I woke up, still deceived, and caressed the bed thinking it my lover. I grow lean in loneliness, like a water lily gnawed by a beetle. She has a friend. At first, I thought this friend was also chasing after He.
Another poet, though, suggests this friend is experiencing deep grief for She, a wonderful kind of love that is also explored here. You say that the wasteland you have to pass through is absence itself: But tell me really, do you think that home will be sweet for the ones you leave behind? There is a lot going on in these seemingly simple poems. We get the passersby, those who think She has been possessed because they do not know about her sometimes debilitating love for He.
Another aspect that I loved was the heavy reliance on nature, that external landscape, to explore the interior landscape. Most of the poems contain some metaphor whose central feature is a tree, a fruit, a handful of grass, rain. Ramanujan wrote many essays on Tamil Poetry. While I can read Tamil, the year old poetry is in archaic tamil that I can barely understand — like classical greek or latin. So, for most of us, not studying tamil at University level, the Ramanujan translations are the only way to approach these poems.
I am yet to get hold of this book — I have an old translation by Ramanujan where he extensively annotated each poem. The basic division in the poems is Akam inside — poems of love and Puram outside — Poems of War.
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There is a wonderful poem, where thoughts of a tired warrior move from the battlefield that is Purapuram -outside of the outside to the body of the beloved Akamakam — the inside of the inside. Ramanujan also talked of how temple architecture in Tamil Nadu is similar to the structure of these poems. Outside the temple, there is a Gopuram — a monumental tower, decorated usually with scenes from a battlefield puram.
The Way of Woman. My Tao Te Ching. The Feminine in Fairy Tales. Hundred Tamil Folk and Tribal Tales. Animism - The Seed Of Religion. I Sit Listening to the Wind. Footprint of an Elephant. Essay 4 of 4. The Wilds of Poetry. How to Awaken and Direct it. Love Is A Gift. Songs from My Heart. The Book of Spirit: What is this Inner Spring of Life?
The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems
A Way of Seeing: Perception, Imagination, and Poetry. How to Develop the Faith That Heals. Vocabulary of Symbols and Images. Being in the Way.
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Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — The Interior Landscape by A. In translating these poems from the ancient Dravidian into English, the poet and translator A. Ramanujan who died in has rendered two services: In them, as the translator notes, passion is balan In translating these poems from the ancient Dravidian into English, the poet and translator A. In them, as the translator notes, passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, spareness by richness of implication.
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 A. Seventy-six of these classical poems have here been given 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. This classic anthology of translations has long been out of print.
It should interest all those who read poetry, as well as those who value Ramanujan's gift as a translator. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Interior Landscape , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about The Interior Landscape. Lists with This Book.
Minimalist Indian love poems from around AD that feel startlingly fresh. There's some kinship to Japanese haiku and a modernist insistence on ambiguity, ellipsis, and indirection.
The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology by A.K. Ramanujan
The concluding essay about Tamil literary culture from Ramanujan is enlightening, discussing the formal grid of words, setting, and images that the poets were expected to employ depending on the type of love poem among five options they were writing. Here's a sample poem that pa Minimalist Indian love poems from around AD that feel startlingly fresh. Here's a sample poem that particularly grabbed me: My lover has not come back: A goat-herd comes into town with goats and milk to take some rice to the others waiting outside, palmyra rain-guards in their hands, herds of young ones in their care: What She Said My lover capable of terrible lies at night lay close to me in a dream that lied like truth.
I woke up, still deceived, and caressed the bed thinking it my lover. I grow lean in loneliness, like a water lily gnawed by a beetle. If I should lose her I could proclaim my misery in the streets riding mock horses on palmyra stems in my wildness What She Said My lover capable of terrible lies at night lay close to me in a dream that lied like truth. If I should lose her I could proclaim my misery in the streets riding mock horses on palmyra stems in my wildness: But then, even living, away from her, seems such a shame.
What Her Friend Said The great city fell asleep but we did not sleep. Clearly we heard, all night, from the hillock next to our house the tender branches of the flower-clustered tree with leaves like peacock feet let fall their blue-sapphire flowers. What She Said The rains, already old, have brought new leaf upon the fields. The grass spears are trimmed and blunted by the deer. The jasmine creeper is showing its buds through their delicate calyx like the laugh of a wildcat.
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- The Interior Landscape - Classical Tamil Love Poetry?
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- A.K. Ramanujan: The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems – The Mookse and the Gripes?
He left me and went in search of wealth. As for me, if I do not see my lover grief drowns my heart, and like a streak of foam in high waters dashed on the rocks little by little I ebb and become nothing.