The association between “pembayang” and “pemaksud” of Malay pantun / Tran Thuy Anh

The pantun as a form of traditional Malay poetry was very popular in the world. It plays an important role in Malay literature because of its preeminence and poetry. In term of style, pantun is manifested as a prosody abab. In term of content, each line of poetry is divided into two parts: pembayang and pemaksud. This is a correlation between the image and the realization of that image, which, even when there exist independent images, symbolize one meaning that is not directly expressed in both the pembayang and pemaksud. We realized that the clues and the meaning have a close connection with each other, based on the philosophy of Oriental people in general and the Malay in particular. From the perception of the Oriental people, they consider “human as a small universe; human and the earth are united”. Malay Pantun has some similarity with Vietnamese folk songs (ca dao Vi͏t Nam) in which the nature is expressed clearly in both the two genres. The Vietnamese folk songs are the crystallization of Vietnamese people and are a genuine beauty of Vietnamese traditional culture. In terms of the perceptions, Vietnamese folk songs and Malay pantun are the reflection of objectivity and reality of the two peoples’ behaviours, customs and traditions through the images of the nature, lifestyle, national traditions and the community relations. In both folk songs and pantun, the nature is significantly expressed, which can be explained by the special behaviours of Vietnamese and Malaysian people to the nature. The nature had become an indispensable factor in their spiritual life and the behavioural culture of Vietnamese people