Description
A Festschrift is often limited by the lack of a unifying theme and the need for all those included to have some personal connection with the scholar honored by the volume. But A Gift of Tamil–within its modest bounds–is an innovative contribution to Tamil studies, showing a continuity and quality based on the stylistic decisions of its editors and on the fact that K. Paramasivam (who died shortly after the publication of this volume) was well known to many elder and younger scholars of Tamil, who contributed their work in his honor. Norman Cutler and Paula Richman have restricted their selections to translations in modern, idiomatic English that attempt to convey a literary sense of the originals that they have chosen from a wide, though by no means definitive, range of Tamil literary sources, both ancient and modern. The importance and originality of this slim volume is therefore that it offers–generally at a high level of competence and literary skill–some sense of the longevity and richness of a two-thousand-year-old continuous tradition.
Though brief introductions are provided for the literary genres and individual pieces and the translators have added a minimum of annotation, the value of the book rests in the translations themselves, with their varying worth and diverse strategies. The late A. K. Ramanujan–whose recent, untimely death cut short a rich flow of poems and poetry translations–is represented by two selections, a sequence of poems from the Tiruvaymoli, by the Vaishnava poet-saint Nammalvar (9th-10th centuries A.D.), and the prose-poem Wind by the early modern poet, Subramania Bharati. The sequence from the Tiruvaymoli certainly reflects Ramanujan’s great rhythmic…
