Nectar in a Sieve

A fine anthology captures the achievements of Tamil poetry from the Sangam period to contemporary times

My great complaint about this book is that it is too slim. Can 200 pages distil the essence of over two millennia, of a literature the second oldest in India? It is like catching the waters of a great river in a sieve.

However, the sieve is finely fashioned and captures the fish, which is the point. Let me abandon metaphor. The highlight of this collection is the Sri Lankan Tamil poets, whom I have not read before. They must sound powerful in the original. The contrast with their peers on the mainland is marked. Tamil poets write using the centuries-old images of love and a living world. Eelam poets use those same techniques to write of war, despair and desolation.

To begin at the beginning: The Sangam poets, and the Alvars and Nayanmars who follow, are well known. This is AK Ramanujan’s reward. His method was to ‘let the poetry win’, as the editors quote him in their translators’ note. That means not sticking to line, or metre, or ‘visual topography’. They have felicitously succeeded in this throughout this collection.

I skip part one, which holds (it bursts at the seams) pre-modern poetry, although there is so much there worth dwelling upon. Part two begins with Subramania Bharati, that man of many parts, to whom I hope a volume will be devoted by Penguin. It is high time that 20th century Tamil poets became known worldwide, and Katha, for instance, have concerned themselves solely with fiction.

From Bharati onwards, the line can be traced without a break, though there are at least three distinct shifts of tone and emphasis. The mainland poets’ concern with the ‘self’, their introspective I-centred view, may be summed up (I have to be simplistic, for reasons of space) by Anandh’s poem, Timelessness:

It’s nothing to a tree/ if a leaf drops./ It is nothing to the earth/ if a tree falls./ It is nothing to the universe
if the earth is wiped out./ It’s nothing to me/ if the universe disappears.

The Lankan poets, in contrast, are full of a burning anger and sense of helplessness, directed both within and without. This is the last stanza of Cheran’s poem Rajini, on a Jaffna University lecturer who was shot:

As you fell/ the sun’s last rays/ threw upon the wall your shadow:/ your waving hand rising higher/ and higher/ beyond the horizon.

The Lankan poets and the Tamil both use not only the stories of Sangam and later poetry (the lament of Pari’s daughters; the retelling of Ahalya’s story and of Nandanar’s life) but also their highly sophisticated imagery. The editors’ Introduction is an excellent guide to the methods and styles, the worldview, on which Tamil poetry still securely rests.

Increasingly, Tamil poetry is becoming known through the women who practise the art. This anthology represents them becomingly, and also the Dalit poets who speak a different language from classical Tamil. It is called The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, but I should not venture so far. It is only an introduction. Nearly every poet here needs 15 or 20 pages; even Bharatiyar has only five.

Ramanujan’s translations need no praise. All the rest are at least competent. Holmstrom’s own are beautifully lyrical, and form a nice counterpoint to the matter-of-fact renditions by her co-editors. But I have a quarrel with some of the transliterations: ‘ii’ for the ‘ee’ sound and ‘uu’ for ‘oo’ are difficult to digest, at least without a word of explanation.

Poetry is not always what is lost in translation. This book, this sieve, succeeds in holding a quantity of nectar.

Vijay Nambisan’s translations from late medieval Kerala, Puntanam and Melpattur, Two Measures of Bhakti (Penguin Classics ), have just been published

About The Author

Vijay Nambisan