[ Article
published in French in the Journal of
Comparative Poietics/Revue de Poiétique
Comparée, Vol. II, n° 1 (Paris), 1992, pp. 50 –
61, and in English in the Journal of the
Institute of Asian Studies, Vol. XII, n° 2 (Chennai, India), March 1995,
pp. 1- 15.]See: http://stateless.freehosting.net/menupage.htm
The Poïetics of
the Pantun
T.Wignesan
Chargé de recherches,
Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique,
I - INTRODUCTION
It would be quite unjust
to apply the poetic norms of tropes (essentially
paradigmatic relations) and those of schemes
(syntagmatic relations) as they are known to us today
to the poetics of the pantun. In any case, the Malay littérateur of
old did not have to worry/concern himself with the
technique of creative composition of the pantun,
considering his subordinate literary rôle vis-à-vis his Arabo-Persian
and Indo-Chinese counterparts in the pre-medieval era. Richard Winstedt, the foremost authority on the Malay world, seemed
in any case to be convinced of this fact.
From songs of tribal origin
he (the modern Malay) has evolved a number of
chronicles
(hikayat), and he has lapped foreign
suggestion to polish village
quatrains
that must have been popular from time immemorial. A hunt through
half
a million pages of Malay manuscripts will find all that is purely indigenous
in
an output of histories (sejarah), the pantun and a few topical verses (sjair
sha'ir).1
Winstedt
who was unsparing in his criticism of the Malay's lack of originality in many
aspects of his cultural heritage was more than dithyrambic when it came to the pantun. He felt that "many of those (pantun(s)) extant today may even antedate the use of the
Arabic script."2
(AHOCML,p.204)
But in the pantun Malay
literature is almost for the first time original, owing no
debt
to foreign sources, and nowhere else does it reach so high a level.3
(AHOCML,
p.206)
Although Winstedt's
assessment of the pantun was not thorough or even
penetrating, he intuitively - given his vast and incomparable grasp of
classical Malay writing - came to the conclusion - despite his rather
inadequate translations of a good many quatrains - that at "its best the pantun does far
more than juggle with verbal assonance, (sic) is indeed 'simple, sensuous and
passionate' and has the magic of inevitable phrase."4 (AHOCML, p.207)
To the Malay, the metaphor,
the simile, the maxim, the allusion, the proverb, etc., mean practically one
and the same thing, that is to say in Malay: persamaan,
tamsil, ibarat, kiasan, perumpamaan,
peribahasa, pepatah,
pematah, etc. 5, whose minimal differences may
be put down to non-structural nuances, because at the root of the Malay's
rhetorical confusion lies what is very likely a "molecular" structure
which assimilates and incorporates into a globally unified structure of relations all that is rhetorically disparate
and which is known as the pantun, a structure
that is equally grafted onto the Madagascan hainteny,
the German schnadahüpfel, the Russian tchastouchka, the Javanese wangsallan,
the Norwegian fornyrjislag, the Italien stornello, the
Tunisian gharobiat and so on and so forth. Of
course, the Malay distinguishes the pantun from other
similar specific models, such as the sha'ir,
but there is absolutely no doubt that no other poetic vehicle has afforded him
such a collective creative outlet of effervescence, right from the beginnings
of his literary history.
II – THE STRUCTURE OF THE PANTUN
First of all let us note that
the pantun is not simply a quatrain. Of course it is
the form in which it is most to be found, but there exist other more complex
forms of the pantun, such as, the distique,
the sextet (in two successive tercets, each tercet replacing the roles of the distiques
in the quatrain), the octave and the pantun
berkait, the last of which being a series of
interwoven quatrains (quatrains crochetés), that is
to say, the second and fourth lines of the preceding quatrain are repeated in
the succeeding quatrain as the first and the third all along several strophes
(the same procedure applies to successive pantun(s)
in tercets alternating between the first and the
third and the third and the first) while the series of pantun(s)
is/are concluded or brought to an end by the repetition of the first and the
third line of the first quatrain.
The pantun
is not a lyrical or narrative poem: the sha'ir
occupies this place in Malay poetry. The pantun is
quite simply on one obvious level a riddle. One cannot but be affected by the
detached state of its expressed sentiments, be they on the subject of love,
eroticism, moeurs,
customs, philosophical declarations or even jokes. Literary historians have
been able to distinguish several varieties of the genre: the pantun budak-budak devoted
to children, the pantun tua-tua
directed to the older generation, the pantun berkaseh sayang
involving the young in love, the ancient and modern pantun(s),
etc.
As far as we are concerned
here, it would suffice to analyse the form in which it appears most habitually.
Let us take an example of a simple quatrain put forth by M.B. Lewis and another
by A.W. Hamilton, both of which, besides being accessible to all, are typical
of the genre:
Apa guna berkain batek,
Kalau tidak
dengan suchi-ya?
Apa guna berbini chantek,
Kalau tidak
dengan budi-nya? 6
What's the use of clothing
yourself in batik
If
it's not clean.
What's the use of taking to
wife a beauty
If she hasn't character ?
(Of what use fine
feathers
If they are not protective?
Of what use a
pretty wife
If she's not steadfast?)
Anak
berok di-kayu rendang
Turun mandi
di-dalam paya.
Hudoh burok di-mata
orang
Chantek
manis di-mata
saya. 7
Baby monkey in a bushy
tree
Descends to bathe in the swamp.
Plain, ugly in
others' eyes
Pretty, sweet in
my eyes.
As far as the prosodic
structure8 of the pantun is concerned, each line
should normally vary between eight to twelve syllables. Each syllable makes up
a foot. The metre therefore is based on the accent:
In Malay, a syllable of
significant unity which is the lexème can be
highlighted by
an
accent. This accent is pronounced by a slight augmentation of vocalic
duration
and
generally it concerns the penultimate (syllable). 9
Besides, the rhythm is not
rigidly fixed, since in the Malay language the accent falls variously on the
penultimate syllable and on the antepenultimate when the last syllable ends in -
The most frequent rhyme
scheme is as follows:
ABAB 10, but it could
also be - as for the sha'ir - AAAA.
Most often each line of the pantun is made up of four plérèmes
(substantive, verb, adjective, adverb), with or without the cénèmes
(words of syntactic function). And as the majority of the words in Malay do not
exceed two or three syllables, it devolves that each line of the pantun is normally limited to a dozen syllables.
Further, the Malay language formes its syntactic relations by means of morphemes:
prefixes and suffixes, or derivative affixes, that is to say, me-, pe-, ter-, di-,
ke-, se-, -kan, -an, -i, -lah, -kah,
etc. (me- and pe- modify themselves when juxtaposed
with radicals). The agglutinative nature of the language therefore permits us
to find quite often initial rhymes or alliterations, and internal rhymes, or
even frequent instances of assonance and consonance. The final rhymes also may
be affected in the same way. It is also in conformity with the enigmatic nature
of the pantun that the morphemes sometimes are
suppressed better to maintain the prosodic structure, as it is the case with
the rôle of "ellipses" in the poetry of the
classical Tamil poetry, that is, the cankam
and the immediate post-cankam periods. Again, as
it is to be found in some forms of ancient Chinese poetry12, the pantun as a quatrain-strophe is made up of lines of two
separate distiques, but unlike the Chinese prosodic
practice, the distiques are not organically related.
There is no real cesura and therefore no distinct
segments in the lines. Enjambement is possible in the pantun's
distiques, but only in a syntactic sense.
What really distinguishes
the pantun from all other similar forms, such as the
hainteny13, the schnadahüpfl14, the tchastouchka15, the sloka16, (and many
other related forms, such as the wangsallan, the copla, the fornyrjislag, the krakowiak, the kolomyjka, the daina, etc.) is the rôle of the
first distique (or tercet) vis-à-vis the following second. The
first is the "clothesline" containing the allusion (sampiran and kiasan)
on which the second distique or tercet
may be overlaid or hung. The
relationship is one of interdependence. In other words, the first distique or tercet hints or
presages, by the use of poetic artifices of parallelism, either symmetric or de-symmetric,
the sense, the meaning or message (maksud) , if there were any, in the following second group
of lines. The sense of the pantun may generally be
conceived, given the anonymity of authorship in most pantun(s),
as something impersonal.
On the other hand, if we
applied Samuel R. Levin's concept of "couplings" both in a
phonological as well as in a semantic sense17, we may see how the first distique or tercet is
intrinsically joined to the second group. This characteristic of the pantun is easily visible in the above two quatrains.
In the first of the quatrains
given above, the couplings are much more evident, i.e., between berkain (to dress oneself) and berbini
/
As for the second quatrain,
we can see that the morpheme di is the
only cénème
while all the other lexèmes
are plérèmes.
Even if the morpheme di serves as a cesura, it is not necessary to discern segments in the
lines. All the lexemes are made up of two syllables each as it is the case with
the first strophe; therefore, each line is made up of eight syllables, though
not counting the cénèmes di and
-nya. The symmetry and parallelism of the
alternate lines are overtly present. Besides, in both cases, the rhyme scheme
is: ABAB, with a perfect rhyme which alternates between masculine and feminine
ones.
In the second quatrain-pantun, we may note that the semantic couplings are berok and burok , mandi and manis, while the phonological couplings appear in
the di, the end rhymes and internal rhymes: berok and burok. Let's note also the perfect symmetry of di arising at the fifth syllable of each line.
Consequently, both from the point of view phonologic as well as semantic, the
word berok (pigtailed monkey) presages burok (ugly), and in the same fashion, mandi (to bathe) affects manis (sweet or to smell good). The enjambement
between the first and the second lines is altogether syntactic, that is to say,
between the subject and the predicate.
The foreshadowing of the second distique by
the first is reinforced by the symmetry between the first line and the third,
and between the second line and the fourth. The image of a monkey in a bushy
tree (with innumerable leaves) resembles an ugly girl (in the eyes of many),
while a monkey which descends into the swamps to take a bath contrasts with the
image of a young ugly girl transformed (in the eyes of the persona of the
poem). A pantun
which fullfils these structural euphonic and semantic
qualities is known as: pantun mulia or noble pantun.
Another characteristic of the
pantun is that it is often at one and the same time
an anonymous and collective creation and lends itself quite often to melodic
chanting and musical accompaniment. It is in any case the choice means of
repartee during the few minutes that the traditionally popular Malay dance: ronggeng lasts, a dance that is performed by the
opposite sexes without effecting any form of bodily contact whatsoever while
they sway forth and back to the accompaniment of the rebab
(a violin with three chords) and the gendang
(a two-faced drum).20
One can't insist enough by
restating that the pantun generally belongs to the
populace being a product of a collective effort. It also becomes during festive
occasions an excuse for playfulness. On this point what Jean Paulhan has to say on the hainteny,
which by the way like the Madagascan language and the Mérina
people hails from the Malay world, applies in some ways to the pantun with the difference that the sentiments which
predominate in the pantun are weighted more on the
side of love.
If the hain-teny
is therefore a game, it remains that such a game,
by
the hostile sentiments it promotes and affects can at any moment
skid
into real life itself without our being able to distinguish at which moment
the
game ended and at which moment it had begun.21
Finally, it is necessary to
emphasise that the most ingenious pantun(s) remain
the creations of the anonymous masses, and the final touches to the most
popular pantun(s) are administered through several
versions on the same theme in their long melodious voyage from ear to mouth all
up and down the Malayan peninsula.
III - ORIGINS
Since the pantun
does not appear in its written form earlier than the beginning of the
seventeenth century, we must in order to locate its origins follow one of three
roads of research open to us. In the present state of research in the field, we
have to either accept the local antecedents of the pantun
mentioned by several research authorities, or try to discover the influences
coming from overseas, or else, which would be far more useful, attempt to bring
together all the more important elements which could have in the best of
circumstances produced such a poetical structure and such a genre.
The scholars of the Malay
world are agreed on one point at least, that is, that the origins of the word pantun rest uncertain. Nevertheless, two uses of the
word in the Indonesian language deserve to be singled out. According to Omardin Asha'ari21, pantun means
in the language of the ancient Minankabaus22 "as" or "equal
to", or even "for example", although Richard Winstedt
thinks23 that this meaning is derivative and secondary, like the utilisation of
the sanskrit "umpama"
and the arab "ibarat"
as synonyms for the pantun. By contrast, Winstedt cites Brandstelter who
had found in an old Javanese root word "tun"
a whole series of related words, such as, "tuntun"
(string), "atuntun" "in lines), "tonton" (in tagalog: to
speak in a certain order), and cites as a source a Kelantanese
manuscript, the Hikayat Bakhtiar,
in which figures a phrase: "di-tuntunkan-nya oleh perempuan muda itu pantun...".
The origin(s) of the pantun as it is created today is/are most likely to be
found as much within as outside the Malay world, although one may never be
wholly certain of its source(s), since, even before it made its first
appearance in the Sejarah Melayu24 --
given its finished form -- it is more than probable that the pantun had gone through a period of gestation for a number
of centuries. On the other hand, if one takes into account the arrival of the
Chinese emissaries in the sultanate of Malacca: the admirals Yin Ching (1405) and Cheng Ho (1411), of the emperor Chu Ti (1403-24) of the Ming Dynasty, one is constrained to
pose the question whether or not the Chinese shih had not weighed
heavily on the composition of the pantun right from
its first known appearance:
Chau
Pandan, anak Bubunya,
Hendak menyeram
ka-Melaka.
Bunga berladong
si-ayer mata. 26
(Chau Pandan, son of
the King of Siam,
Wishes to drive terror through Malacca.
The ring embossed with flowers,
The flowers laden with tears.)
At this juncture, it is useful to recall that
even before the arrival in force of the Chinese in the Malay world, the most
persistent influence the Malays have had to be subjected to was that of the Indians, above all that
of the Dravidians who spoke both Tamil and Sanskrit and were either Hindus, Jains or Buddhists, followed since the twelfth century by
Indian Muslim converts. The Tamil Dravidians kept coming to the Malay
archipelago from the first century A.D., mainly as
"colonising-traders" as the regional indigenous kingdoms such as Takuapa and Langkasuka (in the
north of the Malay peninsula), the maritime kingdom of Sri Vijaya
(probably centred at one time in Palembang, Sumatra),
and the kingdoms of Majapahit and Sailendra
(founded in the island of Java), etc., bear witness. Among the innumerable
quatrains of classical Tamil literature of the cankam
period, most probably of the second to the fifth century A.D., let's cite the
following quatrain as an example of the concise epigrammatic structure which is
similar to the pantun:
nilattinum perite vaninum uyarntanru
nirinum arala vinre carar
karunkor kurincip pukkontu
perunte nilaikkum natanotu natpe
(Tevakulattar: Kuruntokai,
3)
(Bigger than the earth,
higher than the sky
Deeper than the
oceans, on the mountain slopes
The kurunci of the dark stems blooms - honey like
Even greater is
my love for this lord of the land)
What we should note in this
quatrain of the celebrated anthology on love, Kuruntokai
27 is first of all the utilisation of ellipse as a poetic device, then the
approximate number of syllables to each line, and finally the separation of
images in the two distiques. Of course, one may not
be in a position to fully appreciate the poem without a knowledge of the
poetics of the "five landscapes"28, but one cannot help noting the pantun's resemblance to it.
Khalid
M.Hussain provides in a rather succinct manner the
opinion of several experts on Malaysian studies, such as those of Van Ophuysen, Crawfurd, Pijnappel, Hoesein, Djajadiningrat, Gonda and C.Hooykaas. In their view, the origin of the pantun emerges from the use of "phonic
suggestion" (suggestie bunyi)
and the parallelism of enigmatic forms (teka-teki
and the wangsallan). On the other hand, Winstedt had compared the pantun,
by citing the explanations of Cranmer-Byng29, to the Chinese ode, while he
attributed its origins to the folkloric enigmatic compositions of Malay
medieval literature.
The most elementary forms
of Malay literary effort are these tales
of
his civilisation's nursery, supplemented by riddles and proverbs,
forms
that call not only for imagination but for artistry in words.]4[What
plant
is it that has a leaf like a sword and fruit like a gong-bearer?
Answer: the pineapple. This
plain straightforward riddle can hardly be
called
a literary type, but there is another kind of Malay riddle that
depends
for its solution on jingle and assonance, that is on literary style(...)
While often, if his hearers
were defeated, the propounder would jeer
at
them in a patter (...) This practice in assonance led to the most
pleasing
form in Malay poetry, the pantun.30
Another example that Winstedt cites is even more appropriate to his claims,
which besides rejoins those of the authorities Khalid
M. Hussain mentions above.
Every girl knows that if
her mother reels off the name(sic) of four fishes:
siakap senohong gulama ikan diri,
she
is saying politely
berchakap pun
bohong, lama-lama menchuri
'If
you start by lying, you'll end by stealingt.'31
Theodore G.Th.
Pigeaud, on the other hand, attributes to a quatrain
called parikans32 to be found in ancient popular Javanese literature the
characteristics of the pantun, a genre above all
which was in use in the north-east of the island of Java.
Hans Overbeck,
perhaps the most informed scholar on the origins of the pantun,
draws our attention to a type of "pantun"
in vogue among the Sundanese.
But besides the written
literature there is the pantun,
which
in Sundanese means a tale taken from legends or from
the
history
of old times, half sung, half recited by the bard, the
tukang pantun, to
the accompaniment of a sort of violin
(tarawangsa)
or lute (kachapi).33
Closer still to the poetic
of suggestie bunyi
is the usage by a people in
sitarak =
marsarak (divorce, take leave)
ladung dung =
dung (after)
sitata = tita (we)
sitanggis = tanggis (cry, weep)
padom-padom =
modum (sleep)
pahu = au (me, I)34
All the above phonic jingling
sounds to say: "Since our separation, I cannot sleep anymore, and I
weep."
It is to be noted that almost
all the similar poetic forms that one finds scattered around the world made
their appearance in relatively modern times, and therefore may not shed much
light on the veritable origins of the pantun as it
was handed down to us in the Sejarah Melayu. We are therefore constrained to look elsewhere,
especially in the ancient Asiatic literatures for which the peoples of the
Malay world have more or less always shown a predilection.
IV - INFLUENCES
First of all, Overbeck alludes to a collection of forty Chinese novels
from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 A.D.) where he says he found a similar form35.
Then, he cites V.von Strauss who, in his preface to
the Anthology of Odes, one of the four classics of classical Chinese
literature, mentions the hsing (metaphor or
image), a rhetorical device by which the Chinese poet - even before he
expresses the object of his poem - describes under the guise of an introduction
a strange phenomenon or important event in one or two lines, in order to be
able to prepare in the reader the right measure of receptivity for the
successive lines. Overbeck cites the following
quatrain as an example:
ying ying ching ying
chih yü chen
t'san jen wang chi
kou wo er
jen36
(The clumsy
blue flies buzzing around
Upon the
hazels blunder;
O cursed
tongue that knows no bound
And sets us two asunder.)
What we should bear in mind
here, contrary to the structural poetics of the tz'u
(ch'u), the general rule as is the case with
the shih (fu) requires uniformity in the length of each line,
while in addition permitting the tonal symmetry or de-symmetry.
Secondly, Overbeck
draws our attention, by referring to what Marsden
emphasised earlier on37, to the Buddhist quatrains, in Pali,
of the Dhammapada, in which, according to Overbeck, one finds
several quatrains where "the first distique
contains an image of which the sense is applied in the second." Example:
As into a house, which is badly thatched,
The rain will enter.
Thus into an untrained mind
The craving will enter.38
By contrast, in the pantun(s) one does not find the two key words of the above
quatrain: "as" and "thus". In other words, there is no
logical working out of the structure of a syllogism.
In any case, it would serve
to remember that the pilgrim, Yi Jing (635-713) who
while undertaking a maritime voyage (671-675) to the Buddhist university at Nalanda (in the state of Bihar, India), stopped at Sri Vijaya in Sumatra and found that the official language in
use was Sanskrit and that the largest Buddhist monastery of the times was
situated there.39 Furthermore, the epic poems: Mahabharata and Ramayana
was known all over Southeast Asia as the wayang
kulit (shadow play) of today bears witness,
despite the indefatigable influence of Islam during six centuries.
Thirdly, in order to
circumscribe our investigation of the pantun's
probable antecedents, it would be necessary to seek in A.L.Basham's
knowledge of India what Overbeck had already less
expertly hinted at in his essay on the pantun. In the
following quotation, Basham describes a system of versification which could
very well be at the source of the composition of the pantun
in its written form.
The commonest Vedic stanza
is Tristubh, consisting
of four quarters
of
eleven syllables each. The quarter normally has a caesura after the
fourth
or fifth, and is prevailingly iambic. (...) Similar to this, but with an
extra
syllable in each quarter, was the twelve-syllabled Jagati... In the
later
hymns of the Rg Veda a stanza of four eight-syllable
quarters,
called
Anustubh,
became popular. (...) From the Anustubh of the Vedas
developed
the Sloka,
the chief epic metre of later times. This consisted
of
four quarters of eight syllables each... (...). The sloka metre was widely
used
for poetry of all kinds, especially for didactic and narrative verse. (...)
Textbooks describe over 100
metres of this kind, many with fanciful names,
but
only some twenty or thirty were popular.40
V - CONCLUSION
All in all, it would seem that, given the
rhetorical rôle structure of the pantun
in Malay, the pantun may be reduced to the bare
elements constituting the metaphor. Applying I.A.Richards'41 terminology to the
pantun, we see that the isi
or maksud can be substituted by the tenor and the sampiran
by the vehicle, that is, the image in
the first distique (or tercet)of the pantun is clarified or explained in the second distique
(or tercet); in other words, structurally the pantun constitutes a metaphor in inverse order. On the
other hand, Henri Fauconnier thinks that the
structure of the pantun excels that of the metaphor
itself.
The first two lines of a pantun…are just the preparation of an idea
which
is going to blossom out in the following lines. This creates an
atmosphere
by avoiding the crudeness of a metaphor.42
Further, the anonymous
nature of the pantun elevates the form into a genre
where the essence of the sentiments expressed in it remain at an impersonal
communicative level, without in any way requiring the intervention of the
receptor at the subjective level: one need feel neither empathy or sympathy for
the personae in the oeuvre, nor for
the author. T.S.Eliot's theory of the "objective
correlative"43, taking into consideration Susan Langer's critique of it,
explains quite well the fundamental nature of the pantun.
Here, the anonymous author is solely concerned about interposing between him
and his receptor "...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events...", in order to best retain his art in the realm of
objectivity.
If we take into account the
fact that the pantun in all its variegated forms was
most likely perfected before the seventeenth century, during which period its
creative "processes" were anonymous, collective and oral, we should
admit right away that, failing the discovery of a manuscript containing a pantun earlier than the composition of the Sejarah Melayu, all
the argument about the origin of the pantun must fall
within the domain of academic conjecture.
Excluding the strictly
indigenous elements, such as, the semantic and phonological couplings,
assonance and rhyme, the enigmatic style and variety of the genre, it is quite
probable that the antecedents of the pantun are
likely to be found in the Chinese ode shih, the Sanskrit sloka of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,
the Pali quatrains of the Dhammapada,
and, of course, the elliptical poetry of the Tamil cankam
period. Given this conclusion, it would be most hazardous to talk of a direct
or immediate influence. Besides, the Malays have never used the vehicle of the pantun to serve their religious didactic purposes
(excepting, of course, the numerous ethically edifying pantun(s)
on Malay customary mores), nor as a narrative or lyrical genre, for which they
reserve other models, such as, the sha'ir, seloka, gurindam, etc.
Given the above poetical
characteristics of the pantun, it wouldn't be too
difficult to claim for this unique literary genre the stamp of an original
creative endeavour, endemic to the Malay world, a genre whose poetics
distinguishes itself by its breadth and variety of invention in modern times,
winning for itself a choice place in World literature. The ingenuity of its own
creation by an entire people, transcending class and birthright, and its
continued use and appreciation at all levels of society make the genre a unique
vehicle of communication even among the illiterate: witness the ronggeng.
Finally, it would be fair to
acknowledge that for the Malay the pantun is both an
enigma, made up of innumerable customary, legendary and historical allusions
and a challenge, a challenge to his ingenuity as a creator, a challenge to an
entire race of pantunists (aficionados
of the pantun) lost
by name among the anonymous masses over the centuries, poets such as a mother
feigning anger at her lethargically inclined daughters; an old man desiring to
win the favours of a prince; a young suitor for the hand of his neighbour’s
daughter, or the pining dilemma of a faithful but abandoned wife - poets for
whom poetry means the pantun and the pantun an entirely unique way of life.
Notes
1. R.O.Winstedt,
A History of Classical Malay Literature, répr.
From the 2nd edn., 1961, London-N.Y.: Oxford University Press,1969, p. vi.
2. Arena Wati,
Asas Pengetahuan Puisi,
Cf.T.Wignesan, Etude
comparée des littératures nationales et/ou officielles de la Malaisie et de
Singapour depuis 1941, Lille: Université de Lille III, 1988, vol.II, pp.13-16.
3. Ram Dass
(pseudonym of Richard Alpert), The Only Dance There Is, N-Y: Anchor
Books, 1974, p.115:
"...this kind of discipline of being able to move awareness
behind thought and observe sequences of your
own thoughts,
and be able to be calm enough and detached
enough from
your own thought to witness thoughts."
4. T.Wignesan,
Op.Cit., vol.II, pp.19-22.
5. A.W.Hamilton,
Malay Pantuns, Singapore-K.L.: Times Books
International, 1987, p.47.
6. M.B.Lewis,
Malay,
7. Arena Wati,
Op.Cit., pp.85-96.
8. Joseph Verguin, Le Malais:
Essai d'analyse fonctionnelle et structurale, Paris-La Haye:
Mouton (Cahiers de l'homme), 1967, p.38.
9. Arena Wati,
Op.Cit., p.94.
10. James J.Y.Liu,
The Art of Chinese Poetry, Chicago-London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1974, xii-164p.
Cf.François Cheng, L'Ecriture poétique chinoise, suivi d'une anthologie des
poèmes des T'ang, Paris: Seuil, 1977, 268p.
11. Bakoly Domenichini-Ramiaramanana,
Hainteny d'autrefois (Poèmes
traditionnels malgaches recueillis au début du règne de Ranavalona I,
1828-1861), Paris: pub. avec le concours du CNRS,1971,
p.269:
Pi-boanjo pi-boanemba
Tandany tanana
te-hiaro
Pi-boanjo pi-boanemba
Raha mety hoahy tsy harovako?
c'est-à-dire:
Il claquait une
cacahuète il claquait une casse
Tout près d'une
main qui se voulait protectrice
Il claquait une
cacahuète il claquait une casse
Si elle accepte
d'être à moi ne l'irai-je pas protéger?
12. P.Merker
et W.Stammler, Reallexikon der Deutschen Literatur-geschichte,
t.III,
Dass der Wald finster is,
Dös machen die Bam.
Dass mei
Schatz untreu is,
Dös glab i kam.
13. Revue de littérature comparée, Paris, 1958,
p.220:
Quelle scie bien
affilée
Qui entra dans le
sapin.
Quelle idiote
étais-je
Pour tomber
amoureuse d'un garçon.
14. A.L.Basham,
The Wonder that was India,
Bhagirathi-nirjhara-sikaranam
vodha
muhuh kampita-devadaruh
yad vayur anvistamrgaih kiratair
asevyate
bhinna-sikhandi-barhah
15. Samuel R.Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry,
La Haye: Mouton, 1973, pp.30-41.
16. This is a traditional Malaysian
Malay dance which prohibits the partners (during which time they – the opposite
sexes – engage in a bout of using the pantun as a
challenge and repartee) from touching one another. [C'est une dance traditionnelle de Malaisie où il est strictement
interdit aux partenaires (qui se livrent à un défi de répartie par moyen des pantouns) de se toucher.]
17. The complete Malay orchestra is
made up of (in addition) : the tawak-tawak ( a series of gongs) ; the geduk (drums) ; and the kesi
(two pairs of very small-sized cymbals. [Le grand orchestre malais comprend
en plus: le tawak-tawak (une série des gongs),
le geduk (la battérie)
et le kesi (deux paires des cymbales de très
petites tailles).
18. Jean Paulhan, Les Haintenys
merinas, Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Geuthner,
1913, p.12.
19. O.H.Asha'ari,
Kajian
20. Ibid., p.6.
21. R.J.Wilkinson
et R.O.Winstedt,
22. C.C.Brown
(trad.), Sejarah Melayu, (The Malay Annals), London-Singapore-N.Y.:
Oxford University Press, 1970, 273p.
23. Ibid., p.59.
24. Puliyurk
Kesikan (ed. with commentary), Kuruntokai,
Cf. A.K.Ramanujan (trad.),
The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology,
25. K.M.Hussain,
"Pantun, Teka-Teki dan Peribahasa", in Dewan Bahasa,
Vol.23, n°12 (
26. R.O.Winstedt,
The Malays: A Cultural History,
27. R.O.Winstedt,
A History of Classical Malay Literature, ibid.,
pp. 3-4.
28. Ibid., p.197.
29. T.G.Th.
Pigeaud, Synopsis of Javanese Literature: 900-1900
A.D., Vol.I, Leide:
Bibliotheca Universitatis Leidensis,
1967, p.19, A-B.
30. H. Overbeck,
"The Malay Pantun" in The Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society, Straits Branch, N°85 (
31.Wilkinson
& Winstedt, Op. Cit.
32. H.Overbeck,
Op. Cit., p.12.
Cf.Hoong Ah Kong, "Pantun Melayu dan Puisi
33. Overbeck,
Op.Cit., p.14.
34. Ibid., p.8.
35. Ibid.
36. George W.Spencer,
The Politics of Expansion: The Chola Conquest of
Sri Lanka and Srivijaya,
40. A.L.Basham,
Op.Cit., p.511.
41. I.A.Richards,
The Philosophy of Rhetoric,
42. Henri Fauconnier, Malaisie, Paris: Librairie
Stock, 1930, p.110.
Les deux
premiers vers d'un pantun...ne sont qu'une
préparation
à l'idée qui va
s'épanouir dans les suivants. Cela crée l'atmosphère
sans avoir la
crudité d'une métaphore.
43. T.S.Eliot,
"Hamlet and his Problems", in Selected Essays,
44. The use of ellipses makes for
the suppression of morphemes, such as, prefixes and suffixes in order to
enhance the syllabic structure. [L'utilisation d'ellipse permet la
suppression des morphèmes tels que les préfixes et les suffixes pour avantager
la structure syllabique.]
© T.Wignesan
1987 – Paris, France
