The Sound of the Kiss Read online

  THe SOunD OF THe KISS

  Translations from the Asian Classics

  Editorial Board

  Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair

  Paul Anderer

  Irene Bloom

  Donald Keene

  George A. Saliba

  Haruo Shirane

  David D. W. Wang

  Burton Watson

  THe SOunD OF THe KISS

  or The Story That Must Never Be Told

  Piṅgaḷi Sūranna’s Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu

  Translated from Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman

  COLumBIa UnIVerSITY PreSS NeW YOrK

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-50096-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pingali Surana.

  [Kalapurnodayamu English]

  The Sound of the kiss, or the story that must

  never be told ; translated from Telugu by

  Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0–231–12596–8 (cloth : alk. paper)—

  ISBN 0–231–12597-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title: Sound of the kiss. II. Title: Story that must never be told. III. Narayanaravu, Velceru, 1932– IV. Shulman, David Dean, 1949– V. Title.

  PL4780.9.P49 K313 2002

  894.8’27371—dc21

  2002025746

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  For Sanjay Subrahmanyam

  aharahar-itihāsa-vastu-

  bahu-vidha-sambhāra-dhī-vibhāṣita-kṛtikin

  mahimânvita-vāṇī-kara-

  nihita-lalita-kīra-vāg-viniṣṭhita-matikin

  abhyudaya-paramparâbhivṛddhigā . . .

  bhavyatan ĕlla deśamula prastutik’ ĕkkucu mīriy im-mahā-

  kāvyamu suprasiddham’ agu gāvuta nityamu sarvaloka-sam-

  stavya-nija-smṛtin vĕlayu tāṇḍava-kṛṣṇu kṛpan pavitra-śā

  stra-vyasanâti-dhanyam’ agu saj-jana-koṭiy anugrahambunan

  This story will become famous in all countries. God, the dancing Krishna, has blessed it, and so have all learned people who are addicted to reading books.

  —Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu 8.265

  COnTenTS

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Pronunciation

  Introduction

  The Beginning

  CHaPTer 1

  Dvaraka City, Where the Story Begins

  Kalabhashini on the Swing and Rambha in the Sky

  CHaPTer 2

  Narada Studies Music

  Enter Manistambha

  Manikandhara’s Pilgrimage

  CHaPTer 3

  Rambha Entices Manikandhara

  Kalabhashini Flies off with the Siddha

  The Temple of the Lion-Riding Goddess

  Kalabhashini Returns

  Rambha Meets Rambha

  Nalakubara Meets Nalakubara

  CHaPTer 4

  The Story of Salina and Sugatri

  Enter Alaghuvrata. Kalabhashini Is Sacrificed

  Manistambha Tours the World with His Wife

  CHaPTer 5

  The Baby Who Talks

  Sarasvati Decodes Brahma’s Story

  Manistambha and Sumukhasatti Exchange Genders

  A Lecture on Yoga

  Svabhava and Madasaya at Srisailam

  CHaPTer 6

  Manikandhara Fights the Porcupine Demon

  The Story of Alaghuvrata and His Sons

  Satvadatma’s Question

  Madhuralalasa Comes of Age

  CHaPTer 7

  Kalapurna in Love

  The Wedding of Kalapurna and Madhuralalasa

  Abhinavakaumudi Becomes Jealous

  CHaPTer 8

  Kalapurna Conquers the World

  Homecoming

  The Story of the Necklace

  Invitation to a Second Reading

  Guide to Pronunciation and List of Characters

  Index of Names and Technical Terms

  ACKnOWLeDGmenTS

  Many friends and scholars in India, Germany, and North America helped us in our efforts to translate Pingali Suranna. As usual with Telugu studies, our first difficulty wasin locating surviving copies of earlier printed editions of the text. Chekuri Rama Rao and Vasireddi Naveen provided us with Malladi Suryanarayana Sastri’s edition, the only one to document variant readings from manuscripts. Vishnubhotla Ramana sent us the two volumes of the Emesco edition with a preface and notes by Bommakanti Singaracarya and Balantrapu Nalinikanta Ravu. Vakulabharanam Rajagopal gave us speedy access to the rare Vavilla edition with annotation by Cadaluvada Jayaramasastri.

  We are profoundly grateful to the early editors for their scholarly introductions and notes. Nonetheless, many questions about readings and interpretations remained. We had fruitful discussions with Prof. Kolavennu Malayavasini at Andhra University; with K. V. S. Rama Rao of Austin, Texas; and with Paruchuri Sreenivas in Grefrath, Germany, a source of unfailing bibliographic guidance and wisdom. To all of them, we offer thanks.

  We are grateful for the many thoughtful suggestions about polishing the translation offered by Nita Shechet and the two anonymous readers for Columbia University Press. Students in a seminar on the Sanskrit novella at the Hebrew University in the spring semester of 2001 gave us, with their meticulous reading and enthusiasm as well as their insightful interpretations, our first assurance that the text can grip the attention of a contemporary audience.

  We began work on the translation in the summer of 2000 in Jerusalem, in a flat thoughtfully provided by the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University. That summer’s work was made possible by the resources put at our disposal by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We brought the work to completion in the congenial milieu and open spaces of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where we had uninterrupted days to read and reread. We hope that all three institutions will find satisfaction in the fact that this unusual book is now accessible to a wider readership.

  No less critical to this enterprise was the constant supply of superb sambar prepared daily by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, to whom we dedicate the translation.

  NOTe On PrOnunCIaTIOn

  No diacritical marks are used in the body of the text. Citations from Telugu and Sanskrit in the notes, the introduction, and “Invitation to a Second Reading” are marked in the usual scholarly style. For those who want to pronounce the names correctly, we give a list of characters, with full diacritic marks as well as brief linguistic guidance, as an appendix. All proper names and technical terms also appear in the index with full diacritical marking.

  InTrODuCTIOn

  [ 1 ]

  Great artists occasionally emerge together, all at once, like a goddess embodying herself in multiple forms. They may belong to a single extended moment, which they shape through their harmonic resonances in the direction of cultural innovation or breakthrough. This happened in Sophoclean Athens, for example; in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century; in sixteenth-century Spain. It also happened in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century South India, in the area now known as Andhra Pradesh, where Telugu is spoken. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, under the patronage of a famous king, Krishna-deva-raya of Vijayanagara, Telugu poets produced masterpieces of narrative poetry, kāvya, often playing with one another and echoing themes, styles, and a certain intensity of
observation and description. The oustanding names are Krishna-deva-raya himself, his court-poets Peddanna and Mukku Timmanna, and, somewhat later, Tenali Ramakrishnadu and Bhattu-murtti. Together, they created a corpus of unique richness, quite distinct from any other literary production in premodern South Asia.

  Toward the end of this period of volatile creativity, and still firmly rooted in the idiom of the time, a fertile poetic genius named Pingali Suranna took the impulse of literary invention in a wholly new direction. His master work, the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, is translated here. We see this book as, in a certain sense, the first Indian novel—that is, as embodying the invention of a hitherto unknown genre, perhaps comparable in its sensibility and adventurous imagination to its roughly contemporaneous work in Europe, Cervantes’ Quixote, which is also often seen as the first modern European novel. In the “Invitation to a Second Reading,” we discuss the analytic features that we regard as essential to such a definition.

  The Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu is a thoroughly “modern” work—a playful exploration of the limits of linguistic expressivity and of the ecology of available literary genres or forms; a complex psychologizing of the human mind; the elaborate working through of a plot that constantly twists and surprises the reader with its multiple perspectives and unconventional sensibility. At the same time, it is a long poem cast in the accepted modes of courtly poetry that were perfected by Suranna’s predecessors. Despite what we are so often told, modernity, in several specific senses, begins in South India in the sixteenth century, and this novel is one of its harbingers. It explodes nearly all the received wisdom about medieval Indian literature—for example, the hackneyed and misleading insistence that character in premodern texts has no interiority or subjectivity and hardly undergoes change; the notion that all major texts in classical Telugu are simply translations or reworkings of Sanskrit models; the strange belief that language in these texts has no transparency and tends to the “baroque” or the “verbose” or the “formulaic”; the nineteenth-century accusation that classical poetic works were replete with nearly obscene sexual representations; and so on. Suranna’s book clearly reveals how wrong such views really are.

  Suranna actually tells his readers, at the outset, what he intends to do. After describing how his patron, King Krishna of Nandyala, commissioned the work, he reports:

  I began work on the book, to the best of my ability. I wanted it to have the structure of a complex narrative no one had ever known, with rich evocations of erotic love, and also descriptions of gods and temples that would be a joy to listen to. I called it Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu. (1.16)

  So his express aims were three. He wants to tell a good story that is full of surprises and structured in an entirely unprecedented manner (atyapūrvakathā-saṃvidhāna-vaicitrī-mahanīyambu). He is eager to give a taste or experience of an aestheticized eroticism, habitually known as śṛṅgāra-rasa. And he is also interested in singing to or about the gods. The three directions are more or less incompatible in one text, so their very combination here says something about the challenges the poet has undertaken.

  But there are deeper, even more compelling impulses driving Suranna that he does not talk about explicitly as goals. His intricate novel is one of the most penetrating statements in the whole of South Asian literature on the inner mechanisms of language in relation to something we could call “reality.” This poet is also fascinated by the enormous range of human sexual and erotic experience, and he explores this range with verve and imaginative courage. Moreover, he makes a powerful comment on the literary genres of his time and how they can be renewed and reimagined. In this context, he also offers an implicit, sustained meditation on properly ontological questions, such as the boundary between perceptions of reality and the “hard” facts of a life lived in the world.

  Suranna also innovated in the matter of style and texture. Technically, this is a book written predominantly in metrical verse, along with occasional prose passages in the usual elevated, campū style.1 In fact, however, most of his metrical verse reads like direct, straightforward prose. In itself, this new style of fast-paced narrative reporting is no small achievement for a poet who still opted to write in metrical form. At the same time, much of Suranna’s prose reads like complex lyrical poetry, with a high level of musicality, alliteration, and powerful rhythms—almost a kind of free verse. Occasionally, of course, there are verses that are entirely within the lyrical tradition of pure, metrical poetry; and there is prose that reads like prose. In effect, Suranna has invented a new style, well suited to writing a novel—a genre that includes many other genres. He is terse, pointed, precise, scrupulous about transitions and connections, tough in phrasing, and extremely economical. He can also be expansive, symphonic, and extravagant in description. His meticulous attention to wording in reported conversation or in narrative events comes through often as one reads through the text and discovers the unsuspected meanings implicit in what looked, at first reading, like simple statements. We have tried, in our translation, to reproduce these carefully layered formulations with the same precision that Suranna shows. We have chosen to translate most of the text into a somewhat compacted prose, close, in our view, to the texture and tone of the Telugu. At times, when Suranna breaks into poetry for poetry’s sake, we have tried to follow him in this respect.2

  There is something more specific to be said about Suranna’s tone in the dialogue passages that comprise much of the book. This is a text in which people are continually speaking to one another, often in highly colloquial and idiomatic ways. A wife who is being kissed too hard by her husband may playfully push him away with the direct command, cāliñcĕdaro: “Cut it out!”3 Insults, in particular, are, not surprisingly, far from elegant: thus a sexual rival is taunted with being a “freeloader,” teragāḍu4—a word still current in this meaning in modern Telugu. Men and women banter freely, with sexual innuendo expressed in naturally colloquial language, mostly slang. Two women—as it happens, both of them highly sophisticated and refined—quarrelling over a lover sound like two Andhra women as one might hear them bickering today in villages or towns.5 In fact, Suranna’s ability to reproduce such living speech is a sign of his realistic attention to detail and something of an innovation in Telugu kāvya. Note that in Suranna’s hands Telugu meter accomodates such colloquial syntax just as readily as it absorbs elaborate Sanskrit compounds. Throughout the novel, distinct speech registers alternate freely and fluidly. One moves rapidly from dense lyrical description to street slang to high courtly language, as context demands.

  Such flexibility in syntax and diction, in combination with a relatively elevated narrative and descriptive style, produces a texture that, at first sight, might look incongruous in translation. We have tried to reproduce the variation in level faithfully; hence, certain dialogue passages may appear close to contemporary English idiom. We have resisted the temptation to colloquialize radically by resorting to English slang, but we have, at the same time, avoided an artificially antiquated style. If a disparity in tone sometimes remains, the reader should know that it reflects a real and intentional mixture of registers in the Telugu original.

  [ 2 ]

  Literary historians argue about Suranna’s dates. We know he lived in Nandyala, a small town in the eastern Deccan, where a local king named Narasimha Krishna was ruling. One cluster of opinions, pioneered by the influential nineteenth-century literary historian Veeresalingam, favors a date circa 1560. Another group suggests 1620.6 There is no decisive evidence in favor of either position. The earlier date would place Suranna in temporal conjunction with Bhattu-murti, perhaps the most linguistically complex of the Telugu kāvya poets, with a fondness for śleṣa, that is, double entendre or “bitextuality” of a highly sustained and intricate nature.7 Suranna himself, in addition to the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu and another kāvya, Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu, composed a bitextual tour de force, the Rāghava-pāṇḍavīyamu, that simultaneously tells the stories of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. I
t is at least possible that the two bitextual poets, who were also each deeply concerned with music, knew of and responded to one another’s work. On the other hand, the later date would situate Suranna closer to the period of intense grammatical and metalinguistic speculation in seventeenth-century Andhra—a period that could be said to contextualize or frame his narrative.

  Suranna’s paternal grandfather, who shared the same name as his grandson, was also a poet. We know a little about the family background. In his Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu, which Suranna dedicates to his father Amaranarya, he gives an extensive description of his uncles, brothers, and other members of the extended family. He expresses regret that in his earlier works (including some now lost)8 he had not offered a full account of his own family (mat-pitrādi-vaṃsābhivarṇana) .9 The line of descent is said to go back to the Vedic sage Gautama. Did the poet take a certain characteristic pride in this filiation? He tells us that Gautama, the author of the foundational text on logic, entered into a contest with the god Siva himself; when Siva, losing the debate, tried to pull rank by opening the third eye in his forehead, Gautama trumped this by revealing a third eye on the sole of his foot—and won.10 We can assume that Suranna grew up in a family environment rich with classical erudition and literary interests. But there is another element in this environment that popular narratives bring to the fore. The family genealogy in Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu mentions, immediately after Gautama, an ancestor named Goka, a poet who composed a text in praise of Vishnu’s sword; but this same Goka also managed to bring under his control, by Yogic means (yogitāgurv-anubhavuḍai, 1.14), a gandharvi servant-concubine named Peki—a beautiful woman from the class of singers and musicians to the gods. So this family saw itself as having inherited both the highly intellectual, classical tradition of Gautama and the musical, Yogic, and magical skills of this Goka.