Translator's Note
Between 1831-41, King Rama III of Thailand, then Siam, ordered the expansion of Wat Pho, a sprawling Buddhist temple-complex beside the Grand Palace in Bangkok. As part of his vision, he had the wat’s galleries affixed with over one thousand stelae. It was an age that anticipated the rise of Western influence in the region, bringing with it both industrialization and imperialism. In an effort to preserve his people's traditional culture, the monarch had the day's knowledge in the arts and sciences inscribed onto these stone tablets and publicly displayed—treatises on such subjects as geography, literature, religion, and medicine.
Out of the many texts that would comprise this stone library, the King entrusted his elder brother, Prince Dechadisorn, a respected statesman and his chief secretariat, with assembling a single, authoritative version of the Lokanit (from loka, “world,” and niti, “law, code”) or Guide to the World, a collection of over four hundred verse proverbs, from several older recensions extant in the royal court. It's unclear when these older versions of the Lokanit were originally composed, but they represent a shared tradition of gnomic literature that includes Burma, where similar texts bearing the same title also exist, and a number of verses can also be traced to more ancient Sanskrit and Pali sources from the Indian subcontinent. Working from those older Thai recensions, His Highness polished existing poems to make them more technically precise and added variations and verses of his own.
Professing to offer instruction on subjects both spiritual and mundane, the Lokanit has since become a classic of Thai literature. Today it is taught and memorized in school, referenced in popular culture, and read as a primer on traditional values. With its enormous cast of characters, which includes not only people from all walks of life, but also local plants and animals, the Lokanit also gives a panoramic view of pre-modern Southeast Asia. I stop short of idealizing the poems’ supposed wisdom as timeless or universal, however, as they also reflect the prejudices of their day—such as in their attitude towards women, who often appear in the proverbs as faithless, among other negative characterizations.
In 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) entered the “epigraphic archives” of Wat Pho’s stelae, including the poems of the Lokanit, into its Memory of the World Register of mankind's documentary heritage, which includes writings and illustrations of singular historical importance. For ten days preceding the New Year, the monastery celebrated the honor with performances of classical dance and theater at stages scattered across its grounds. At one of the stages, three students from the College of Dramatic Arts—a young lady flanked by two gentlemen—each dressed in elegant court attire, chanted poems from the Lokanit, elongating each syllable in the languorous way traditional Thai verse is meant to be performed. The students' voices rose high and crisp into the warm evening, and I could hear the poems take shape in the air without seeing them on the page: alternating long and short lines punctuated with rhymed syllables, the lilting tones of the Thai language regulated into different positions. I was struck by how the sophisticated and epigrammatic khlōng sī suphāp stanza used by Thai poets for centuries could transform even practical advice into memorable verse.
In the original Thai, the four lines of each quatrain are divided by caesurae into eight half-lines of between four and two syllables each. For my translations, I have found it practical to treat all but the first two half-lines of each stanza as individual lines in themselves. I also imitated their alternating lengths, as well as aimed for three A-rhymes and two B-rhymes in the same places as the original (though this was more a guiding principle than a hard rule). Finally, I have not shied away from embracing at times an old-fashioned word or turn-of-phrase (like the inverted syntax that begins “The Cobra and the Scorpion” and “The Sweetest Thing”) in order to playfully affect the pedantic tone of the original.
Noh Anothai