Original scientific paper
Perceptions of India in the Dubrovnik literature / Barlaam i Jozafat (Barlaam and Josaphat) in Dubrovačke legende (The Legends from Dubrovnik)
Dunja Fališevac
; Department of Croatian language and literature, Faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper opens up with a brief survey of the perceptions of India in the Early Modern Croatian literature, which is followed by the analysis of the novel Barlaam i Jozafat (Barlaam and Josaphat), a Christianized version of the life of Buddha. The novel is contained in the 17th-century Dubrovnik codex entitled Dubrovačke legende (The Legends from Dubrovnik), but its origin is medieval. It is most likely that the text was translated/adapted from a specific Italian folk source. Narration in the novel is structured multifariously with many narrators and frequent and numerous interpolations of secondary genres (eschatological visions, allegories, moral tales etc.). After the narratological analysis of the novel, the paper offers a comparison with Buddha’s traditional biography in order to discuss contact points and differences, and show the modes of transposing the Buddhist source into Christian Western code, as well as to further emphasise differences between Eastern and Western cognition and worldview. Barlaam i Jozafat (Barlaam and Josaphat) is not only a narratologically complex novel, but also the first textual testimony of the Western proto-Orientalism in Croatian literature.
Keywords
imaginarium; India; Dubrovačke legende (The Legends from Dubrovnik); medieval novel; Barlaam i Jozafat (Barlaam and Josaphat); the legend of Buddha; Buddhism; Christianization; Eastern and Western worldview
Hrčak ID:
174580
URI
Publication date:
3.12.2012.
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