Walter Couvreur (1914-1996)

Without any doubt the most knowledgeable person and the most charismatic guru I ever came across. Who, having had the good kismet to have been able to attend his classes, would ever forget the abundance of facts, theories and stories showered into one's veins by Professor Couvreur?

Having obtained doctorates in Oriental (1936) and Classical Philology (1938), Couvreur joined Ghent University in 1938, reading Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages and General Linguistics. In 1954, as the first President of the Volksunie (a Flemish Nationalist political party), he co-authored the first federalist constitution of the Belgian state, leaving politics shortly later, devoting the rest of his career to the pioneering studies of the Hittite and Tokharian languages.

For three consecutive years I had the good luck of being able to have weekly one-on-ones with him, my at first sight somewhat aloof but extremely warm-hearted master, reading BHS (Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit), Turfanian (Tokharian A) and Kuchean (Tokharian B) Buddhist fragments and texts. In these, I quickly discovered that Professor Couvreur was not merely a linguist, but also an exquisite Buddhologist, and a storyteller with bravo: I shall never forget his many musings on the adventures of his teachers, co-discoverers and decipherers of the Tokharian languages (1908), Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling, or his enthralling retellings, in that famous declamatory voice of his, of so many stories from Buddhist lore. Having obtained my degree, I simply couldn't stop seeing him, and I continued reading Tokharian fragments and Pali texts with him, in private tuition sessions, both at the university campus and at his magnificent museum-like patrician mansion in the heart of the old town of Antwerpen.

What struck me most of all, at the time, in the discovery of Hittite and Tokharian cultures, was the fact that cultural migrations and cultural hybridity has always been an inherent fact of humanity, and that there is, most literally, neither East nor West, Border nor Breed nor Birth (to speak with Kipling), when global history is seen through the lens of a truly culturally unbiased historiography. Is Buddhist culture actually Greek? Or: to what degree is Greek culture actually Asian? - these were the kind of questions Professor Couvreur and I pondered over, and out of this came, easily, the conclusion that human culture is and has always been and shall always be: hybrid, dynamic, cosmopolitan.

Walter Couvreur's flabbergasting collection of (antiquarian) manuscripts and books was auctioned at Amberes Veilingen in Antwerpen in 1997 - and a good few of them can today be consulted at the Dunya/IBS Knowledge Centre in Bayt al-Andalus.

Links:

Walter Couvreur - Emil Sieg - Hittite - Tokharian - Public Library - Huis Happaert

- Francis Laleman -