Poet, translator, and folklorist, A.K. Ramanujan has been recognized as the world's most profound scholar of South Asian language and culture. This book brings together for the first time, thirty essays on literature and culture written by Ramanujan over a period of four decades. It is the product of the collaborative effort of a number of his colleagues and friends. Each section is prefaced by a brief critical introduction and the volume includes notes on each essay as well as a chronology of Ramanujan's books and essays.
Brings Poems And Essays That Could Not Be Published In The Literature Of A.K. Ramanuja Who Speaks About Exile, The Politics Of Language, Being A Bilingual Poet And A Trilingual Translatior. Divided Under Three Headings-Uncollected Poems- Two Interviews-Uncollected Prose-Index Of Title- Index Of First Lines.
A.K. Ramanujan Represents The Quintessential Indian English Poet Engaged In A Relentless Quest For Self In The Welter Of Tradition And Contemporary Reality As Well As That For A Well-Adapted Poetic Idiom. His Poetry Refracts The Essential Indian Sensibility Fused Artistically With The Temper Of Modernity. Ramanujan Emerges Out Of His Artistic Predicament To A State Of Creative Freedom By Means Of Cultivating A Uniquely Personal Idiom. It Is Within This Thematic And Linguistic Framework That Ramanujan S Poetry Projects A Self Assuming A Number Of Identities In Time, Rendering The Quality Of Transparence.Applying Closely Textual, Formal, Socio-Cultural, Philosophic, Imagistic And Post-Colonial Approaches Of Literary Appreciation And Analysis, The Essays In The Present Anthology Take A Fresh Look At Ramanujan S Poetry, Revealing Aspects Of Study Hitherto Unexplored, Offer Critically Incisive And Insightful Probes Into Different Collections Of Poems And Examine In Depth The Deployment Of Images, Symbols And Other Poetic And Rhetorical Devices.An Indispensable Source-Book For Students, Researchers And Teachers Of Indian English And Commonwealth Literature In General And Poetry And A.K. Ramanujan In Particular.
This classic anthology of translations has long been out of print. The poems come from one of the earliest surviving texts of Tamil poetry, the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love lyrics probably recorded during the first three centuries AD. Seventy-six of these classical poems have here beengiven a modern language and form. In an effort at fidelity to the effect of the images and their placement in the original, Ramanujan has given a visual shape to the poems by typographic devices. An essay on Tamil poetry explains its techniques and enriches the reader's pleasure in these quiet, controlled, yet dramatic poems.
Poet, translator, and folklorist, A. K. Ramanujan has been recognized as the world's most profound scholar of South Asian language and culture. This omnibus collection brings all of his diverse poetic output in one volume. It will enable readers and scholars to see much more easily the interconnectedness of his work in different genres--original poetry and scholarly translations--and different languages.
This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted. With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could--servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales. With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer.
The Vacanas Or Free-Verse Lyrics Written By Four Major Saints Of The Great Bhakti Protest Movement Which Originated In The Tenth Century Ad. Composed In Kannada, A Dravidian Language Of South India, The Poems Are Lyrical Expressions Of Love For The God Siva. They Mirror The Urge To Bypass Tradition And Ritual, To Concentrate On The Subject Rather Than The Object Of Worship, And To Express Kinship With All Living Things In Moving Terms. Passionate, Personal, Fiercely Monotheistic, These Free Verses Possess An Appeal, Which Is Timeless And Universal.
A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), one of India's finest poets, translators, folklorists, essayists and scholars of the twentieth century, is a stalwart in India's literary history. His translations of ancient Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, as well as of UR Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, are considered as classics in Indian literature. A pioneering modernist poet, during his lifetime he produced four poetry collections in English, and he had also intended to publish the journals he had kept throughout the decades. After his premature death 25 years ago, his journals, diaries, papers and other documents-spanning fifty years from 1944 to 1993-were given by his family to the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago in June 1994. These unpublished writings, meticulously preserved and catalogued at the University of Chicago, were waiting for someone to unveil them to a wider readership. Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan's personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work.
