There is something about poetry that appeals to me, even though I have a tough time understanding poems because they are never straightforward. There is plenty of subtext that interpreters have to explain to me. Even worse the situation is when the poems are from the old days. Centuries old. In those cases, I need translators before I can seek the help of interpreters.
Tamil literature has poems in plenty from the Sangam era. But, that classical Tamil is not the Tamil that we speak now and, therefore, is well beyond my intellectual abilities. It is a tragedy that decades under European colonial powers interrupted the transmission of knowledge down the generations through a simple act of imposing a new language as the official language. That interruption meant that Shakespeare became well known to many young students for whom the local masters of the past were practically non-existent.
Reading David Shulman's biography of Tamil a couple of years ago was, thus, a pleasure because, for one, he presented in English the history of the language along with samples of great works of literature. It was a feast unlike any.
Many of the classical works are religious as well, which is how I am at least familiar with the names of a few poets and their works. Nammālvār's Tiruvāymoli is one of those. Who hasn't heard of the name Nammālvār. But, how many of us have read more than a couple of lines of his Tiruvāymoli?
Archana Venkatesan has done us a huge favor by translating into English Nammālvār's Tiruvāymoli. The 528-page book includes a foreword by, yes, David Shulman. A review essay in The New York Review of Books was how I came to know about this translation.
Venkatesan has a Pattamadai connection too! A couple of months ago, in the depths of the pandemic that precluded my annual travel to the old country, one night I googled for "Pattamadai." One of the links led me to this blog post, which was about the blogger--Archana Venkatesan--visiting her ancestral village--Pattamadai--for the first time. She writes there:
This is the village, deep in beautiful ten-Pandya Nadu, where my maternal grandfather was born and raised. This was where he studied, gaining life-skills that pulled him and his family out of difficult circumstances to forge a better life for all of them. This is where my paternal grandmother studied, where my paternal great-great-grandfather helped run a school. Where my uncles and aunts studied.
I emailed her that night. I wrote:
I understand from your post that your grandparents and elders lived in "mela theru." My grandmother's home was in "keezha theru"--almost at the very end and near the Shivan Koil. I have spent many summers in Pattamadai during my childhood years; the last time I was there was 10 to 15 years ago. I have been to mela theru only once: When I was a kid, my father took me there to visit with his friend, Sankaran, who was also visiting from Bombay.
In her reply, Venkatesan noted that until the pandemic hit she had been going to Tirunelveli every year for 15 years for her professional work. An academic, a Tamil scholar, based in the US, who unearths for us the lost works and also translates for our understanding the old classical literature. How fantastic!
After reading the NYRB essay, I immediately wrote to her. In her reply, Venkatesan included a link to her latest project, which is "to produce a complete, scholarly, fully annotated literary English translation of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa of Kampaṉ."
The ever curious me wanted to know more about her collaborators in this multi-year project. In addition to Shulman, there was another name that I recognized: Aniruddhan Vasudevan. Vasudevan translated into English Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman.
We owe a great deal to these scholars who are keeping the classics alive.
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