Kavya Workshop - Latse Library - 2017

Skills for Translators

The study of Kavya will not only enhance one's appreciation for Tibetan writing styles and literature in general but is also a useful tool for translators to develop. Knowledge of how Kavya is used in Tibetan writing will help a translator to interpret and understand sections of texts that include poetry and song, and other writing based on the Kavya style, that we often find inserted into sections of text common in nearly every Tibetan genre, such as introductions, opening and closing prayers, dedications, and colophons.

Kāvya at the Latse Library in New York

Latse Library in New York hosted a workshop on Tseten Zhabdrung’s commentary on poetics (སྙན་ངག་སྤྱི་དོན་ snyan ngag spyi don) May 12-14, 2017. Kurtis Schaeffer and Andy Quintman organized the meeting with Gendun Rabsel, Nicole Willock, Janet Gyatso, Pema Bum, and a small group of specialists (attendees listed below).

The seminar’s focus was the system of poetics and ornate poetry known as snyan ngag, or kāvya in Sanskrit. This system is based on the most important Indian manual of poetics, Daṇḍin’s Mirror of Poetics (Tibetan: snyan ngag me long; Sanskrit: Kāvyādarśa), which forms the basis for Tibetan poetic theory and practice. Ornate poetry is found across all genres of Buddhist literature in all schools. It is often used for introductions in order to display the author’s intellectual skill. More importantly, it is a primary vehicle for evoking beauty and heightened aesthetic experience in relation to Buddhist contemplative ideals, doctrinal commitments, and philosophical exploration. The technical nature of the Mirror’s system has challenged non-native readers. Thankfully we have both Tibetan experts and a new generation of scholars in our midst who are working to make this literature more widely accessible to readers and translators of Tibetan.

The event was envisioned as a master class in which four experts in Tibetan poetry and poetics introduce seminar participants to the fundamental theory and practice of this type of literature, and lead them through close readings of select examples. The presenters consist of two Tibetan scholars, Pema Bhum (Lhatse Library) and Gendun Rabsel (Indiana University), and two American scholars, Janet Gyatso (Harvard University) and Nicole Willock (Old Dominion University). Pema Bhum is Director Lhatse Library and the preeminent scholar of modern Tibetan literature working today. Gendun Rabsel is author of an important history of Tibetan literature and an accomplished teacher and translator. Both scholars have classical training in monastic settings and contemporary training in Indian higher education, making them ideal mentors for those wishing to learn more about the intricacies of Tibetan poetics. Nicole Willock is an intellectual historian of modern Tibet whose work focus on the literary scene of the late twentieth century. Willock and Rabsal have co-translated the most important Tibetan-language introduction to poetics, Tseten Zhabdrung’s General Survey of Poetics (Snyan ngag spyi don).

One outcome of the workshop will be an opportunity for these to scholars to refine the draft of the General Survey of Poeetics in light of feedback from seminar participants, thereby bringing it closer to publication. When published, this work will be the first of its kind in any European language, and will serve as a ready guide for all translator’s wishing to work more precisely with the ornate poetry they encounter in Buddhist texts. The workshop will also produce a bibliography of Tibetan and European language materials for the study of Tibetan poetry and poetics.

Video Presentations

Introduction to Tseten Zhabdrung’s commentary on poetics with Nicole Willock and Gendun Rabsal."

Main Organizers and Speakers

Gendun Rabsel, Indiana University

In the current political circumstances, Tibetan literature and language is in grave danger of surviving. My life goal is to contribute to preserving and promoting the advancement and flourishing of Tibetan literature and language. With these concepts in mind, I have chosen to devote my career to teaching, writing, researching and translating so that Tibetan language can flourish in today’s world.

Pema Bum, Latse Library

Pema Bhum is Director of the Latse Contemporary Tibetan Cultural Library in New York City, which is a project of the Trace Foundation, where he has worked since 1997. He holds an M.A. in Tibetan Studies from the Northwest Nationalities Institute in Lanzhou, Gansu Province (PRC), where he also taught Tibetan language and literature. After his arrival in India in 1988, he founded the first independent Tibetan language newspaper in exile, Dmangs-gtso, and the Tibetan literary magazine, Ljang-gzhon. From 1992-1996, he served as founding director of the Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamsala, India, and for two years taught Tibetan language and literature at Indiana University. He is author of two memoirs of the Cultural Revolution — Six Stars with a Crooked Neck (2001), and Dran tho rdo ring ma (2006)–as well as Heartbeat of a New Generation, now translated into three languages. He has also authored several articles, the most recent of which are published in issues of the Latse Library Newsletter.

Nicole Willock, Old Dominion University

Nicole Willock (Ph.D. Indiana University in Tibetan Studies and Religious Studies, 2011) is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She is 2017 Research Fellow, The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies for her book project: Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhists Making Modern China. She is currently polishing up A Tibetan-English Primer for Poetics (Snyan ngag leg deb bod yin shan sbyar), which is co-authored by Gendun Rabsal. She also co-translated “Zhangtön Tenpa Gyatso’s Advice a Jeweled Rosary” with Gendun Rabsal, which will appear in Buddhist Luminaries: Inspired Advice by Nineteenth-Century Ecumenical Masters in Eastern Tibet, edited by Holly Gayley and Joshua Schapiro (Boston: Wisdom Publications, expected in 2017).

Andrew Quintman, Yale University

Andrew Quintman is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in the Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. For seven years he served as the academic director of the School for International Training’s Tibetan Studies program based in Kathmandu. He is the author of The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of the Great Tibetan Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014). His English translation of The Life of Milarepa (2010) was published in the Penguin Classics series. He is currently writing a history of Drakar Taso Monastery in Tibet southern borderland and a study of the Buddha’s life story through the visual and literary materials of Jonang Monastery in western Tibet.

Kurtis Schaeffer, University of Virginia

Kurtis R. Schaeffer received an M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Washington in 1995, a Ph.D. in Tibetan and South Asian Religions from Harvard in 2000 and is now an associate professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia. His books include Sources of Tibetan Tradition (2013), The Tibetan History Reader (2013), The Culture of the Book in Tibet (2009), An Early Tibetan Catalogue of Buddhist Literature (2009), Dreaming the Great Brahmin, and Himalayan Hermitess (2004).

Janet Gyatso, Harvard University

Janet Gyatso (BA, MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. She has recently completed a new book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, which focuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan medicine in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries

Lauran Hartley, Columbia University

Lauran Hartley is Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University and occasionally serves as Adjunct Lecturer in Tibetan Literature for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She received her Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies from Indiana University in 2003, and has also taught courses on Tibetan literature and religion at Indiana and Rutgers universities. In addition to co-editing the book Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008) and serving as Inner Asian Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, she has also published several articles on Tibetan intellectual history and literary translations. Her current research focuses on literary production and discourse from the eighteenth century to present.

Attendees

• 1. Ben Bogin (Associate Professor, Skidmore College)
• 2. Lara Braitstein (Assistant Professor, McGill University)
• 3. José Cabezón (Professor, UC Santa Barbara)
• 4. Bryan Cuevas (Professor, Florida State University)
• 5. Jacob Dalton (Associate Professor, UC Berkeley)
• 6. Brandon Dotson (Associate Professor, Georgetown University)
• 7. Holly Gayley (Assistant Professor, Colorado University)
• 8. Frances Garrett (Associate Professor, University of Toronto)
• 9. David Germano (Professor, University of Virginia)
• 10. Jonathan Gold (Associate Professor, Princeton University)
• 11. Janet Gyatso (Professor, Harvard Divinity School)
• 12. Paul Hackett (Lecturer, Columbia University)
• 12. Lauran Hartley (Tibetan Studies Librarian, Columbia University)
• 13. Sarah Jacoby (Assistant Professor, Northwestern University)
• 14. Nancy Lin (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University)
• 15. Andrew Quintman (Associate Professor, Yale University)
• 16. Jann Ronis (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley)
• 17. Kurtis R. Schaeffer (Professor, University of Virginia)
• 18. Dominique Townsend (Assistant Professor, Bard College)
• 19. Nicole Willock (Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University)
• 20. Carl Yamamoto (Assistant Professor, Towson University)

Other Presentations on Kavya

Israel Institute for Advanced Studies

Pema Bhum and Janet Gyatso on Kavya: Beyond the Gossip: The Kavyadarsa, the Dalai Lama, and Mr. Smart Tibetan

This presentation was given at the conference A Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters held at the University of Jerusalem, December 13-17, 2015.

The Influence of Sanskrit poetics on Tibet. An Essay Entitled "Beyond the Gossip: The Kavyadarsa, the Dalai Lama, and Mr. Smart Tibetan." Followed by Vesna A. Wallace presenting on Kavyadarsa in Mongolia.

Kavya in Tibet Translator's Craft Session

Translator’s Craft Session 1.1 • Room 207, 2nd Floor • 2:30 PM, June 2, 2017

with Gendun Rabsel, Nicole Willock, Andrew Quintman, Kurtis R. Schaeffer

Kavya in Tibet is a session following from a workshop on Tseten Zhabdrung’s commentary on poetics (Snyan ngag spyi don) that was hosted at the Latse Library with Gendun Rabsel, Nicole Willock, Andy Quintman, and Kurtis Schaeffer. The Tibetan system of poetics and ornate poetry is highly influential in the history of Tibetan writing and is based on the most important Indian manual of poetics, Daṇḍin’s Mirror of Poetics (Kāvyādarśa). This session will introduce some of the fundamental theory and practice of this type of literature.

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