I was amazed to find allusions and symmetry working together to create a trapdoor in each poem.
The simplicity of the verses in the translations is deceptive. Each poem is a short monologue or half of a dialogue, part of an unfolding drama, but is self-contained, a glistening snapshot of a particular moment. These poems revolve around a love affair with a cast of five speakers: the heroine (in Tamil, talaivi) and hero ( talaivan), her friend, her mother, and his mistress. Reading this work was not only an opportunity for me to walk into Tamil with a brilliant guide, it represented a chance to roam in the genius of a community of poets and scholars in ancient India.Ĭankam (pronounced “Sangam”) means community, and the poems in Ku runtokai are a formal genre called akam written by many different poets based on a common poetic language of five landscapes, with corresponding symbolism in the specific plants, animals, bodies of water, occupations, seasons, and more in each. Ramanujan’s translations of Kur untokai, an anthology of love poems from the Cankam era of Tamil poetry, illuminate the beauty of both languages. I didn’t have to look hard to find a compelling doorway. I turned to learning my mother tongue and attempting translations with the hope of finding a door through which I might reconcile these two movements in my own writing. In my work of distilling English in my poetry, I had begun to notice my many refusals to use foreign words and syntactic differences, which often correspond to my thoughts stemming from Indian philosophy. Wittgenstein wrote “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This wasn’t exactly the reason I set about learning and translating Tamil, the language of my south Indian heritage, but I admit that I liked the idea of pushing back the limits.