ILMU BAHASA, ILMU BUMI KEBUDAJAAN INDONESIA - kitlv

THE OLD-JAVANESE K AM A Y AN A
an introduction to some of its problems.
by
Dr. C. HOOYKAAS.
Writing about the Old-Javanese Rämäyana (OJR) for Indonesians
in a learned journal appearing in Indonesia it will be superfluous for
me to stress the importance of the Räma-story in India and Indonesia.
This article, written at the request of the Editorial Board of this
Journal, aims chiefly at recasting in an easier and more readable
form the contents of my two recent monographs on the subject
(I, XIII) as well as several papers (II-XII), the exact titles of which
are given at the end of this article. Students will perhaps welcome
such a summing up of points of view, problems and tentative results,
without the apparatus of notes, tables, graphs, appendices, numbers
and subdivisions which seemed unavoidable in the studies themselves.
The resulting article is to be regarded not as a reasoned essay but
rather as a lecture, not to be quoted but to be considered as a talk
providing an introduction to some problems posed by the OJR.
The story of Räma, a story of Indian origin, has spread over the
whole of South East Asia. The OJR, this one facet of the subject,
has been studied by scholars from various countries. Kern from Leiden
edited the complete text in Javanese script in 1900 (I n 27), but
had his doubts concerning several passages because of their erotic
and/or artificial character, doubts which, for the rest, he indicated
mainly by the device of using very modest square brackets in the
text, but also expressed in the Variae Lectiones. Only much later,
when he had become an emeritus professor, did he find the leisure
to make a (Dutch) translation, of which unfortunately he was able
to complete only VI out of XXVI sar gas (1917 ; I n 29).
Juynboll, who already as early as 1902 had published a special
dictionary to this text (I n 28), largely based on its modern-Balinese
paraphrases, completed the translation (with the exception of those
passages which he considered as interpolations). This translation appeared
piece- meal in the course of the twenties and thirties, scattered