness. In Sanskrit, Gu means “darkness” and ru is”that which removes.” A Sanskrit sloka says: The Guru is Brahma, the Guru is Vishnu, the guru is Shiva, the God of gods, / the Guru  is verily the Supreme Brahman. Salutations to the adorable Guru.

          3. Ramayana Play (theory and practice). Valmiki, Kamban and Tulsidas are universal revealers of Rama, but also of Hanuman. Devotees of Ramayana meet bhakti. The ramayanic spring bring the thirsted receiver to an ever fresh newness of divine spirit and beauty. The music of Hindi Ramcharit Manas, an Indian Divine Comedy, is heard also far out from temple in the hearts of different believers, beyond dry ecumenical talks. The joy to re-tell Raamaayana and awakening from a dream when it is over, made Rajagopalachary to equal in a subliminal way Raamaayana with Seeta herself:

          “When the Prince left the city, he felt no sorrow; it was only when he lost Seeta that he knew grief. So with me too. When I had to step down from high office and heavy responsibility, I did not feel at a loss or wonder what to do next. But now, when I have come to the end of the tale of the Prince of Ayodhya, the void is like that of a shrine without a god.” ( C. Rajagopalachari, Ramayana, Bhartya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbay, 1996, p.313).

          Srimad Valmiki Ramayana is smriti („ memory”), an epic poem which narrates the journey of Virtue to annihilate vice. Sri Rama is the Hero and aayana His journey.

          In almost all of North India, the Tulsidas Ramayana, also known as the Ramcharitmanasa, is the most popular. Goswami Tulsidas rewrote the Valmiki version in Hindi in about 1574, changing it somewhat to emphasize Rama as an avatara (incarnation) of Vishnu. Another notable change was that Sita had a duplicate, who was kidnapped while Sita remained safe. In the Kamban Ramayana, popular in the state of Tamil Nadu, segments of the story were changed to better reflect Tamil ideas, including Ravana not being as cruel to Sita.

          The easiest way to attain Lord Rama is to worship Hanuman: “Tumhare bhajan Ram ko pavae”; “Nothhing exist but God”; “You are the whole I am a part”; “I see that you are I and I am you”. One can see firstly an impish young monkey flying to the sun, becoming distracted and falling, thus earning his name which means “broken chin” (Li Min). Think also to Sun Wukong’s Journey to the West, and also to Hobbits journey through the wilderness, into maturity.

     The ancient message of the Ramayana continues to be relevant for the human race. It is not surprising that Mahatama Gandhi was tremendously influenced by the teachings of the Ramayana. If Gandhiji is still relevant for the world so is his guidebook – Ramayana.

SANSKRIT-ROMANCE ONTOPOETICS

       1.A Sanskrit mantra among the euphonies of any Romance utterance puts a peculiar question of poetics. Because  that rasa appeals there to the global mythologi­cal imagination. Neither Sanskritization and nor the least, in turn, Latinization here, these literatures can be compared in the good Indo-European tradition. But at the same time both Pan-Indian poetics and subjective Europocentric modernity have to be regard­ed not only as registration of some assimila­ted influences but also in a specific indivi­dualized  perspective. Thus, through an ontologic poetics - and not compulsory Heidegger's Dasein — we see beyond satyasya satyam (the reality of the real) or superintellectual reality of the mystery, the poet as such, as poet to poet, as Tagore's personaliz­ed upanishadic advaitam (the mystery of one) which is anantam (infinite) and which is anandam (love).

          2.  Tagore' s   "O fire, my brother" sounds as Franciscan "il mio fratello sole". Trans­cribing in Latin the Buddha's  fourth noble truths-suffering, origin of   suffering,    cessa­tion of suffering, the eightfold way leading to the cessation of suffering as - dolor, doloris ortus, doloris interims, octopartita   via  ad doloris sedationem Dhamapada -, Artur Schopenhauer   has   identified   morally  the bikkhus and mandicant order of St. Francisc. Sometime, the philosopher's disciple, Mihai Eminescu, took again the way from Latin to Sanskrit, looking to change, for instance, the name of one his Romantic character called Mors   (Death) into Nirwana.      Significant enough, Jawaharlal Nehru confessed he didn't know more Sanskrit than Latin. May be what meant Sanskrit creative unity to Tagore was for & as the Latin one for  Ezra Pound in whom "Cantos" flows  as   if   same Ganges of Petrarch, while, on the other hand, last century Mirza Ghalib didn't   spend   time any more for reading Sikandar's   life.    Now, from poetics to poetry as an order of Welt-literature could be observed as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin.   Ontologically the mechanism looks freer, the theme of love for example trying to be one either as ecstatic knowledge    or as disorder of  human  rational equilibrium.

          3. Indo-Latin Kavya Purusha. A Latin ecce India still keeping in the beginnings 'Java' of "Mahab-harata' resounds from Catullus "India's arid land' and Horace's peace of mind' with no gold nor tasks that India yelds' to Cavalcanti's chiostra/ Chel's sente in India ciascun Unicorno'. Camōes' 'o illustre Ganges que na terra celesta tenho o berco verdadeiro' or Góngora, from Baudelaire and Eminescu to Dario, Pessōa. Montale. On a modern Sanskrit ground we can attend - as Pound said about Brancusi - that 'exploration toward getting all the forms into one form' - Latin satires, epodes, odes, epistles, sermons continued into Italian sonetto. French chanson, Spanish romancero, Romanian doina, Portuguese redondilha. For, said Michael Madhu Sudan, ‘ cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet would in the time rival the Italian'. With such thought to a Sanskrit-Latin sonnet I published in my book of poems -Ardhanariswara" (International Academy 'Mihai Eminescu', Delhi, 1982). Lope de Vega's Cuando el mejor planeta en el diluvio'. Baudelaire's Correspondances' and Eminescu's 'Venetia', in Sanskrit version done together with U. R. Trikha, from Spanish, French, Romanian respectively,

'Ganga  Dnnuvyava saha samgachhati'

                                                Lope de Veffa

'niseva vidyutiva rasarupani

dhvanayah prativadanti parasparam

                                                Baudelaire

'sthiram   jivanam vishla venitsyayah'

                                                Eminescu

One verse by Eugenio Montale,

'cio che non siamo, cio che non vogliamo'

is transounded as follows into Sanskrit by Satyavrat Shastri,

'na vayam smo na ca tatha yadvayam kameyawaho'.

Otherwise, J. M. Masson confesses also a Sanskriturn-Latin smriti paral-lelling within a Proustian memory a Sanskrit sloka with one of Dante's,

kavinam manasam naumi taranti pratibhambhasi

yatra hamsavayamsiva bhuvanani caturdasa

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

          4. Last years the Vedic and Buddhist in­spiration in Mihai Eminescu's poetry now more than an experiment in translating but an ontic sat. "Scrisoarea 1" ("First Epistle") was published in 1881 in "Convorbiri literare" ("Literary Conversations") and then soon translated into German and after some time into Latin, Italian. Polish, Hungarian, English, French, Armenian. Bulgarian, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Bengali. The Vedic cosmogony and the Apocalypse both under the ray of the moon superposing the vision of Old Guru and the construction of the poem, it's springing at infinitum from one point as Beethoven's Vth Symphony were transposed affinitively by some professors and poets from the Department of Modern Indian Languages of Delhi University increa­sing so the creative knowledge of the poem - for instance the tantric Shiva-Shaktis union observed through Mahendra Dave and O.M. Anujan versions. With the Sanskrit transla­tion of Rasik Vihari Joshi, Indo-Latin roots restart the poetic universe again. Because, in Eminescu's mind-differing by his own translations from German, French, English. Swedish, Latin, Greek literatures - in the case of Sanskrit like of Romanian itself it seems to be realized an identity between affinity and creation And with only a (half) sloka open­ing the Hymn of Origin from Rig Veda we face onto-poetry's source.

        4.1.    Rig Veda   ("Hymn of Creation" starts):

nasad asin, no sad asit tadanim

          4.2     Mihai Eminescu:

La-nceput, pe cind fiinta nu era, nici nefiinta

          4.3.    Sanskrit (re-)version by Rasik Vihari Joshi:

adau sampurnasunye na hi kimapi yada

sattvamasinna casi

          4.4   Hindi, by Usha Choudhuri :
Pranihina. sattarahita. ajiva

          4.5 Gujarati, by Mahendra Dave:
Tyare natun ko Sat, na asat

          4.6 Punjabi, by Gurbhagat Singh:
Jadon thakian akhan nal main mombati
bujhaunda han

          4.7.    Malayalam, by O.M. Anujan (Dravidian languages, as Pali, taken with Sanskrit):

Adiyilekku nissunyata nannile

          4.8.Tamil,byP.Balasubramanian:
MudhanMudhalil.thodakkathil,
Onrumatra verumaiyil

         5. The Indian poets answer today, rather than old Latin continent, some Latin American creators, themselves looking forward personal Sanskrit poetic  myths. Otherwise, the Sumitranand  Pant's  inner  sorrow keeps the journey  in   universal Sanskrit  jar and to recommend tale-quale the   doctrine of  the correspondence, the symbolism and any synesthetic bend seem to be a work of a distant poetics,   maybe far away   from   the poetry   itself.  Those poets renouncing apparently  the  registration of  the aesthetic truths   and   following their  genuine destiny are signaling the eternity   of   poetry, as such more-or-less no analyzable   by the means of the poetic.

           In the context of the Indian literature, looking upon some trends, spheres of influence amongst groups and generations - beyond the perception of common essences and inspirations summarizing a complex originality—there are new concomitantly universal and Indian personalities; so it's to be contemplated that creative process, given impulse by the Sanskrit root growing up under the sun of the whole world.     The incommunicable inner drama of the poet lets itself be   shared through  the directness of language, the ideal of  beauty  and   human participation.

             All are transfigured within the art,   as   if  divine,  and  of the   Prajapati (creator).  After all, the poets are one, but through the communion the poet can perhaps renounce the lyricism of his own person; the Thou installs the contradictory infinity of love; not the world but the ego is expressed as a theater, multitude of human sorrows, spiritual differentials of the same mind; the third person exists, thus, as autonomous inspiration and whole transcends  the  unreconcilable plurality to let open   the  way of creation.   

            It's a communing self, within the neighbour, the idea, the  solitude, a respon­sive and, in the same time, fully   passionate: the technique is denied sometime through an obsessional geometry; the motive dictates  or is dictating itself as a leitmotiv; the poem is the fruit of one violent and tender   radiance; the   images   are   remembering the really seen and, maybe, conquered worlds: A poem is sorrowful, another  answers it;   a book is the memory   of  a sound,   another  is   a chorus, preserving  the   silences  of  the   soul on the poetic planet: and the cosmos validates itself tantrically in the communion of the   fecundity with  self creation;  the light  of   sadness and the   hymn   of  joy   castellated   in   a   time   in­different   to   the primordiality of sorrow: the communing salvation is the name of synchronicity of the song with the  transcendence   of the person through an unsinful message. 

           The poetic discourse  originated  in a dream homologue   with    reality   adapts   to   rare destiny,   preserving  the old   temptation   of searching    for   the   lost happiness   of   the Paradise,  which   is   now just disappearing or emptying itself  out;  the   existential   fullness is saved through the freedom of the singing; the awareness doesn't follow   the  poem,   it is synchronistic  with   it; and  so another poem waits its avatar; many more lives in a literary intuition are  finding utterance,    the   world recognizes its   miracles  and   injustices. The questions are put deeply into the answers of the communion; the poem guesses the salva­tion; the poetical dedication is like  an adoption; the Logos passes through moods without   words; the   secret   of    the   death follow   all   the   former lives; Saphic   women flows toward  the pose  of   the  one   like   a hibiscus. 

         The resurrection of the hymn is written in itself, with a decent passion of the glory through love and sorrow, through the lyricism of the unhappiness in love and world. To write the poetry of being - over the obsession of   life   as   such or musicalised myths, classicisms on Anglo-American modernisms - is to have the essential recep­tivity   of   the world  through untransfigurable symbols, to reach one infinite familiarity with the tragic self, to produce a purificatory purity.

           The poetic excellence arises, then, through a concurrent vibration: there is a back -ward path towards the finesse and the tender power of vital light: the ancient Indian aura is interior to the poet and the metronomic moves the hearing towards the luminous sounds; thus, the primordial moods are everydaynesses of a poetic destiny; the commu­nion fascinates the lyric work and so the love can still be the progression in the series of the great feelings.

          6. Anthropology of New Recognition. There is no need to say that making literature as anthropology and anthropology as literature one loses one’s chance to be recognized within either of them. But the theme of recognition itself can be a joint topic, on top of it may be Kalidasa’s “Recognition of Sakuntala” (Abhijnan Sakuntalam). Even after some two thousands or two thousands and a half years it seems that Dushyanta recognizes his deserted wife almost for the sake of their child, successor to the throne.

A XIX century’s replica is Cãlin poem by Mihai Eminescu, in which the recognition of the deserted wife, after years, starts by meeting the child.

Philosophy of recognition in modern times includes patterns drawn by Hegel, Pascal or Lacan. An anthropology of recognition would record also discrimination between cultures and their representatives to the extend of cultural cannibalism, colonialism-globalism, localism, etc. To be recognized during or after demise is very little related to one’s will. It seems rather an outer concept. It is quite hard to enjoy the non-recognition, but after all, then it is time to find God. Does God recognize a person unrecognised even by self? Is it possible to get God’s message when all expectations are transformed in lost obsession of Divinity?

Two poems of different ages and others reveal the devotion-recognition to Goddess or simply Woman. Shankaracharya’s Saundaryalahari and Dylan Thomas The Ballad of Long Legged Bite are almost at the antipodes one from the other, yet they may meet either in Shakta cult or in surrealistic mysticism of woman. Sanskrit worshipper makes a cosmic prayer to the Divine Mother on the whole and part by part, while the Welsh balladist thinks of woman in pieces thorn apart by sharks and lovers. While the religion – recognition of Uma, Daughter of Himalaya attracts hotly tantric and advaitin followers, the woman-bite is recognizable only through song recreation of the victim in tune with legions of raped and kidnapped heroines like, for instance: Kira Kiralina of Romanian ballads and Panait Istrati’s novels, in which the heroine kills herself in order not to be captured by the rapists. In another ballad by Ionel Zeana, hundred virgins chose to kill themselves instead of entering the harem of the invaders.

The woman is recognized as Goddess and as a bite almost in the spiritual inspiration, once an enthusiastic devotion, twice even still more literary as empathically ballad. The joy and sorrow come together as the characters are concerned, but both works convey either advaita-nondual, or Don’s love recognition in the same move as prayer and chatarsis causes-effects.

From thousand to thousand years, from Sakuntala to Saundaryalahari and ballad Goddess-bite other characters and feelings are transformed or forgotten also as recognition of the fact that recognition is not possible.

          Cătălina-Kate-Christina love, up to avataric identification, the soft and all powerful Morning Star in his   cosmic-erotic double. By 1980, when Eliade saluted in a letter to us the Sanskrit version of Eminescu's Luceafarul / Divyagrahah by Urmila Rani Trikha, would have had in mind his character Miss Christina - … avatara diviagraha – but also divine Arundhati, embodiment of Vedic  Morning Star and of spiral kundalini serpent, ideal wife – of Vashista – invoked by Sita in Ramayana by Walmiki. At D. H. Lawrence, Kate abandons herself to the Morning Star beyond military world, beyond the good and the wrong, in role of Malintzi: „So, when she thought of him and his soldiers, tales of swift cruelty she had heard of him: when she remembered his stabbing the three helpless peons, she thought: Why should I judge him? He is of the gods. And when he comes to me he lays his pure, quick flame to mine, and every time I am a young girl again, and every time he takes the flower of my virginity, and I his. It leaves me insouciante like a young girl. What do I care if he kills people? His flame is young and clean. He is Huitzilopochtli, and I am Malintzi” 

7.        Feminine Theoanthropoetics. The anthro-poetry (I have proposed the term in 1970, at the 10th ICAES, New Delhi) may deal with a transcendental deputation of man as creator and of the creator as god but also with the human share of the supreme creation through the poetical cosmogonies. Some Indo-European creative myths are quite separated from the current theories of the universe  but not so within poetry. For instance, the cosmic symbolism of woman's hair grows independently fromKalidasas's Usha/Dawn (Sanskrit-Romanian trans-soundation: ava yoseva suna/urusa yati prabhunjati/ave ei eva juna aurusa-n pridvor de zi" - George Anca. Ardkanariswara, International Academy Eminescu, Delhi, 1982) in the Veda or the Milk Ocean to Eminescu's blonde Indian princess or Brancusi's La negresse blonde.

          The ambiguity between divinity and hair-fairness is obvious in the appellations of Krishna as Krishna (derived from ka - Brahma, ica - Siva, vo - one that goes before Brahma and Shiva; or from kesa-hair, and va - who possesses, fair-haired) or as Vasudeva meaning dark-blue or brown (M.N. Dut). And everybody enjoying, reading, commenting, dancing, translating (what be in that case a sort of trans-translation) Jayadeva's Gitagovinda, remembering or not the ten opening avatars of Vishnu will witness differently the climax-reproach of Radha speculating on Krishna's name (as -'dark"). While the avatars of Hyperion in Eminescu's poem are marked in the eyes of moon-like girl, Catalina, just by changing color of his hair (6). "Thus Rāma banished will be no-Rāma"' ("not charming") says Manthara to Kaikeyi (Rumayana by Valmiki). Sanskrit nymphs, poetesses, characters can be paralleled with blonde avatars in modern poetry, from Kalidasa's Urvasi to Giraudoux' Ondine.

          A. K. Warder, Indian Kavya Literature, vol. 2, Motilal Banarsidas,  Delhi, 1974: "The travelers look with unblinking eyes peasant's daughter made pale with flour.  ' With desire, as if at Fortune coming forth from the Ocean of Milk" (Maharastri verse from 2 A.  D.)  "The allusion here is to the myth of the churning of the Ocean by the gods, which produced among   other precious   things   the   Goddess   Fortune (Laksmi), moreover Fortune is symbolized by the color white. It is a commonplace that the gods' eyes do not blink, thus the travelers' stares would suggest that they were gods' (p.  192). Vol. 3, 1977: From Kalidasa's Urvashi: - "At the rite of her creation was the Moon the Creator, giving his charm?  ' Was it Pleasure himself with the sensitive as the one aesthetic experience? Was it the Moon who is the source of flowers?   ' - For how could an ancient sage, dull through studying the Veda, his interest averted from sense objects, create this delightful form?" (p. 139).

          An almost feminine theoanthropoetics of the vision is retained by Abhinavagupta from a yoga tradition in which the eye is populated by many goddesses differently colored . Kami  Chandra   Pandey,   Abhinavagupta.   Chowkhamba.   1963, p. 533; "each eye has four orbits (Mandala) (i) white (ii) red (iii) white-black (iv) black. The first is the abode of the group of sixteen goddesses, the second of twelve, the third of eight and the fourth of four. In each of these four orbits one of the four powers, of creation, maintenance, annihilation and of manifesting itself in indefinable form, respectively predominates and so does one of the four, object (Prameya), means (Pramaaa), subject (Pramata), and knowledge (Pramiti)".

          Rajasekhara's argument of the blind poet sustaining the theory of poetic imagination, pratibha, meets Eminescu's blind sculptor as well as Brancusi's sculpture for the blind - one with the beginning of the world, the golden embryo - Mihai Eminescu: Memento mori. Geniu pustiu / The Deserted Genius; Ion Barbu: Oul dogmatic/The Dogmatic Egg. Blond women avatars in Eminescu's "The Avatars of the Pharaoh Tla" and in Liviu Rebreanu's Adam and Eve. George Bacovia: "All chaos is a gaiety of the ether" (Autumn Notes); "In the ideal night the blond princess in white" (Ballad).

 The feminine rhyme of the Ganges in Romance poetry recalls an endless flowing creation over the human phalanges . Gongora's (and many other poets') "el Ganges/falanges" sending to the nritti sequence Ganga springing from the head of Shiva. Pierhyme cosmic dance in Camōes : "Eu sou o illustro Ganges, que na terra /Celeste tenho o berço verdadeiro". Al. Philipide still baroque "picioroange falange". Giambattista Marino: "De la vene de Gange il fabro scelse / Il piu pregiato et lucido metallo. Virgil in Georgica: "usque coloratis amnis deuxus ab Indus./ et uiridem Aegyptum nigra fecundant harena" (the river flowing down from the colored Indians / and fertilizes green Egypt with its black sand - tr. David West). Sanskrit-Portuguese rhyming in Mariano Garcias: "Terra de Sabios, e imortaes poetas / Philosophos, videntes e ascotas./Valmiki. Somadeva, e Kalidasa, / Budha, Manu, Panini e Vynssa / Durgavati. Maytreyi e Kalinatha Dvantari e Soma e Aryabratha /. Kaverajah. Jayadeva o Vedanta, E tanto genio, tanta gloria, tanta. Surréaliste natya rhyme in Apollinaire : "L'époux royal de Sacontale / Las de vaincre se rejouit / Quand il la retrouva plus pâle / D'attente et d'amour pâlie/ Caressant sa gazelle mâle".

L'IMAGINATION DE BAUDELAIRE

Sanskrit Correspondence

A few expressions here, like Anandavardhana's kavi-prajapatih or Baudelaire's, could be related, somehow, to Kamala Das' "when you learn to swim do not enter a river that has no ocean". 

1.   After his unfinished voyage to Bharata Varsa, as if out of Camoens steps, the young punished Charles Baudelaire  did more than imagining India. As a now adikavi - or, in T.S.Eliot's words, the greatest archetype of  the poet in modern age  and in all the countries  -, as a critic, too,  he refound on an endless path that "ordre  et  beauté" corresponding to Sanskrit aucitya and ramanyia.

With this alliterative modern-maudit Baudelaire, but also acarya or padah, like the old Abhinavagupta we speak of poetry and poetics /metaphysics/science/dandyism, etc. poetry in correspondence /unnaya/ symbol/verse/ prose,etc.,  poetry within  logos/rasa-dhvani etc. Poet, daemon and lecteur/sahrdaya are one, the Swedenborg's heaven-man. And beyond a Jesuit ballet of forgiving-conviction around, the Parisian poet living between 1821-1867, we see again "Les Fleurs du Mal ", opened in 1857, while Flaubert published 'Madame Bovary', Dostoievsky and Tolstoy gathered their momentum, Wagner ended the second act of 'Tristan'; "such a year matters in the history of spirit" (André Suares).

Some "substantives" passed obssessively into the bibliography of this now tragic sophist, now virgin poet now the best critic of this century: the madness, the world-index, the autobiography, the influence of Poe, the mystical symbolism, the city, the cathacresys, the originality, the muse, the aesthetics of individualism, the revery, music, etc."Substantif, adjectif, verbe, on correspond alors que le grand trinité" - profondeur, transparence, mouvement, - qui est celle de l'être baudelairien lui-meme"(Jean-Pierre Richard)."Cinque sostantivi"(Lorenze Maranini): "Le tout n'est qu'ordre  et beauté,/Luxe, calme  et volupté".

As kavyapurusha  (spirit of poetry) meets sahityavidya (appreciative criticism) making her his bride in Vidarbha and creating Vaidarbhi Riti, the modern poetic  mind travels within the  temple  of the nature - correspondence/ lila  (play)   of  the  heaven  with the  earth - in Cythere, Icaria,   Lesbos,   to  a Limbus,   a sunset,   a mist  mixed with rain,   a Paris,   a Cocagne   Land,   a Capua,   a Parnassus. But in the island of Venus, the temple is changed in a hanged alter ego. Like following descendita ad inferna of Ulysses, Aeneas, Jesus, Dante, 'Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d' un pas', and analogically to Bhavabhuti introducing the  scene  of Madhava's  selling flesh in  the crematory, in the course of development of Rasa  of  love, Baudelaire  contemplates the divine essence in the corpse of Venus. Being the correspondence of the life with the death, of the spleen with the eternal ideal, the journey never ends. Diabolical or paradisaical, the poetic corres­pondences reveal through the prayoga of the poet a self-poetry as rasavada and sarasvatyastattvam, an alchemy of grief which will be transformed by Rimbaud in an alchemy of verb. Over versed poetics - like in Horace and alamkara sastra -, among dense perfumes, with vaporized and, in its divine momentum - before the loss of para­dise -, centralized self, the poet remains the stranger, the mysterious of his first prose poem, the lover as in Kalidasa's  'Meghaduta', of the clouds, the going clouds, the marvelous clouds, clouds which are imitating his life and are thinking through him as also he thinks through the things, the clouds like the perfumes of the 'Correspondences', "ayant 1' expansion des choses infinies".

2.  Reading Baudelaire within Sanskrit context, beyond the poet as voyant in the temple of clouds, the correspondences are to be felt individually from both Indian and Latin carmen-kavya through the ancient epos, Camoens' epic India,   Eminescu's rig-vedic  romanticism, even if it is said, for instance, about Edwin Arnold's translation  of 'Gitagovinda'   that is "so unrecognizable baudlerized". To remember Baudelaire as a translator, "People accuse me, of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I translated Poe so patiently? Because he was like me. The first time I opened a book of his I saw, with horror and delight,  not  just the subjects I had dreamt of, but sentences I had thought of, and written by him twenty years   before"(1864).

3.   For the modern poet - Rimbaud:   "Je suis un autre" - on reading-Mallarmé could contradict one reading - Baudelaire, a continent's apophatic  avantgardism could be  secretly rebelled by the ancient diction of another universe but through such unfaithfulness  within  confi­dence he creates the fidelity of the poetry to itself. The critical mind seems to mingle the poet and poetry, from Thibaudet's stake on Baudelaire or Paul Bourget's enjoyment to Brunetiere's protest, last  century, and in our age  between a programmatic  bio-bibliographical exhaustiveness  (George Blin,  Henri Peyre, Claude Picnois, Marcel Raymond,   W. T. Bandy,   Robert T.Carge, Alfred Edward Carter a.e.)  and  "attemptative"(Sartre) or simply existentialistic work (Buter), esoteric (Pierre Emmanuel) or semiotic isotopic  (Roman Jakobson and Claude Levy-Strauss).  Poet of the poet - as Holderlin interpreted by Heidegger -, through his spiritual encounters -De Maistre, Poe, Delacroix, E.T.A. Hoffmann, de Quincey, Wagner -,Baudelaire revealed his  own aesthetics  having as  a method the  sincerity of self,  and the new as  ulti­mate  aesthetic obsession.   What he said about Poe could have been written at the first person. Between asatya (non - existent) and utpadya (created by imagination) to Te  Deum / opium sahitya and to include verse  in  the most of prose-critical glass is  to  transfer stanzas  from" "Correspondences"  or "Les Phares" in antara-sloka.

In Kalidasa's comparison of poetry to Ardhanariswara (the symbolic image  of Siva representing one  half of his body as Parvati)   the goddess Parvati is Vak or Jalva (parole) and god Paramesvara is Artha (logos/conventum), their union as Ardhanariswara signifying, as V.Raghavan reminds it, the greatest ideal of poetry variously emphasized as  sahitya,   sammitatva,   etc.   For Baudelaire, the poetry - this fruit of the sensitivity of imagina­tion - is absolutely true only into another world. But the poet himself, in and out of the two halves for two persons of symbolon or  the Lohengrin's secret of Graal, comes self devouringly to another world as  Heautontimorumenon,   that  Greek-Latin  comic  character bantered by Goethe  as   anologen  of poetes  from his   age,   of a tragic irony after Baudelaire.

The words from the dictionary of external nature, says Baudelaire, have to be  selected and  arranged  by  the creative  artist  using the imagination,   "la reine  des facultées",   an  almost  divine  faculty,   giving  to  the poet  or to  the  musician  the capability of  translating the  hieroglyphs  of  the  spiritual reality. Only the imagination comprises the poetry. The true imagination of the true poet, who is also always a critic and a reader. As mystery of creation either in written word, music or painting, there is a blank, lacuna, to be fulfilled by the imagination of the reader or listener, which suggests similar ideas in different minds. And through which we can find in different times and spaces Kalidasa's corresponding imaginative sympathy of the audience, the whole Sanskrit emphasis on sahradaya, - l' homne de lettres,  l'homme  d'esprit  -,  answering  "le poète,  le  prêtre  et  le  soldat,   l'homme   qui  chante,   1' homme  qui  bonit,   l'homme  qui  sacrifie  et  se  sacrifie".

   IDOEMINESCOLOGY

          1. Mihai Eminescu's Rasa-dhvaniah. The Sanskrit correspondence with the Romanian culture and poetry culminates with Mihai Eminescu, a reader of Vedas and Upanishads in original. In Romania, it is taught at school that "The First Epistle" or "The Dacian's Prayer" (Nirvana) are connected with Rig Veda. Of course the analogy is fundamental but the correspondence lies both in the common or community cosmogony mind and particularly in the universal intuition of real life, of sat (meaning "village" – in Romanian, "truth" in Sanskrit).

Eminescu speaks of human reality and reverse nostalgia, reciprocal metamorphosis, intensive voluptuousness and general transparency, the retrospective lucidity and the para-nymph and we can deduct an anthro-poetry and anthro-poetics by reading his "Anthropomorphism", "Tat tvam asi", "God and Man", "From Berlin to Potsdam" etc. There is a theo-anthropomorphosis in his poems of which 'Dumnezeu/god' is also 'om/man', and, through the evoked Indian forest, the Sanskrit Om. Eminescu's  dream of Carmen Saeculare - like in Horace's 'dulce ridentem Lalagem amabo/dulce loquentem' - is also of mahakavyas and of mahavakyas, as he entitled a poem 'Tat twam asi', and through 'Eu sunt Luceafarul' (I am the Evening Star) comes in mind 'Aham Brahma asmi' or his melancholy turns into verse - 'melancolia-mi (...) se face vers' - like Valmiki's soka into sloka. As "Rig Veda" entered even his journalism, one may say, as alamkarika. 'raso vai sah'.

          Most frequent key-words in Eminescu's poetry are, 'ochi'/eye, lume/world, viaţa/life, umbra/shade, faţa/face, dulce/sweet, lună/moon, mînă/hand, noapte/night, alb/white, mare/sea, negru/black, suflet/soul, vis/dream, inima/heart, cer/sky, cap/head, frumos/beautiful, stea/star, floare/ flower'. There are Latin words, Romanian ramanya, where the rhyme itself could affect the flexion, at Eminescu, Ind' rhyming with gerundive forms or with nouns and getting its own flexion euphonically, 'lnde decinde/Indic vindec/Indicele vindice-le Indici vindici/Inzi colinzi'. In his universal Romanian dictionary of rhymes (edition Marin Bucur, Victoria Ana Tauşan), colored by classical Greek-Latin and Romance sounds, the Indo-rhymes answer chosen words and compounds : "Vede/revede. Gangele/falangele, coline/bramine, carmine/latine, increde-i/Vedei, dat mi-i Atmei, Elorii/norii, ateismul/budismul. iubi-va/Siva, bengalic/italic, predic/Vedic, naframa/Brahma, Kama/ iama, aurora/ Elora'.

          A "restituendo' (Rosa Del Conte) work is the Sanskrit version of Eminescu's "Luceafărul'/"Divyagraha'' bv Dr. Urmila Rani Trikha in collaboration with the present  author. As the names of Brahma and Buddha are written rhymed in manuscript variants of "Luceafărul" and the association with it of "Katha Upanishad" (Nachiketas-Yama compared with Hyperion-Father) is familiar by now to the eminescologists as well as to the Indian students in Romanian, when translating we found ourselves close to Sanskrit and Buddhist atmosphere as such. To "Rig Veda": Brahma and the identity of everything with god: the feminine Ushas compatible with the male Luceafar (seen by Sergiu Al-George as a Bodhisattva from Ellora): the young and at the same time ancient twin, brothers Ashvina; Agni as Varuna in the evening; the golden son of the waters Apam-Napat consounding with Romanian Latin apă (water) with bright rays; the king Varuna making path for sun and constellations: the golden bright-rayed Savitr; Yama as the god of death and of life wearing nilāmbara: Purusha as Jivatma separating himself from Virat: Sarama crossing the waters of Rasa. To "Brahadāranyaka Upanishad": "O Maytreyi, a wife is dear to her husband not for her sake, but for the sake of his own Atma". To other correspondences with Kalidasa's "Raghuvamsam", "Rtusamhara", Shakuntalam. "Meghadutam', with refrains from Bhavabhuti, Amaru, Jayadeva. Thus, if in Romania concluding her book "Eminescu and India" Amita Bhose stated that Eminescu is the only European poet who made India immortal in his country, in India, Urmila Rani Trikha transposed in ballad-sloka meter "Luceafarul" within a symbolical gathering of immortal Sanskrit sounds and feelings known by any sahrdaya as any Romanian recites stanzas from Eminescu.

           The union of kavyapurusha with sahityaviya in vaidarbhi riti could be for a modern poetical mind the correspondence of heaven with earth. Diabolical or paradisaical, the poetic correspondences - rasa-dhvaniah - reveal through the prayoga of the poet, a self poetry as rasavāda ad sarasvatyasattvam, an alchemy of grief and verb. In Kalkdasa's comparison of poetry to Ardhanariswara, the goddess Pārvati is vāk or śabda and god Parumeśvara is artha, their union as Ardhanarishvara signifying, as V. Raghavan reminds it, the greatest ideal of poetry variously emphasized as sāhilya, sammitatva etc. Or, the love between Hyperion and Catalina in Eminescu's "Luceafărul" evokes beyond the myths a neoteric Anlhanarishwara. One can see Lucypherus as a biblical Ravana, but Eminescu's Hyperion is closer to Jayadeva's Krishna and one can read "Luceafarul" as the "Gītagovinda" of Romanians.

          From a Romanian point of view, we consider that under the light of recent researches, poems by Mihai Eminescu. Ion Barbu, Emil Botta a.o., the cosmic temple of Indore projected by Constantin Brancusi could be not absent from any anthology or ontology of Sanskrit and Buddhist world poetry, that at least Eminescology and Brancusology matter for Indology and Sanskrit studies, as in the works of George Calinescu, Mircen Eliade, Rosa Del Conte, Alain Guillermou, Constantin Noica, Perpessicius, Marin Bucur, Sergiu Al-George, Zoe Dumitrescu-Busulenga, Amita Bhose a.o. Following the continuous modern Indo-European scientific tradition we looked forward to bringing out, beyond theoretical studies, a living Sanskrit-Latin sahitya through an anthology of masterpieces inspired by India in Greek, French, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish.

          Both poetical work and thinking of Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), the national poet of Romania, “the last romantic” of Europe, are connected with Indian culture.  The complete series of Eminescu’s Works published by Editura Academiei includes in the  XIVth volume – “Philosophical, historical and scientific translations” (1983) -  also the translation into Romanian from German of Franz Bopp’s Sanskrit Grammar   after Kritische Grammatik der Sanskrita-Sprache in kurzerer Fassung von Franz Bopp, Zweite Ausgabe, 1845. Perhaps most mysterious manuscript of Eminescu, was published for the first time in 1983, after 100 years of its conception, but only in facsimile, due to lack of printing Devanagari letters in Romania, at that time. 

          The editors, Petru Creţia and Amita Bhose, introduced the researchers and readers in the laboratory, all suprizing for Romanian culture, of Mihai Eminescu, the translator. Preocupation for Sanskrit could appear  like a final of work in eternity. Gramatica sanscrită în versiunea lui Eminescu (Sanskrit grammar in version of Eminescu) appeared for the first time in printed devanagari, in 2004, at Bibliotheca Publishing, editors - Dimitrie Vatamaniuc, George Anca and Vlad Sovarel, under care of Romanian-Indian-Cultural-Association.

          2. Eminescu and Jayadeva. Choosing to speak of Jayadeva and Eminescu - Poet to Poet - does not mean to compare automatically the 12th century last Sanskrit classic to the l9th century last great European romantic.

          About Jayadeva I can speak only as a translator of 'Gitagovinda' into Eminescu's language and meters. My Romanian version was released within a gathering organized by the Association of Indian Comparative Literature and the Department of Modern Indian Languages on 3rd May 1983 at the University of Delhi. I am grateful to all who were attending the same and to those who commented it always encouragingly. I am grateful, of course, to Jayadeva and Eminescu.

          My version was begun as a sort of trans-sounding syllable by syllable from Sanskrit into Romanian but increasingly it became a dhvani, turning the dhvani (sound) into the dhvani (suggestion) in respect to the two languages. The 'Gitagovinda' in Romanian may be compared to the Sanskrit version of Mihai Eminescu's 'Luceafarul' (Hyperion) signed by Urmila Rani Trikha in 'Latinitas' published as a book under the International Academy Mihai Eminescu having as a president Amrita Pritam. It was hoped that these translations will open new trends for comparative discussions on Jayadeva and Eminescu. But the ultimate test of this Gitagovinda in Romanian will have to be related to its own poetic quality.

          This is a part of a project started in 1981 as 'Patterns in Modern Indo-Latin Kavya Purusha'. By following a quiet utopian concept of integration and migration of poetical mind we enter the temple of nature, of its correspondences. On the other hand, looking precisely now and again to the poetic being, to the poet as such, we could easier rediscover analogies of apparently unconditioned symbols through unusual addresses of the poet to the other, to the cosmos, to god. Thus, any regional anthology could be seen as a part of an onto-poetry, a universal kavyapurusha. An essential reader was intended in this vision in Indian and Romance poetry and poetics from the classics to contemporary poets writing in Indian languages, in French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish. In terms of comparative literature, Indian themes as avatar or sati and in poetics, rasa and dhvani were to be analyzed in Romance literature as an argument of a Sanskrit-Latin poetics.

          Mihai Eminescu's 'Luceafarul' (Hyperion) appeared in 1883, in Vienna. Out of a genuine smriti, we have printed in Delhi the Urmila Rani Trikha's Sanskrit version. Divyagrahah". This translation from Romanian has been appreciated by well-known Sanskrit scholars like Satyavrat Shastri, Kapila Vatsyayan, Sergiu Al-George, enjoyed by literary audience and students. 

          There are many Romanian studies on Eminescu and Rigveda, Katahaupanishad, the Buddha Kalidasa, Tagore, and India as such, which like Max Muller he hadn't seen physically. 'Luceafarul' is the 'Gitagovinda' of the Romanians. The anustubh is Dr. Trikha's version, like in Veda and Avesta. Recalls also Eminescu's original meter on a 'story' like Jayadeva's. At the same time, the meters of the "Gitagovinda' are to be reimagined  through all Eminescu's poetry. The Sanskrit and Romanian aren't perhaps the two closest languages in the world but one can think so on this ground. And if Urmila Rani Trikha did know a better Romanian after accomplishing her Sanskrit Hyperion, one can get closer to Eminescu by translating Jayadeva into Romanian. The illustrations to the both first editions of Eminescu's 'Luceafarul' in Sanskrit and, respectively, Jayadeva's 'Gitagovinda' in Romanian were intended accordingly.

                    The two prabandhas - the 9th and the 18th - recited at the beginning of our Gitagovinda-release - belong to the sakhi, which I've translated into Romanian with 'surata', meaning also 'little sister' and evoking by contrast or not the Sanskrit Jayadevian meaning of "surata", as for gaining that dreamt dhvani from the original into translation, to let the veena sounds of the creator be heard among the tabla sounds of the interpreter. Actually, sakhi herself is an interpreter with a triple speech and the translation is like her, her brother.

          In both 'Gitagovinda' and 'Luceafarul' gods speak directly, as Govinda and Demiurgos Radha and Catalina are in love with gods. The ten avatars evoked in one, at Jayadeva are three simultaneous avatars - Demiurgos, Hyperion, Catalin - at Eminescu. The double reading of 'Jaya jaya Deva Hari' speaks for, both poems of the belonging of the poet to god or of the belonging of god to the poet. Yamuna speaks of Gitagovinda as if the river has read it, and not only the original but all the translations and especially those to be done again and again until the original will repeat itself in the waters of the river. The water is, at Eminescu, that of the primordial, Vedic ocean.

     The translation of Gitagovinda in Romanian was thus done in a very daily life, culture and language in India. In the same very room where we gathered, one afternoon in 1981, October, after Dr. Sergiu Al-George, the translator of the 'Bhagavad Gita' into Romanian, had lectured on Rupaka, I've asked him why not Gitagovinda. But one week later he was no more. With his death, the Sanskrit became for me not a foreign language any more. So, naturally, my translation is dedicated to Sergiu Al-George. Listening to Dr. Trikha's translation into Sanskrit from Eminescu, he also told us that it was as if he had heard for the first time 'Luceafarul' (Divyagrahah).

          3. Dyachronically, the best spirits of Romanian culture were attracted by Indian thought (Blaga, 1945). There is a confluence (Al-George, 1981), a correspondence with perennial India. Our pre-christian Dacian deity Zalmoxis was interpreted for instance by Keith in connection with the Hindu doctrine of immortality. Alexandria, Sindipa, Varlaam and Ioasaf are amongst fundamental of Romanian medieval readings. The Buddha is represented as Ioasaf in Christian murals. The ‘antibarorea’ synthesizes in the 18th century Ion Budai-Deleanu’s masterpiece Tziganiada the forms of government as envisaged by gypsies claiming their origin from Jundandel of India. (By the way, the ruler patronizing the talkative governants to be is nobody else than Vlad Tsepesh, alias – according to many – Drakula).

Synchronically, during the 19th century, newspapers and magazines from all Romanian provinces wrote on Indian widows (1829), Csomo de Koroszy (1830, 1842 – the death of ‘our patriot’ recorded in ‘Gazeta de Transilvania’), maharaja Ranjit Singh and Martin Honigberger (1838, 1839, 1857), morals of Indians (1840), caves from Ellora (1846), Ostindia (1857), etc. On the old paths of Dimitrie Cantemir or Miron Costin, polihistorians of the same century like Ion Eliade Radulescu and Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu have shaped both romantic and Indo-Europeanistic renaissance while the great classical writers – Mihai Eminescu, Ion Creanga, Ion Luca Caragiale, George Cosbuc, Titu Maiorescu – created in correspondence with Indo-universal values. At the same time, the school came into existence – the first course of Sanskrit was begun by Constantin Georgian in 1876 at the University of Bucharest -, and grew up during 20th century trough generations of students in philosophy, letters and Indology having – in the universities of Bucharest, Iassy, Cernowitz, Cluj-Napoca – as professors: B.P. Hasdeu, C. Georgian, N. Iorga, V. Parvan, N. Ionescu, I. Iordan, A. Frenkian, A. Rosetti, L. Blaga, G. Calinescu, T. Vianu, M. Eliade, A. Graur, T. Simenschy, V. Banateanu, N. Zberea, C. Poghirc, S. Al-George, V.P. Dyal, I. Pandey, I.N. Chaudhuri, A. Bhose, S.B. Singh, Y. Tiwary, S.Kumar, G.Anca, L. Theban, M.Itu, N. Samson, S. Fanar, P. Lazarescu a.o.

The second classical age of Romanian culture and literature between the two world wars strengthened a new correspondence through the creations by C. Brancusi, L. Blaga, I. Barbu, M. Sadoveanu, L. Rebreanu, M. Eliade, V. Voiculescu, I. Pillat a.o. In all, the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and Buddhism seem to lead to correspondence (through Eminescu, Brancusi, Blaga, Eliade, Galaction, Voiculescu), but epics, natya, lyrics of Sanskrit, Dravidian or modern Indian languages works are shared rather through synchronistic studies and translations. For the future (these are considerations rendered as such from 1970’s), the knowledge and openness to Panini and Abhinavagupta, Bhartrihari, Gunadin and Jayadeva are likely to be correspondingly approached by new comers. (“Future” was –it is – much of Shankaracharya and advaita). Up to this point (bindu?), many translations from Mahabharata for instane have been done by George Cosbuc, Psychora, Irineu Mihalcescu, Theofil Simenschy, D. Nanu, M. Eliade, G. B. Duica, A. E. Baconschi, S. Al-George, I.L. Postolache, C. Filitti – many versions of Bhagavad Gita, one published in 1944, during the war. Tiruvaluvar Tamil’s kurals appeared in Romanian as early as 1876. Traditionally, Eminescology and Brancusology include always larger indological comments. Leading personalities of Romanian culture have written about Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi as representatives of whole Indian and world culture

After years, even psychoanalyzable, above vague hiding concepts of correspondence and school  are but fact and desiderata in absence of real possibilities of, with Dandekar’s term, ‘exercises of Indology’. There were a few others, e.g.: natya rhyme, Sanskrit-Latin Onto-poetics, feminine anthropoetry, inverse nostalgia, crawfish… Yet a freedom of Indology like freedom of expression seemed flooding in 1990’s in Romania, with a start of a new Indological school – MA dissertations in philosophy, history, philology on Indian themes, Hindi courses in Bucharest university, Romanian-Indian Cultural Association on the steps on Centre of Indian Studies projected by late Dr. Amita Bhose, broadcastings, publications, Indian Library and so on. International Academy Mihai Eminescu, after being founded in Delhi in 1981 and existing for three years, restarted in Bucharest after 1990. But old  coherence of classicity followed by ‘coherence’ of repression, made room to postmodern destruction or sect brain-washing. Many diaries form already a field Indology confirming diversely chronic views of cultural shock. Confusing enough are rash of some  self styled gurus, artificial puja culture, para-psychological Indology. Individual Indology of solitary adventurers of the fields may prove fruitful especially with growing quality leading to solidarity in long run research forming and reforming a genuine school based on Eminescu and Eliade heritage.

This is a very personal outlook, of a writer who preferred to make ‘indological’ novels (the series Indian ApoKALIpse is in 9 volume) and books of poems.

It can work a saying of retiring at time from anything but Indology. There are born Indologists. Wars, jails, repression keep aware that spirit of abhijnan in them. A try of symbolic recognition was the lecture tour in Romnia of prof. Satya Vrat Sastri, in 2001, at our invitation, with award of Oradea University Honoris Causa Doctorate to Indian scholar. In the beginning of the new millenium an option for Sanskrit as leading chapter in further studies became obvious. What a passeist step, at best, some may say.

Sergiu Al-George died in Octomber 1981, one week after he returned to Romania from India where had participated to International Congress of Sanskrit in Varanasi. I said then he was too happy, that happiness killed him. All suffering of his life was dispersed by translating Gita. So may have it been. I discussed many things with him. Or could he have died for Sanskrit? 

          4. Public Address to the President of India, H.E. Shanker Dayal Sharma, at ceremony  of  Receiving  Honorary Doctorate, Bucharest University (by George Anca, 1994)

          Your Excellency Mr. President of India, Sharmaji,

Your gracious meeting offered to Romanian specialists in Indian studies, mainly from Bucharest, here, it's a high honor, a stimulation and also a consolation. For it's a tragic issue of Stalinist-Communist dictatorship that best thinkers, Indologists included, were jailed. But riks and slokas from Vedas and Upanishads were still communicated by Morse alphabet.

          We feel getting, at last, a free way to knowledge of Indian spirit and culture. Perhaps the moksha/salvation was the most appreciated quality of Indian spirit, together with Christian, Indian and universal dharma and shanti.

          Mihai Eminescu, Romanian national poet, declared himself a Buddhist as an empowered Christian. During more than 15 years I had talks and letters about Mihai Eminescu, mainly in and from India, but also other continents; they make some personal and Indo-eminescological history in an epistolar novel I had honor to dedicate to your excellency, Mr. President of India, Dr. Sharma ji.

          Kind of field researcher, I taught Romanian, between 1977-1984, at University of Delhi, while Prof. dr. Prabhu Dayal Vidyasagar was teaching Hindi at Bucharest University.

          My mother has just died before and so India became my mother – now it was no problem how good India was to me, but how good was I to her.

          I am grateful to legions of people in India, from great writers and professors like Amrita Pritam, Ageya, Nagendra, R.C. Mehrotra, Gurbakhsh Singh – former vicechancellors of Delhi University – to my colleagues and students in the university.

          Surely the exchange of teachers between universities is a must.

          Suppose India and Romania would have their cultural centers in Delhi and in Bucharest respectively, smaller and in a way more cultural cities like Iaşi, Cluj, Timişoara, Râmnicu-Vâlcea, for Romania, and Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Trivandrum for India may be taken in consideration.

          Romanian-Indian Cultural Society, started recently, in 1993, beyond university and formal scientific research on Indology, is trying to gather interested people in different topics of Indian culture. Many young and gifted persons are eager to study Indian arts, dance and music, to be on scholarship in their dreamland.

          We can only slightly open a door toward an endless realm.

          Finally, I will dare to evoke a very special Indo-Romanian tradition dealing with human freedom and make a call for your judgment.

          Early 1990's Romanian new press acknowledged both India's international support to political prisoners and their recognition to pundit Jawaharlal Nehru who provoked a visit of then UN Secretary General U Thant.

          Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, when vice president of India, made shorter the sentence of poet Radu Gyr.

          As a representative to UN International Association of Educators for World Peace, I request now, Mr. President of India, your high intervention that Mr. Ilie Ilaşcu, parliamentarian, jailed in Tiraspol, for only guilt of being Romanian, to be liberated.

     5. International Academy Mihai Eminescu

          Founded in 1981 in Delhi by George Anca. Presidents: Amrita Pritam (1981-1984), Eugen Todoran (1990-1994), Alexandru Surdu (1994-1996) Dimitrie Vatamaniuc (since 1996).           Publications: Latinitas (Delhi), Bibliotheca Indica (Bucharest – with Romanian Indian Cultural Association), indological, anthropological and fiction books.)

          First draft – 1981 – to be completed by acknowledgments, other names of poets, thinkers, artists, translators, eminescologists, educators, desiring to be together unto poetry/shanti.

          Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Chile, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungarx, India, Iran, Irak, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, United Kingdom, USSR, USA, Yugoslavia

          MEMBERS / HONORARY INVITED

          Rafael Alberti, Robert Bly, Emil Cioran, Rosa del Conte, Yolanda Eminescu, Evgheni Evtushenko, John Fowles, Vaclav Havel, Daisaku Ikeda, Eugen Ionesco, Octavio Paz, Amrita Pritam (president since 1981), Salman Rushdie, Leopold Sedhar Senghor, Bogdan Suhodolsky, Grigore Vieru.

          MEMBERS AT LARGE

          Anna Aalten, B. Abanuka, Tawfik El Abdo, Prachoomsuk Achava-Amrung, Ioan Alexandru (organizer), Ion Andreiţă, O. M. Anujan, Lourdes Arizpe, Werner Bahner, Andrei Bantaş, Romano Baroni, Georges Barthouil, Al Bayati, Enric Becescu, Eva Behring, Amita Bhose, Danuta Bienkowska, Carlo Bernardini, Eveline Blamont, Ana Blandiana, Lucian Boz, Ion Caramitru, Margaret Chatterjee, Mary Ellen-Chatwin, Mihai Cimpoi, Silvia Chiţimia, Henri Claessen, Georges Condominas, Lean-Louis Courriol, Robert Creeley, Petru Creţia, Marco Cugno, Nicolae Dabija, Rodny Daniel, Nilima Das, Sisir Kumar Das, Mahendra Dave, Guenther Deicke, Francis Dessart, Stanislaw Dobrowolski, P. Vidyasagar Dayal, Metoda Dodic-Fikfak, Mihai Drăgan, Livia Drăghici, Jules Dufur, Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga, Anton Dumitriu, Monika Egde, Christian Eggebert, Didona Eminescu, Roland Erb, Jiri Felix, Galdi Laszlo, Roy Mac Gregor-Hastie, Al Giuculescu, Allain Guillermou, Herbert Golder, Klaus Heitmann, Helena Helva, Gerard Herberichs, Carmen Hendershott, Anna Hohenwart, Peter Hook, Alexandra Hortopan, Kazimiera Illakowiczowna, Philip Iseley, Judith Isroff, Ion Iuga, Vilenka Jakac-Bizjak, Rafik Vihati Joshi, Elena M. Koenigsberg, Maria Kafkova, Iuri Kojevnikov, Henrik Konarkovski, Omar Lara, Leonida Lari, Maria Teresa Leon, Catherine Lutard, Keshav Malik, Muhamed Maghoub, Fidelis Masao, Liliana Mărgineanu, Pino Mariano, Constantin Mateescu, Anna Mathai, Dumitru Matkovski, Charles Mercieca, Ion Milos, Baldev Mirza, George Munteanu, Chie Nakane, Ion Negoiţescu, Wanda Ostap, Ayappa Panikar, Sheila Pantry, Daniel Perdigao, Augustin Petre, Irina Petrescu, Max Demeter Peyfuss, Jane Plaister, Franco Prendi, Carlos, Queiroz, Zorica Rajkovic, Lisa Raphal, Peter Raster, Ruprecht Rohr, Marcel Roşculeţ, Mario Ruffini, Angelo Sabbattini, A. M. Sadek, Zeus Salazar, Patricia Sarles, Monika Segbert, Joachim Schuster, Vinod Seth, Satyavrat Shastri, Andrei Simic, Norman Simms, William Snodgrass, Mihai Stan, Dumitru Stăniloae, Sygmunt Stobersky, Sanda Stoleru, Sorin Stratilat, Arcadie Suceveanu, Eric Sunderland, Bathelemy Taladoire, Akile Tezkan, Eugen Todoran, Fernando Tola, Mona Toscano-Pashke, Urmila Rani Trikha, Kliment Tsacev, Mihai Ursachi, Bruno Uytersprot, Nelson Vainer, Isabela Valmarin, Dimitrie Vatamaniuc, Romulus & Mihu Vulcănescu, J.L. Vig, Brenda Walker, Xu Wende, Reinhold Werner, Rudolf Windish, Mario Zamora

          MEMBERS IN MEMORIAM

          Anna Ahmatova, Sergiu Al-George, Gheorghe Anghel, Tudor Arghezi, George Bacovia, Ion Barbu, Lucian Blaga, Samson Bodnărescu, Alexandru Bogdan, N.N. Botez, Petre Brânzeu, Victor Buescu, Anta Raluka Buzinschi, George Călinescu, I. L. Caragiale, Iorgu Caragiale, Toma Chiricuţă, Pompiliu Constantinescu, Aron Cotruş, Ion Creangă, Dimitrie Cuclin, Mihail Dragomirescu, Mircea Eliade, Gheorghe Eminescu, Gheorghe Eminovici, Franyo Zoltan, Galgi Laszlo, Gala Galaction, Mozes Gaster, Onisifor Ghibu, Petre Grimm, Ion Goraş, N.I. Herescu, G. Ibrăileanu, Nicolae Iorga, Petru Iroaie, Josef Sandor, Ivan Krascko, Mite Kremnitz, Franco Lombardi, E. Lovinescu, Titu Maiorescu, Alfred Margul-Sperber, Veronica Micle, Matei Millo, Gheorghe Nedioglu, Constantin Noica, Ramiro Ortiz, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vasile Pârvan, Perpessicius,  Ioana Em. Petrescu, Gheorghe Pituţ, Miron Pompiliu, Augustin Z. N. Pop, Cornelui M. Popescu, Aron Pumnul, Salvatore Quasimodo, Ianis Ritsos, Mihail Sadoveanu, George Bernard Shaw, Ioan Slavici, Nichita Stănescu, Carmen Sylva, Carlo Tagliavini, Fani Tardini, Vasile Văduva, Tudor Vianu  

Notes

Some Indian Writings and Authors in Romanian (apud Latinitas, No 2, October 1982, Delhi):

Vedas (Rig-, Atharva, hymns), Mahabharata (Savitri, and Damayanti, Bhagavad Gita, Bhima, Dasharatas, Tilotama, Urvashi), Ramayana, Upanishads (Kata, Mundaka), Manava Dharma Shastra, Tirukurral, Panchatantra, Hitopadesha, Vetalapanchashatika, Shakuntala, Gitanjali, Discovery of India, Amaru, Sri Aurobindo, Ageya, Mulk Raj Anand, O.M. Anujan, Muhamad Alvi, Manik Banerji, Baren Basu, Vasant Bapat, M.A.Bhagavan, Bhabani Bhatacharya, Lokenath Bhattacharya, Shukanta Bhattacharya, Sisir Bhattacharya, Amita Bhose (Ray), Prem Chand, Margaret Chatterjee, Nirendranath Chakravarti, Rani Chanda, Krishna Chandar, Kamala Das, Nilima Das, Sisir Kumar Das, Prabhu Vidyasagar Dyal, Anita Desai, Maitreye Devi (Sen), Rajlakshmi Devi, Nissim Ezekiel, Nida Faazli, Mahatma Gandhi, Sarath Kumar Gosh, Bimal Chandra Gosh, Ibrahim Gialis, Muhammad Iqbal, Jayadeva, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kalidasa, Humayun Kabir, Prabhjot Kaur, Krishna Kripalani, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ananda Kumarasvami, P. Lal, Prabhakar Machwe, Rupendra Guha Majumdar, Keshav Malik, Pari Makalir, Kamala Markandeya, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Kansal Mishra, Anna Sujata Modayl, Sitakant Mohapatra, Dhan Gopal Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru, R. K. Narayan, Pritish Nandi, Kedar Nath, Amrita Pritam, Palagummi Padmaraju, Anvayiar Ayappa Panikar, Induprakash Pandey, K. M. Pannikar, Deva P. Patnaik, N. Pichamurti, Phanishvaranath Renu, Z. Zahher Sajjad, Vinod Seth, Satya Vrat Shastri, Madan Gopal Sinhal, Shahryar, Harbhajan Singh, Navtej Singh, Anant Gopal Shorey, Pillai Thakazhi Sivasankara, Tiruvalluvar, Rabindranath Tagore, Valmiki, Vyassa, Narayana Menon, Valathol, Mahadevi Varma, Srikanta Varma, Kapila Vatsyayan, T.S.Venugopala, Martin Vikramasinghe, Syed  Sajjad Zaheer.

Some Romanian Books on India (apud Indoeminescology, 1994, Bucharest):

Sergiu Al-George: Indian Philosophy in Texts. Bhagavad Gita, Samkhyakarika, Tarka-Samgraha, 1971; Language and thought in Indian Culture, 1976; Archaic and Universal, 1981

George Anca: Indian ApoKALIpse, I-VII, 1997-2003, Indo-Eminescology, 1994; The Buddha, 1994; Mamma Trinidad, 2001; Manuscripts from the Living Sea1996; Sanskritikon, 2002

Tancred Banateanu: Life and Work of Rabindranat Tagore, 1961

Amita Bhose: Eminescu and India, 1978; Bengali Proverbs and Thoughts, 1975

Ion Budai-Deleanu: Tziganiada, 1800

Ion Campineanu-Cantemir: Sati or Pikes of Love, 1928

Al. N. Constantinescu: The Buddhism and the Christianism, 1928

George Cosbuc: Sanskrit Anthology. Fragments from Rig-Veda, Mahabharata, Ramayana. Lyrical Poems and Proverbs, 1897; Kalidasa – Sacontala, 1897

Mircea Eliade: India, 1935; Workshop, 1935;Maitreyi, 6th edition 1946; Asian Alchemy. Chinese and Indian Alchemy, 1935; The Myth of Reintegration, 1939; Yoga, 1936; Patanjali et le Yoga, 1962

Irineu Mihalcescu: The Cosmogonies of Indians, 1907; Bhagavad Gita, 1932

Cezar Papacostea: The Ancient Philosophy in Mihai Eminescu’s Works, 1932

Cicerone Poghirc: Origins of a Civilization: The Ancient India, 1972;

Theofil Simenschy: The Grammar of Sanskrit Language, 1959; KathaUpanisad, 1937, Mundaka-Upanisad, 1939; Bhagavad Gita, 1944; Story of Nala. Episode from Mahabharata, 1937; Panciatantra, 1931/1969

Iuliu Valaori: Elements of Indo-European Linguistics (1924); Main Indo-European languages, 1929

Some topical studies

Le mythe de l’atman; the semiosis of zero, la fonction révélatrice des consonnes;l’Inde antique et les origines du structuralisme; Brancusi et l’Inde (Sergiu Al-George); Tagore – a Skeleton Poem (Tudor Arghezi); le naga dans les mythes populaires roumains (Tancred Banateanu); new contributions on a ‘proto-Indian’ language (Vlad Banateanu); Rabindranath Tagore in Europe; Mahatma Gandhi as I knew him (Lucian Blaga); classical Indian literature in poetry of Eminescu; classical Indian literature in poetry of George Cosbuc (Sergiu Demetrian); carols and Vedic hymns (Aron Densusianu); influence of ancient Indian culture on Romanian contemporary literature (Ion Dimitriu); Indian demonology and a Romanian legend; bi-unite et totalite dans la pensée indienne; la concezione della liberta nel pensiero indiano; contributions to the philosophy of yoga; cosmic homology and yoga ; Durga-Puja; Duryodhana and the Walking Dream; pre-Aryan elements in Hinduism; mystic erotic in Bengal; woman and love; philology and culture; introduction in Samkhya philosophy; introduction en tantrisme; magic and métapsychique; la mandragore et les mythes de la naissance miraculeuse; the metaphysic of the upanishads; religious motives in upanishads; mudra; symbolisme aquatique; il problema del male e della liberazione nella filosofia  Samkhya Yoga; erotic rituals; il rituale hindu e la vita interiore; sapta padani kramati; les sept pas de Bouddha; the symbolism of sacred tree; symbolisme indien de l’abolition du temps; Indian humanism; secret languages; vernamala; Bhagavad-Gita in Romanian (Mircea Eliade); Purusa-Gayomard-Anthropos; Greek skepticism and Indian philosophy; la theorie du sommeil d’apres les Upanisad et la Yoga; wherever there is smoke there is fire (A.Frenkian); a Romanian exorcism and an Indian exorcism from Veda; Die philosophischen und religiosen Anschauungen in ihrer Entwicklung; (B.P.Hasdeu); reflection on India in Romanian Popular  Litrature Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Keith Hitchins); divinites indo-européennes aux populations de l’Asie Antérieure et de la Mediterrannee; the formation of Vedic Pantheon; errors in the analysis of phonetic sequences  of primitive Indo-European (G.Ivanescu); Veda, the oldest Indo-European text (Henri Jacquier); due pessimisti romantici sotto l’influssi del pensiero indiano antico; influsso del pensiero indiano antico sull concetto di uomo in Mihai Eminescu; influsso del pensiero indiano sull concetto di donna di Mihai Eminescu (D.Marin); Eminescu and Indian philosophy (Cezar Papacostea); lat. Nubo-nubes et le mythe d’Indra; the morals of Nirvana (Ion Petrovici); Indo-Traco-Dacica; sur les traces du transylvain Martin Honigberger, médicin et voyageur en Inde; Constantin Georgian, the founder of Romanian Indology (Arion Rosu); the origin of universe in the conception of Indians and Greeks; supreme being in Hindu mystic (Theofil Simenschy); researches of Indo-Aryan linguistics; actualité de la Grammaire de Panini; Indo-romanica estruturas sintacticas an contacto (Laurentiu Theban); Romania me hindi; puridhan ka phalahari baba; Romaniya ka yayavar Aleku Ghika (N.Zberea)

Energetic nonviolence and non-possession  - main themes of the master course in psychology-sociology (by George Anca);

Exploring social violence. Motivation of violent behavior (protection, „fight or flight”, groups and identity). Conflict prevention – systemic (globalization, international crime), structural (predatory states, horizontal inequities), operational (accelerators and detonators of conflict – e.g. Poverty of sources, affluence of small guns, elections).

Anthropology of nonviolence: Jain ahimsa and aparigraha. Buddhist karuna. Christian pity. Gandhian nonviolence. Principles of anekanta (relativity).

Ancient Mahavira has classified people in three categories: having many desires (Mahechha), having few desires (Alpechha), having no desires (Ichhajayi). The economy of nonviolence, along with poverty eradication, applies also Mhavira's concept of vrati (dedicated) society. He gave three directions regarding production: not to be manufacturated weapons of violence (ahimsappyane), not to be assembled weapons (asanjutahikarne), not to be made instruction for sinful and violent work (apavkammovades). Following anekanta, the philosophy of Mahavira synthesizes personal fate and initiative.