The Journal of the American
Vol.116 No.1
Jan-March 1996
P.180
Copyright by American Oriental Society
In The Tale of Prince Samuttakote, Thomas John Hudak offers us a useful translation of a Thai poetic version of the tale of Buddha's previous incarnation as Prince Samutthakhoot, one of the fifty apocryphal jataka tales known as pannyatsachadok. To my knowledge, this is the first time that an English translation of this Thai epic poem has been published. The translation will thus be of great interest and usefulness to scholars of early modern Southeast Asian texts, especially for those who work in Southeast Asian languages other than Thai. While authorship of the epic is controversial - each of the epic's three parts was written by a different poet, but the first two poets have yet to be identified with absolute certainty - the periodization of the poem's composition is less doubtful. Seventeenth-century poets (one of them may have been King Narai) composed the first two sections of the poem and Prince Paramanuchit Chinorot finished the third and last section in 1849. This periodization is important, because the first two sections of the epic provide the reader with useful information on seventeenth-century court society and culture. The epic version, for example, departs from the jataka story at numerous points, providing new elements, values, and references to the story, which are rooted in the cultural context of the time and place in which the epic poem was constructed. Scholars of early modern Southeast Asian literature will be more interested in the actual framework of the story's presentation, as it provokes inquiries concerning whether the presentation used shadow puppets or living actors. Hudak also provides a useful analysis of the use of both kaap and chan meters in the poem, as well as extensive and useful annotations. If there is any criticism to be made of Hudak's project, it would concern his brief preliminary commentary to the translation. Some discussion, for example, would have been useful of how Hudak's translation is influenced by his own context. Nancy Florida, in a forthcoming publication, has made clear the need for translators to understand that the translation of texts really involves the intersection of new as well as old contexts. Despite this major lacuna, however, Hudak's translation is important and useful, and certainly provides a useful contribution to the study of both Southeast Asian literature and early modern Southeast Asian history. M. W. C.