The German Gita by Herling Bradley L

Author:Herling, Bradley L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135501952
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

“We are Europeans” is a statement that entitles a scholarly approach to the world that uncovers its secrets and also prevents one nation from holding exclusive control,48 but perhaps it happens that the right spirit and method is for a time found in one place before the others. Indeed, in deciphering secrets more profound, more noble than even the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics (IB I, 5), the philological and philosophical keys have now been placed in the hands of the Germans.

In surveying some of the content of the journal, let us begin with the technical side of this decipherment, leaving the mythic riddles of the “Indian Sphinx” for last. Over the decade of its publication, Schlegel included a set of philologically rigorous articles in the Indische Bibliothek that identified the technical appraisal of text and language as the locus for the interpretation of Indian religion. The first substantive article in the journal, for example, includes a rather technical examination of epic meter; Schlegel also offers a fairly precise review of Bopp's translation of the Nala from 1819; and a review of Hayman Wilsons 1819 Sanskrit-English dictionary (1822) also appears, along with an examination of Bopps linguistic studies by Schlegel's student, Christian Lassen (1830). Perhaps the crowning moment of these technical contributions is the article written by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schlegels friend and patron, who took up Sanskrit after Schlegel but seemingly surpassed him in technical apprehension of it. The article begins as the last entry in 1822 and takes up a question that was hardly accessible to most of the journal's readership: what is the nature of the-ya and-tvā verbal endings in Sanskrit, and are these endings related to phenomena in other languages? The analysis breaks off at the end of the issue, and von Humboldt leaves the reader in suspense: “are the verbal forms in-tvā and-ya participles that join onto the subject of the main clause, or gerunds that join onto the verb of the main clause?” (IB I, 467). The article concludes in the 1824 issue, with fifty more pages of analysis.

The essay is quite sophisticated as a philological examination of grammatical principles, and on that front, the questions it poses are completely worthwhile.49 It is important to note that Schlegel announced the all-embracing purpose of these technical inquiries in the first substantive article that he himself published in the journal, “Indische Dichtungen.” In a rather striking turn against a position that prevailed particularly among the British missionaries (a turn which marks the connection between Romantic myth and the new philological emphasis), Schlegel argues that the interpretation of Indian religion should not read its “wonderfully bold creations of an … astonishing imagination [Einbildungskrafi]” as “abominable absurdities” (IB I, 35). Nor should this religious system be understood according to “the common understanding,” “outer appearances,” “bourgeois moral” judgments, open derisiveness, or poor representations: “In this way one will surely never attain to conceptualizing the origin of this poetic belief … nor will one decipher the hieroglyphic traditions of the fore-world historically and philosophically' (IB 1, 35).

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