518
PARTISAN REVIEW
poems-or rather the translations-themselves . Looking, as always,
for the original, of course. The whole venture depends not upon the
authority or intelligence of the surrounding information but upon
the qualities of the translations themselves. And inevitably what we
find in Mr. Ramanujan's work is not the original but a representa–
tion projected from the assumptions and conventions of contem–
porary English poetry. His credentials as a Tamil scholar appear to
be flawless, as far as a complete lay person can judge, and he has
devoted himself to the study and translation of the classical poems
for years. He is at the same time deeply versed in contemporary
poetry and criticism in English .
The result is a collection of Tamil translations that , as his
earlier volume
The Interior Landscape
did , affords a fresh , vivid,
readable, and delightful glimpse of the poetry of a great tradition .
The distances the poems have had to traverse, from one age and
context, as well as from one language to another, are vast, and they
multiply the problems of such translation. The tone of the originals
must have contained many shades of formality that cannot even be
suggested by the English of our time and mores . Mr. Ramanujan's
essay indicates the nature of some of these formalities and their role
in the poems. He has not attempted to reproduce in English the
metrical forms of the originals - a wise choice, I think, for such
forms are in fact a part not only of the original conventions but of the
original language itself.
Since the Tamil poems, when they were composed, were not
written at all but were part of a rich, complex oral tradition, Mr.
Ramanujan has evolved a light, rapid verse, with short lines which
suggest the pace of speech and voice . Sometimes the lightness is such
that the lines have no substance individually and read as prose . And
the English occasionally seems colloquial in ways inconsistent not
only with the original conventions he has suggested but with his own
style as a whole. Yet the translations are a pleasure to read and
to
listen to, as oral poems have to be. Translations such as this one
make Mr. Ramanujan's work a gift to the Tamil tradition and to
contemporary poetry in English:
