Week 1: OrientationOrientation Activities - Instructor: laura-gibbs@ou.edu |
|
|
|
|
This overview has several pages, so make sure you take a look at each one:
If you are interested in "getting to know" more of the characters whom you will meet in these epics, here is a random Hindu divinity - a god, or goddess, or some other supernatural being. There are 50 of them all together, and they will appear at random each time you Refresh the page. It's totally random - just a way for you to meet up with some more of the characters from the world of the epics. If you want to learn more about any of them, just click the Wikipedia link. Feel free to take a look at as many or as few of these characters as you want.
Finally, I just wanted to share this lovely poem by Tony Hoagland, in which he shares his experience of reading the Ramayana in a motel in North Carolina...
by Tony Hoagland
I was reading the Hindu epic The Ramayana.
It was spring in North Carolina:
the birds fabricating their nests
while I was dipping myself like a tea bag
over and over in my own despair.
What I like about The Ramayana
is how each character suspects
there is more than they know to the story.
The friend and the foe, the sister and brother,
they keep getting reborn again and again,
and they start to wise up but never quite do -
Sugriva thinks to himself, "To visit Vali's wife
will assure my destruction
- and yet I cannot prevent myself!"
Rama, dressing for battle,
is scared by his face in the mirror.
They are like us when, deeply immersed,
we sense the surface above us.
Or, breaking a spider web,
we wonder about the spider. In The Ramayana
the victim travels a long ways
to be slain. The wound recognizes
the knife. Upon meeting her beloved,
a young girl swoons.
How still the air was that afternoon!
How tired I felt of not-knowing.
Once in a while I would put down the book
and stare into the yard
of the motel where I was staying.
Where a man dressed in gray
was pulling weeds in the garden;
where a woman in a bathing suit
over and over was diving
into a swimming pool of blue.
[from Ploughshares, Spring 2004, Vol. 30 Issue 1, page 75]
 |
Modern Languages MLLL-4993. Indian Epics. Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. The textual material made available at this website is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. No claims are made regarding the status of images used at this website; if you own the copyright privileges to any of these images and believe your copyright privileges have been violated, please contact the webmaster. Page last updated: October 16, 2007 12:22 PM |