词源 |
Mahabharata; Ramayana. One of the longest poems in the world is the Mahabharata, which tells the story of the descend- ants of the Hindu King Bharata. Mahabharata means “the great Bharata,” and the poem’s 110,000 couplets, or 220,000 lines, make it four times longer than the Bible and eight times longer than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. The Indian poem is really the combined work of many generations of writers, writ- ten between the years 400 b.c. and 150 b.c. Though its main theme is the war between descendants of Kuru and Pandu, it is a vast repository of philosophy and legend. The Ramayana, named after the god Rama, is another great Indian epic poem, containing 24,000 stanzas in seven books as we know it today. Still another claimant for the longest poem is The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi—at 257,000 lines. |