}} ANDAL* |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










ANDAL*

Translation by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
 
Andal, the 9th century mystic poet of Tamil Nadu was elevated to goddess status within a few centuries of her birth. She was the only woman among the twelve Alvars who “dived deep and drowned themselves in the love of god,” implying their complete devotion to Narayana/Vishnu (The Preserver in the Hindu pantheon). The Alvars are among the earliest proponents of the bhakti movement, a devotional and socially radical form of personal worship that emerged in medieval South India and spread to the rest of the subcontinent. However, plural practices flourished under the bhakti rubric. For instance, the South Indian mystics privileged the senses of taste, touch and smell, they sang of eating, scenting, even being pawed by the Divine; while those of the North favoured hearing or seeing God.

Unique among mystics, Andal demands Vishnu takes her as his bride, not merely in spirit, but as a living maiden; she craves the ecstasy and terror of this visceral transformation. Her first work, Tiruppavai (The Path to Krishna), composed when she was thirteen, is a song of congregational worship. In Nacciyar Tirumoli (The Sacred Songs of The Lady) , her second and last work at age fifteen or sixteen, Andal sings of her individual need for spiritual and sexual congress with her chosen god, and of an abundant female desire that is explicitly sited in the body, which, too, is holy. Her work calls to question all markers of identity and boundaries as she passionately sings for bliss to enter her body and spirit.

Translators’ Note:
Nacciyar Tirumoli is a work of layered suggestion and unambiguous wild passion wedded to an overwhelming enchantment with the divine. Andal’s unconditional surrender (prabati) to Narayana-Vishnu is of such intensity and anguish that she scolds and even rages against god while demanding his caress.

Most translators concentrate on expounding Srivaishnava philosophy or render literal translations that exhibit remarkable fidelity to the original. We, however, have attempted to do something different. We concentrate on the aesthetic properties of her songs, reimagining them as lyric poems and foregrounding the metaphoric and sensory valences of her words, while keeping the more esoteric and philosophic meanings in the background, informing but never conscripting us. Our translations are very much a poet’s translations, rather than a scholar’s.
Andal composed richly alliterative, complex songs in cen (Old Tamil), largely faithful to 2 BCE-3 CE Tamil Sangam-era poetic conventions that favoured coded allusiveness. Sangam poetics meticulously charts the progression of sexual love from infatuation to fatal lovesickness. Andal largely follows this spiral though her spiritual anguish, coursing like a tongue of lava, both illuminates and devours its literal boundaries. Her shifting registers, cadences and moods exact from the translator a range of forms and voices to ground her ascending emotional and spiritual voltage.

Ravi attempts to refine a line possessed of a geometric intricacy that can speak to the tension between divine order and disorder, while Priya evolves a triple layered approach. She first does a literary translation, followed by two further levels of prizing out embedded layers of significance, eraichi /parallel and ullurai/ inset. Thus, it is hoped the body of each translated verse retains its multi-hued complexity and extends the expansive reader receptivity Andal demanded.

Priya translates Song Eight, Dark Clouds Be My Messenger:

Translating the erotic and increasingly violent but sacred Nacciyar Tirumoli was like being in a storm of grace. For a host of reasons. I worked closely with the directives of ancient Sangam era poetics that Andal largely followed. Almost each verse then is a literary kaleidoscope that gifts hidden, multiple configurations of meanings. This riddling generosity of interpretative possibilities demanded research and intuition. In my three versions of each verse, the first is the literal translation; the second, ullarai aims to unveil mythological connections while the third, eraichi, is an ‘upward’ leap of faith, it sometimes arrived as an inverse of the literal meaning.Besides, I was inspired by the lila/play and veiling/unveiling of reality essential to Srivaishava thought. Therefore, too, the enigma behind the songs could not, to my mind, be rendered in one voice or version. Finally, mystics speed along the lips of the horizon, into a vast unknown; the translator does her best to follow on falling ground, and can only attempt to touch that luminosity. Each translation, is hence, exploratory, and invites the reader to make her own connections.

In this, one of her most violent and explicit songs, Dark Clouds Be My Messenger, Andal employs a convention of Sangam love poetry by requesting monsoon clouds to act as a messenger to her love. The monsoon was the season when lovers reunited, as men returned home for the agricultural sowing season from cities or outposts of the empire. The mystical Srivaishnava tradition, which speaks of the terror and ecstasy of spiritual transformation, here reaches an apogee. As her passion consumes her she welcomes her Beloved not only as the valorous Rama, sky-crossing Trivikarama or handsome Krishna, but even in his ferocious and rarely entreated-to avatar, as the Man-Lion, Narasimha. Nothing stops Andal.
 
 
 
Song Eight, Dark Clouds Be My Messenger
 
 
Verse 2.
Massive clouds you unroll overhead showering
           Pearls and water beads on dark earth. Bounteous
Ones, what message do you bear from my ferocious Lord
           Of Vengadam where treetops tousle the sky?
As your swooping shadow deepens night’s ink
           I flare in love, afflicted, sleepless. Your softest
Southern breeze fans my passion. Help me.
           I could blaze to death.
 
 
Night hued you are, yet rain brilliance
on earth’s rustling wetness. Caress me
 
with your magical melody: bring
a message from my love. In this sooty
 
hour of longing, at its centre I burn
my body’s oil, a wick flame exposed.
 
A zephyr’s murmur makes me clamour:
What news? My flame flutters, douses.
 
 

always magnificence pours
through darkness
as blessing
yet none for me
no trace of him
on my incandescence

I am sizzle drizzled
touch untouched
extinguishing

 
 
Verse Five.
Monsoon clouds you spread and spread
              To hood earth, your torrent slashes
The sky, you shake the honey-heavy blossoms
          Of Vengadam and strew scented petals.
Go tell the dark lord who killed the demon Hiranya
          Ripping him with paws of fury
That he has robbed me of my bangles.
                    He must return them to me now.
 
 
Whirling clouds you enlarge in anger
and growl across the sky rending it open
 
with lightening. Spilling honey you tear
flowers, petals spatter like blood on earth.
 
Go to the fierce lord who roars and mauls
tossing his mane as his paws rip insides out.
 
Tell him I’m bloodied. He must heal
with long caresses, still me in his thrall.
 
 
 

engorged with anger
nails extending he kills
plunging wrists in blood

from these very hands I seek
fondling
gather in my swollen ripeness

as spilling nectar
my body’s bloodflower
bursts

 
 
 
 
I Dreamt this Dream My Friend (Varanam aayiram)
 Translation by Ravi Shankar
 
 

*Excerpted with thanks from Andal The Autobiography of a Goddess, published by Zubaan, New Delhi in 2015 and University of Chicago Press, 2016