Red earth and pouring rain: Powerful imagery

SINCE June this year, an English translation of a Tamil poem from the Sangam anthology is on display in the trains in the London Underground. The original poem, in Tamil script, is also featured along with the English version.

The London Tube, as the underground metro train service is known, was started in 1863 and now covers 408 km. It is the lifeline of the city. When the transport authorities began paying attention to the interior of the coaches, they instituted prizes for the best advertisement posters. In 1986, encouraged by the Poetry Society, short poems of five or six lines were displayed in a special show. It proved so popular that poetry display has since become a permanent feature in the trains. Funded by the Arts Council of England, the poems are printed in uniform sized enamel plates and displayed inside the coaches. Copies of these displays are sold as posters and are sought after as souvenirs. The collection of these poems, published under the title Poems on the Underground has just gone into its ninth edition. This practice has been adopted by public transport systems in New York, Moscow and other metros and the display of poems has become part of the urban landscape.

The Tamil poem that is exhibited now, the oldest to be featured, is from Kurunthogai, a collection of 400 poems on love, ascribed to the first three centuries A.D.. This is the most popular and off-quoted of the Sangam anthology. When the team of selectors for Poems on the Underground started looking for the original text, Nalini Prasad, curator of the South Indian Languages section of the British Library stepped in. The library has in its holdings, a Kurunthogai text, published in 1915 by Vithyarathnagara Press at Vellore. Tirumaligai Sowriperumalarangam of Tirukannapuram had written the annotation. (There were later editions with annotation by U. Ve. Swaminatha Ayyer. It was my delight to see and handle this edition at the British library. A calico-bound imprint, in good condition, it had been bought from a certain Saraswathi Book Stores in Vellore, as evidenced by a rubber stamp impression on the title page.

The poem, as it appears in this book, was photocopied and reproduced in the display. The English fonts were slightly altered to match with the Tamil characters. And the display board, designed by Tom Davidson, with a kolam design on the left margin, looks elegant and exudes a period flavour.

The English version, by A. K. Ramanujan, has been taken from his book Poems of Love and War (1985). The credit of introducing the splendours of Sangam literature to the English-speaking world in our times goes largely to Ramanujan. He seems to be able to capture with ease the quiddity and the texture of these poems and contextualise them. One has only to read the Interior Landscape, a translation of Kurunthogai, to get an idea of his abilities as a translator. His "Afterward" at the end of this book is the best introduction to Sangam literature I have read.

The poem is titled "Red Earth and Pouring Rain". In the background of authors of many works remaining anonymous, in Tamil literary tradition there is this practice of identifying a poet by a phrase or word from his poem. Thus the author of this poem is Sembulapeyaneerar, literally "The poet of red earth and pouring rain".

The poem is about two lovers uniting and the man reassuring her of his love.

The powerful imagery in the words "red earth and pouring rain" is so evocative, standing at once for the union in love and also for a geographical context. Evidently, it is this line that inspired the title of Vikram Chandra's recent English novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain.

In Interior Landscape, Ramanujan explains his philosophy of translation. "The effort is to try and make a non-Tamil reader experience in English something of what a native experiences when he reads classical Tamil poems. Anyone translating a poem into foreign language is, at the same time, trying to translate a foreign reader into a native one."

Ramanujan once told me a st story about a leading English publisher in India approaching him for a translation of Tirukural. Enthusiastic about the idea, Ramanujan asked for at least two years' time. He needed that period, as he did not want the translation to read like a list of aphorisms such as "Honesty is the best policy". The publisher, in a hurry, wanted it in six months and approached another translator who agreed to abide by the deadline. Thus the world lost an opportunity to get what probably would have been the best ever English translation of Tirukural.

S. THEODORE BASKARAN

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