Three Old Sundanese Poems-Bibliotheca Indonesica

Three Old Sundanese Poems-Bibliotheca Indonesica

J. Noorduyn (Editor), A. Teeuw (Editor)

This book is the first major contribution in English to the study of Old Sundanese literature. Old Sundanese texts have generally been preserved in undated palm-leaf manuscripts, often in a bad condition. Most of them contain prose texts of a historical, religious or didactic nature. Reliable editions are still largely lacking.

The present book presents three long Old Sundanese poems, each of them handed down in a single manuscript. Two of these – the story of King Rama, and Sri Ajnyana – were found in a nineteenth century manuscript collection of the former Batavian Society, now in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta. The third – Bujangga Manik – had been donated to the Bodleian Library in Oxford as early as 1627, but it was not until the 1950s that it was identified as an Old Sundanese poem. The poems are written in octosyllabic verse, altogether counting some four thousand lines. Two of the texts belong to the sphere of popular Shivaism as it was widely practised in Java and Bali; at the same time they are in many respects typical of Sundanese culture.