Veröffentlicht am: https://blog.crossasia.org/small-forms-in-a-long-malay-romance/
Gastbeitrag von Dr. Kris Ramlan “Seven of you, and I alone.” With this playful challenge, Angkaran Dewa, companion to the hero of a Malay romance, invites the princess’s attendants to a contest in verse. The princess smiles and urges them to answer. Dang Areka Warna draws her bow across the rebab, a bowed string instrument, and replies with a teasing four-line poem. Music, teasing and verbal skill converge in a few lines of a handwritten copy of the story preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB). Such exchanges became the focus of my two-month research residency at the SBB in…