from Kuruntokai

Part of the Ettukotai (ie., the eight ancient anthologies of Tamil poetry), the Kuruntokai is an anthology of short lyrics ranging from four to eight lines in length.  There is already a fairly long chain of translations of these poems available in English, starting with A.K. Ramanujan's iconic translations of the 1960s, going through to the most recently published versions by M.L. Thangappa (Viking Penguin, 2010); so my versions, even as I work from the Tamil originals, are inevitably done in self-conscious conversation with the other English works, responding, borrowing, critiquing, inverting.

My concern has been to highlight and clarify specific and intense qualities that I perceive in the original: their incredible compression and economy, their mysterious and elliptical nature, and their ability to cut deftly between a "cool", more cerebral mode of (often visual) imagery and a startlingly direct, unadorned, spoken, performative voice.  The latter is often heard in the Tamil almost as a shout—this is difficult to get right in English—in the same kind of language that you would hear on a street today.

I have removed the colophons that Ramanujan famously rendered as "What he said...", "What she said..." etc.  These are definitely part of the anthology; however, there is a widespread agreement among scholars that they came at a later stage.  It's true that interpretation and critical thought was important to the poets of the "Sangam" and post-Sangam eras.  The pseudonymous poems, with recurring images in conversation with each other, are often slyly as much about poetry itself as anything else; and there has even been a rich folklore around Sangam literary criticism—as with the tale of Nakkeerar, a poet who stuck to his critique of the lack of precision in a line even after it was discovered to have been written by Shiva himself.  Nevertheless, there are also infamous examples where the colophons get so creative that you wonder if they were deliberately inserted as parodies by some Sangam-era Nabokov.  Kuruntokai 157, for instance, "kookoo said the cock..." carries the colophon: "What the wife said at the onset of her period".

I felt that leaving out the colophons might help the resounding ambiguity and sense of possibility that I see in the poems.  This is the spirit that informs my versions more generally as well.  Earlier translators have tended to add things in the translation, perhaps as a way of glossing or trying to explain echoes inline—Ramanujan's translation of poem 28 ("I want to get up and break things..."), for instance, contains an image of a bull that is not there in the original.  I have occasionally ended up leaving things out.