The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology
This is a series of translations from largely Tamil, but also Sanskrit, texts, by one of the great modern poets of India, who was the greatest translator of ancient Indian poetry into modern English. It’s equivalent to Ted Hughes doing his translations from Ovid, the same sort of thing. A great modern poet taking on ancient poetry and making modern literature. It’s a very slim text – you can savour it and get the essence of it in half an hour; it’s a very quick way of getting into something extraordinary."
Also recomended by William Dalrymple
”Classical Tamil Love Poems“, Roman Nies
This book contains Love Poems from a classical Tamil Anthology of Kuruntokai. Why at all Love poems from Tamils? Because the Tamil culture is one of the eldest cultures in Asia. It was thriving already three thousand years ago and it has never ceased to flourish as far as tradition and literature is concerned. For the ancient Tamils the love between man and woman was the highest form of expression of the experience of ones own inner self. Thence love poetry was a known subject to the educated people. There are all sorts of love experiences in separation and in union, before and after marriage, in chastity and betrayal and that is what the Kuruntokai is about.
The Tamil poetry does not know rhymes, so do not expect rhymes. The translator did not introduce them either. But it knows metrical variations, assonances and inputs of symbolic language. The term inner landscape stands for the Indian countryside with which the Tamil people is connected since more than 2 thousand years (perhaps 3 thousand years!) without interruption. Symbols of nature and environment are widely used. The Tamil language itself is one of only two old Indian languages that has survived relatively unchanged from its classical times till today. Some say, it is because it was perfect and had never need to be changed. Unchanged are the people themselves. A pure race, always free and self-dependent.
And what a language they have! It is a pity that in this translation all the beauty of sound of the Tamil language is completely lost. In its contents the Tamils of old have to say the same things about love as their cousins of today!
"Love waits for you to find someone to look at!"
This book is only advisable for lovers of the Tamil literature. It is just too special!
”Superb introduction to Tamil poetry“, M. J. Smith
Interior Landscape is the book you always hope to get - a poetic translation true to the original yet understandable to the reader. This is poetry at its best exploring human relationships. The introduction provides sufficient material to appreciate the aesthetic framework under which the poetry was originally written. But one can appreciate the poetry without knowledge of its background - in fact, without even considering that it is a translation.
In translating these poems from the ancient Dravidian into English, the late A.K. Ramanujan--celebrated poet, translator, and linguist--has rendered two important services: he has introduced Indian and Western readers to an unfamiliar and fascinating literary tradition, and he has provided access to some exquisite examples of a mature classical poetry. In The Interior Landscape, as Ramanujan notes, "passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, spareness by richness of implication." The poems come from one of the earliest surviving texts of Tamil poetry, the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love lyrics probably recored during the first three centuries A.D. Seventy-six of these classical poems have here been given a modern language and form. In an effort at fidelity to the effect of the images and their placement in the original, Ramanujan has given a visual shape to the poems by typographic devices.
With an essay on Tamil poetry explaining its techniques, this collection of quiet, controlled, yet dramatic poems will enrich the understanding of all those interested in Indian poetry while providing hours of pleasure.
