A Comparative Vision Between Bharata and Aristotle

• Main Author: Sergio Armando Rentería Alejandre
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 2013-05-01
• Series: Acta Poética
• Subjects: retórica comparada, India y Grecia, alamkaras, Bharata, Aristóteles.
• Online Access: https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/acta-poetica/index.php/ap/article/view/397

The forms of love in India are as complex as in the rest of cultures; especially when they are reflected in literature. One of the tasks of Indian literary poets about these forms is concentrated on the cultural and the social field. The Indian lyric poetry reflects images which go beyond linguistic structural morphosyntactic forms. For both Indian and Greek theorists and poets it is very important not only the structural form of poetry but also the images in it. With this I refer to alamkaras or rhetoric figures, as it is usual translate them thanks to all poetic Greek tradition, of which Aristotle, with his Poetics and Rhetorics, is the representative maximum. The rupaka or metaphor is a figure very used by both Indian and Greek poets. The stylistic reach of rupaka or metaphor manages to transcend into theoretical and poetical texts. In this sense, into this essay I set out a comparison between the definition of metaphor in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetorics and the definition of rupaka in Bharata’s Natyashastra, treatise about playwriting, very important for the studies on Indian theater as well as for those on Indian poetry. All this comparative theory helps me to find the aim of metaphor into Sanskrit poetry, through the vision of Aristotle and Bharata, thanks to the poetic reach of rupaka or metaphor.