Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan teaches poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University. His books of poems include After (New York Review Books, July 2022) Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S. A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books, Aroop and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019.

Translator’s Reflections

The Kuruntokai (lit. “Shorts Anthology”) is one of the Ettuthokai, or “Eight Anthologies” of classical/ foundational Tamil literature, variously and unreliably dated to between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D., reaching back into the oral tradition. It is an anthology dedicated solely to the art of the short poem, by definition between 4 and 8 lines—except for one or two 9-liners which seem to have crept in. These are poems where the protagonists’ names are never mentioned, and so by critical label, are akam—or poems of the “interior spaces”. However, many of them in fact explore in excruciating detail the relationship between the interior and the exterior, the personal and the public. Above all, in the way the four hundred and one poems seem to worry and riff off each other’s images, with a rich and playful critical dialogue running alongside, they are, deeply, poems about poetry itself. The classical anthologies and the Kuruntokai in particular have had a profound and direct influence on every subsequent layer of Tamil poetry, from the medieval saints through to the modernists and contemporary avant-gardists. But, perhaps because of their frank eroticism, studious lack of interest in religion, and deep sympathies for lovers and the less powerful, they were shunned and suppressed for centuries, stunningly rediscovered only in the early 20^th.

The most iconic translations of poems from this anthology remain those done primarily in the late 1960s by the poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993). Ramanujan’s visionary Poundian reinventions, reissued in 2014 by New York Review Books, are powerful enough to have entered the general language through more than one title of an Indian English novel—Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, for instance. Ironically, their very success may have made it harder for further translations of classical Tamil poetry, and especially of the Kuruntokai, to grow in their shade. Ramanujan himself only translated a very small selection of the four hundred and one poems in the Kuruntokai; and to date there are only two available translations of the entire anthology, neither convincing to me as poetry in English. In reading the whole anthology in sequence, one begins to truly see the complex and winking ways the poems talk to and deepen each other.

I first discovered Ramanujan’s versions, with tremendous excitement, in my late teens. For at least a couple of decades, his poems simply stood in for the originals in my head; it was only when I began to look at other translations of the same material that I saw that there might be more to the story, more to look at, more to do, and further that he had often radically rearranged the poems from within. Ramanujan makes no bones about this; in his introduction, he argues for the visual exploding of the poems on the page as not “arbitrary” but “as a way of indicating the design of the original”. He notes that a poem of four lines might become ten lines in his translation and urges the reader to note the poems’ original tight, box-like shapes.

Ramanujan offers us powerful ways of looking in, almost a kind of x-ray vision, but in offering his own distinct interpretive maps, in developing narrative scenarios over splicing and enjambment, he sometimes closes off other possible readings and circuits in the work, hiding great mysteries, obliquities and gaps that confound scholars to this day. Thus began my own long journey, first by comparing English translations, then crawling into Tamil glosses and eventually having the great benefit of Eva Wilden’s magisterial two-volume critical edition of the poems that appeared in 2010. Wilden returns to any still-available original palm-leaf manuscripts to compare variations and check the work of U V Swaminatha Iyer done nearly a century earlier; she provides authoritative Tamil and transliterated texts, presents annotations summarizing scholarly discussions and uncertainties around the poems and word-for-word vocabularies along with functional translations. Her translation is not pretty and not meant to be; rather, it is “a tool that lays open the difficulties of interpretation”. It is Wilden’s edition that I work slowly from now, and its detailed apparatus allows me to enter the original poems until I can begin to hear them fluidly from within, their vocabulary and phrasing sometimes alien but every now and then startlingly familiar and close to contemporary Tamil speech, their dazzling and sometimes harsh use of enjambment, their rich tapestry of internal rhyme, the dance of the akaval metre and, above all, the poems’ sometimes extreme and intense minimalism, with just a few words in every line.

It is this astonishing economy of expression—where often, the more you reread a poem the more mysterious it becomes—that I find myself exploring above all in my own translations. If previous translations tended to rearrange the poems towards quick comprehension, smooth over their sharp and startling switches between hot speech and cold, quiet imagery, and inevitably unpack a terse poem gently into a greater number of lines, I have attempted to provide a rawer, closer experience, pushing as far as I can without breaking comprehension. As I work my way steadily through the anthology, 69 poems drafted and 332 to go, I have worked by the following general principles:

• No colophons or titles: In the original anthology, as well as in some translations, there are colophons indicating both the speaker and the generic situation of a poem. The scholarly consensus is that these are later editorial interventions; often they occlude more than illuminate. (See for instance discussions of the colophons by David Shulman in his Tamil: A Biography and A R Venkatachalapathy in his introduction to the anthology Love Stands Alone.) Even the labeling of the gender of the speaker is not particularly necessary. I have kept only the poem number and attributed author.

• No punctuation, as in the original. I have used caesuras and capital letters (to mark beginnings of sentences) where necessary.

• Keep the same number of lines as the original and follow the order of images and ideas as closely as possible, and syntax wherever possible.

• Preserve or echo the enjambments as much as possible: one of the most interesting features of these poems, especially in relation to other classical traditions, is just how much they use enjambment in daring and illuminating ways, leaping ideas and sense over the metrically determined line, connecting different parts of the poem as if by a circuit but also making sudden shifts and cuts.

• Make the poems sound good and test their legibility through oral performance.