Epic
Phra Lak Phra Lam
ພະລັກພະລາມ
Anonymous · 1500
Synopsis
A prince and his brother, helped by an army of monkeys, set out to free the wife abducted by a demon king. The story comes from India, but it has changed rivers: the places in the narrative are identified with real sites on both banks of the Mekong, and the hero there becomes an earlier incarnation of the Buddha.
Context
The text is recited at festivals and performed in dance theatre; it was copied on palm leaf and kept in monasteries, and many of these copies disappeared during the wars. In 1950, manuscripts that were found established that the country preserved four unknown local versions of the Indian epic; only two are complete. The hero in them is a previous life of the Buddha and not a Hindu god, and the landscape is that of the Mekong. Two modern editions exist: an abridged bilingual version given in 1972 by a Vietnamese scholar from a manuscript from Vientiane, and a critical edition established in the seventies from six parallel manuscripts.
Who it is for
A long narrative, to be read in instalments or seen performed. The French translations are partial and old.
Prizes and reception
Programmes to digitise palm-leaf manuscripts have been launched in Laos since the 1990s, with help from Germany.