Once upon a time in Madurai

Penguin Viking

Price: Rs 399

Pages: 202

Book: The River Speaks The Vaiyai Poems from the Paripatal

Tr from Tamil by VN Muthukumar and Elizabeth Rani Segran

Penguin

Price: Rs 250

Pages: 173

Book :Red Lilies and Frightened Birds

Muttollayiram

Tr from Tamil by M.L. Thangappa

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Price: Rs 299

Pages: 143

It is heartening to see a sustained interest in English translations of Tamil classical poetry,when the readership of poetry itself is claimed to be dwindling. In the last two or three years alone,there have been at least four to five major translations. They have triggered discussions,even heated arguments about their relative merits,in literary and academic circles. One wonders,then,what in these poems — written anywhere 1,500-2,000 years ago — speaks to us today across time,space,language and culture; what is it that makes the demanding task of translation worthwhile though some of these texts have been translated several times in the past 150 years or so.

M.L. Thangappa’s translation of selections from Tamil Sangam poetry,Love Stands Alone (Penguin 2010),raised some of these questions. A.K. Ramanujan’s highly popular and influential translations of Sangam poetry were published between 1965 and 1985 under three different titles,each including a larger number of poems than the previous collection. Ramanujan’s translations,though probably the best-known,are by no means the first. The long history of translation of Sangam poetry has been meticulously documented by A. Dakshinamurthy in an article in a Tamil book on Sangam literature published in 2012 by Marru Publishers. Ramnujan is often hailed for breaking the Western monopoly in the translations of Tamil classics. But Dakshinamurthy records translations as early as 1897,immediately after U.V. Swaminatha Aiyar rediscovered manuscripts of Tamil Sangam texts and had them published. Thangappa’s translations are marked by a serenity and an assurance that owe to utter familiarity with the source text. He grasps the modernity inherent in the source texts almost by habit and conveys this understanding effortlessly in his translations.

Translation very often is re-creation,interpretation and commentary rolled into one. How much interpretation and commentary goes into a particular translation is a decision that the individual translator takes,and this decision has a significant impact on the tone and tenor of the translation. But the re-creative aspect of translation is even more important. If translation is a process of merely finding equivalents for the words and phrases of the source language in the target language,there should be little difference between one translation and the other. But this is never the case,as each translation is an entirely new creation. The availability of multiple translations is a blessing for readers,providing a very rich and complex experience. One understands that translations are to be read not as competing versions but as complementary texts. Each translation offers a glimpse into a slice of Sangam poetry and each foregrounds certain qualities of this corpus of texts. And the insight each offers is complete in itself and yet forms a part of the larger whole constituted by all these texts together — a whole that is constantly being formed and re-formed — in a very Eliotian sense.

Anyone who has read Thangappa’s Love Stands Alone will not be surprised by the felicity of his translation of the Muttollayiram,a Tamil classical text dated variously to the 6th and 9th century CE. Red Lilies and Frightened Birds (Penguin,2011) is a translation of the verses of Muttollayiram — a text that extols the three major royal Tamil clans of Pandiyas,Cholas and Cheras in 300 verses each. This text,which belongs to the late-Sangam or the post-Sangam period,depending on which date of composition one accepts,has not been translated as often as Sangam texts have been. Though the conventions of Akam and Puram poetry largely control these poems too,they are,indeed,breathtaking in the way they play around with these conventions and produce startlingly fresh conceits. Thangappa’s translation,once again,goes to the heart of the experience,the emotional lay of the poem is captured in the simplest possible manner.

The River Speaks (Penguin,2012) is a translation of the Vaiyai (now known as the Vaigai) poems of the Paripadal (a text dated to either before the 3rd century or after the 6th century CE) by V.N. Muthukumar and Elizabeth Rani Segaran. The translators have chosen to translate only the eight Vaiyai verses (with an additional verse believed to belong to the text but found only in a medieval Tamil commentary). As the translators note,a regular pattern can be traced in the verses,each beginning with a description of the Vaiyai river flowing majestically from the hills to the plains,moving on to a general description of the people of Madurai thronging the river’s banks and often describing a specific situation involving lovers,before ending with a salutation to the river. This text is unique in the Tamil literary tradition in that it identifies not only the creator of each verse but also the person who set it to music in a particular pan,(a concept very close to the concept of raga) which is also specified in the colophon prefixed to the poems.

The translators have captured not only the ebb and flow of the river but also the all-engulfing emotion of love,which forms a large part of these poems. To us,the relationships that ultimately matter are the ones between the source text and the translation as well as the one between the translation and the reader. This translation of Paripadal verses has done justice to both. Extensive quotations from the commentaries of Parimelazhagar and Po.Ve. Comacuntaranar aid the uninitiated readers and translate — in the sense of “carry over” — the text closer to the reader.

There is just one little niggling issue that bothers the reader. While Thangappa’s name finds mention on the cover of Love Stands Alone,the other two texts do not acknowledge the translators on the cover. One wonders about this sudden relegation of the translators to the title page inside. One wishes,in future,to see the names of translators restored to the cover,where they rightfully belong.

K.Latha teaches at Stella Maris College,Chennai