Poems of love and war : from the Eight anthologies and the Ten long poems of classical Tamil

352 Pages·2006·43.342 MB·English

by  A. K. Ramanujan

OXFORD INDIA PAPERBACKS
POEMS OF LOVE AND WAR
SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY A . K . RAMANUJAN
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA LIBRARY
X004897685
Poems of Love and War
Poetry from the early classical Tamil ( c . 100 BC - AD 250 ) is among the finest in Indian , as well as world literature . In this volume , award - winning
poet and translator , A . K Ramanujan has selected , from the Eight Anthologies and Ten Long Poems , by a ‘ fraternity or academy ' of poets known as the
Cankam . Most amazingly , poems about the difficulties of love
( in union , separation , or infidelity ) , and poems about kings , death and destruction ; war and reconstruction , are as fresh and relevant as when they were
composed two millennia ago . Ramanujan is a meticulous translator who is faithful to the original poems : he keeps close to the structure of the poems while
clothing them with the texture of modern English . In Poems
of Love and War , poem speaks to poem with lyricism and drama , and Ramanujan ' s essay ( Afterword ) on poetry of the Cankam period is an invaluable tool in
studying the Tamil world - view and its relation to poetry and poetics . This edition has a new preface by
Molly A . Daniels - Ramanujan .
A . K . Ramanujan ( 1929 – 1993 ) , acclaimed poet and translator , was William E .
Colvin Professor at the University of Chicago , and taught at various other institutions for forty years . He was awarded a Padma Shri in 1976 and a
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1983 . He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and won a posthumous prize from the
Sahitya Akademi for poetry in English . He wrote in Kannada three books of poetry and a novella . He also wrote Folktales from India and The Flowering Tree .
He translated classical and medieval poetry ( Speaking of Shiva , Poems of Love and War , Hymns for the Drowning ) , as well as
fiction ( Samskara , Haldi Meenu ) .
Books in English by A . K . Ramanujan
Poetry The Striders ( 1966 ) Relations ( 1971 ) Selected Poems ( 1976 ) Second Sight ( 1986 ) Collected Poems ( 1995 ) The Oxford India Ramanujan ( 2004 )
Translations The Interior Landscape : Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology ( 1967 ) Speaking of Siva , Kannada vacana poems by Virasaiva saints (
1973 ) Samskara : A Rite for a Dead Man , a Kannada novel by U . R . Anantha Murthy ( 1976 ) Hymns for the Drowning : Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar ,
translated from Tamil ( 1981 ) Folktales from India : A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty - two Languages ( 1991 )
Co - authored and Co - edited Books The Literature of India : An Introduction ( 1974 ) , with Edward Dimock Jr . and others Another Harmony : New Essays on
the Folklore of India ( 1986 ) , with Stuart Blackburn When God is a Customer : Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others ( posthumous , 1994 ) , with
V . Narayana Rao and David Shulman The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry ( posthumous , 1994 ) , with Vinay Dharwadker
Posthumous The Black Hen in Collected Poems ( 1995 ) The Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India ( 1997 ) Collected Essays ( 1999 ) Uncollected
Poems and Prose ( 2000 ) Oxford India Ramanujan ( 2004 ) Poems and a Novella ( 2006 )
Poems of Love and War
from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems
of Classical Tamil
selected and translated
by
A . K . Ramanujan
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in India by Oxford University Press , New Delhi
Copyright © Columbia University Press 1985
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First published by Columbia University Press 1985 Published in India by Oxford University Press 1985
Oxford India Paperbacks 1999
New edition 2006
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ISBN - 13 : 978 - 0 - 19 - 5680189 - 8
ISBN - 10 : 0 - 19 - 568089 - 8
Printed in India by Pauls Press , New Delhi 110 020
Published by Manzar Khan , Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building , Jai Singh Road , New Delhi 110 001
for Helen and Milton Singer
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Preface
A great translator has the gift of two languages , as well as a third language , the language of the heart . He must also have an intimate knowledge of the known
poetry of the world ; he must develop quadruple lenses , two for the life lived in the moment , and two for the life of another time , and another place ; he must
allow the work to transform his own self . His devotion to his work might make him stumble on earth , and he might not be spared ignominy ; he must learn to
rise above loss and gain . Having been to the paradise of poetry , how could he possibly bear to walk on earth ?
A translator has to be a poet in training . He must find mentors growing on every bush . In 1961 , Ramanujan attended Samuel Yellen ' s poetry writing workshop
. One assignment required rhymed couplets , but then Yellen would say , " Now throw out the rhymes . ' In case a rhyme refused to budge , it could be buried
discreetly within the line . It was important to start by thinking in verse with end - words , as William Blake did , but it was equally important to be listening to
one ' s own spoken voice . With the exception of Robert Frost , modern poets found English to be notoriously deficient in rhymes ; they compensated by opening
their ears to the music of spoken English , mostly iambic .
The manner in which Ramanujan , the poet , was transformed during the twenty - two years of daily work on the world ' s greatest anthologies of love and war (
100 BC to 250 AD ) , and some of the greatest mystical
vii
poems from medieval Tamil ( 900 AD ) and medieval Kannada ( 1 , 200 AD ) cannot easily be described here . It can only be suggested .
Not unlike cats , poetry has nine lives in the life of a translator . Ramanujan ' s most important apprenticeship began in 1962 when he started translating the love
poems from two thousand years ago . His writing self responded as to a clarion to the sage instructions in Tolkapiyum , a grammar of rhetoric , written by
Tolkappiyar ( second century AD ) . The Cankam ( academy ) became his alma mater . As he worked on into middle age , the Poems of Love and War , from the
Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil , renewed him many times . Ramanujan has described how he came to receive this gift from his
ancestors .
The translations gave Ramanujan a key to his own creativity . He was not pursuing art for art ' s sake , but for his own life ' s sake , especially as he was far from
home , and in a colder , lonelier land .
Thus , the most profound shaping influences of his literary career ( in the order of their completion ) are to be seen in : 1 ) love poems from the classical Tamil
Anthology ( The Interior Landscape , 1967 ) ; 2 ) medieval Kannada metaphysical poems by four Virasaiva saints ( Speaking of Siva , 1973 ) ; 3 ) Tamil
medieval metaphysical poems by Nammalvar ( Hymns for the Drowning , 1981 ) ; and 4 ) the present volume from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long
Poems of Classical Tamil ( Poems of Love and War , 1985 ) . As stated above , his work on this last volume stretched over two decades .
I do believe that readers who become attuned to the speaking voice used here , who understand the structure of these poems , can experience the same alchemy
as did the translator ; that any artist ( whether musician , painter , poet , or story teller ) who works their way daily through these four books would find his own
gifts deepened and shaped to create new works at his highest potential . Just as Ramanujan ' s search for his own voice went from Colonial to Pre - Colonial ,
there is no predicting where your quest will lead you .
In 1962 , there were no readable translations of Cankam poetry . A few archaic attempts existed , but those yellowing pages were hard to read . Unlike the earlier
attempts by those before him , Ramanujan used everyday spoken English , and more importantly , he translated the structure of a poem rather than translating at
the sentence level . The
viji
structure and texture of the lyrics were found to be inseparable . Though Ramanujan was not by any means a brilliant linguist , linguistics also served him well ,
for the discipline gave him the necessary tools for analysing poetry as may be seen in the Afterword .
Ramanujan ' s strength as a poet lay in his natural instinct for figurative language . Added to this , he was at home with a wide range of poets ; in his Chicago
days , he went every day to the Harriet Munro poetry collection at the University of Chicago . He added to his familiar poets ( Shakespeare , the metaphysical
poets , the Augustans , and the poetry of W . B . Yeats ) , new ones ( Wallace Stevens , William Carlos Williams , and Cesar Vallejo ) . Actually , he read most
poets , not because they were great but because they were there . Poetry became his neurotransmitter . By inclination he was a lapidarian , but he could be tutored
on how the turns in a poem came out of the structure , and most of all , he began to hear the spoken flow of his own voice .
With the marriage of traditional form and the language of modern usage the greatness of classical Tamil literature became evident to readers . In Ramanujan ' s
translation , the botanical ‘ myrobalan ' of the earlier translators became the familiar ‘ gooseberry ' , even though botanically it might have been a myrobalan . I
like to think of the present volume as belonging to the “ gooseberry school of translating Cankam poetry .
As he continued to work on Poems of Love and War , his own poems began to be able to say the most complicated things with a minimum of words . He learned
to draw on place and time , and person in the best tradition of drawing from akam ( interior ) and puram ( exterior ) landscapes . He learned to use the telling
detail from time and place to catch a dramatic situation in his own poems .
In this anthology , poem speaks to poem , and they respond to other poems . It would be hard to find another anthology of Love Poetry or of War Poetry to match
the lyricism and drama of the poems in this anthology .
MOLLY A . DANIELS - RAMANUJAN