The corpus of A.K. Ramanujan’s writings shows a rich intellectual range. Besides scholarly writings and retellings of folktales, he translated classical Tamil love poems and medieval Kannada and Tamil Bhakti poetry and wrote several volumes of poetry in English and Kannada. Excerpts from an interview with Guillermo Rodriguez, author of the recently published When Mirrors are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics :
It has been over 20 years since your encounter with Ramanujan’s poems during your first visit to India, in 1993, and your decision to do a PhD. on his poetry (1996). Do you relate to his poetry differently than you did initially?
Every time I re-read Ramanujan’s orginal poems and translations, I discover something new; another nuance, a new sensation is revealed. So the magic about Ramanujan’s poems is that they never fail to surprise you. They are carefully designed artefacts and, as genuine works of art, they conceal multiple layers and are “alive”. One only hast to scratch at the surface or change the point of view to observe a new connotation, a new connection.
The difference between my first reading of his poems in the early 1990s and now (after having thoroughly studied the author’s life and multiple disciplines) is that I am at once aware of the many “reverberations” and traditions that are evoked in his verse. But each reading is a singular aesthetic experience.
He has translated modern Kannada fiction and folk tales, classical Tamil poems, and medieval Kannada and Tamil Bhakti poetry. Does his persona vary as a translator of diverse genres of writing from different languages and times?
I would say there were different aspects of his persona that came into play in his translation activity and they were all present in some degree, whatever original text he was translating. He was a trained linguist, a folklorist, an anthropologist, a scholar of literature and a brilliant poet.
His technique of translation followed the same path: he wanted to translate the spirit as well as the form of the original text. In this process, his linguistic training was an essential tool, but more so, his sensibility as a creative writer and poet. He believed that “only a poem can translate a poem.” And in doing so, he wanted to be as objective as possible and faithful to the original source; the final translation had to be a re-enactment of the aesthetic experience of the original. In fact, that is how he wanted to “re-possess” the past tradition.
Ramanujan published his poetry simultaneously in Kannada and in English between the mid-1960s and 1990. What poetic preoccupations might have mattered in his movement across the two languages?
As a bilingual contemporary poet, Ramanujan’s poetic preoccupations criss-crossed genres, styles, traditions and particular influences. His poetry in Kannada and English springs from the same creative impulse and sensibility, although he was inscribing his poetic oeuvre in two distinct, yet interconnected, modern traditions. On the one hand, he belonged to the navya (new) poetry movement in Kannada which evolved around the ’50s under the influence of Western modernist poetics. And when Ramanujan wrote in English he was also a pioneer (among the modernist Indian poets in English) in utilising the multiple Indian traditions and intercultural layers. All these levels came into play often simultaneously in his poetry. He said one writes not only with a language, but “with all you have.”
Imagist, haiku-style verse a la Ezra Pound, the ironic style of New Criticism and T.S. Eliot, are all at the back of his early poetry, as were the echoes from Bhakti poetry and Tamil Sangam tradition later, and the casual, unassuming manner of his verse that aimed to reproduce a conversational style or a story. And there was of course an evolution in his poetics and style both in Kannada and English over the decades.
You are the first researcher to have accessed Ramanujan’s unpublished materials, including letters, diary entries and drafts of poems, essays and lectures, at The University of Chicago. How did this access aid in your interpretation of his poetry?
The A.K. Ramanujan Papers at The University of Chicago are a treasure house of material covering all the disciplines and topics that Ramanujan was involved in through his career, and they include a large amount of unpublished texts. Coming face to face with this vast primary material was a challenge as well as a rare opportunity. It allowed me to have access into the creative process of a complex multi-disciplinary scholar, translator and poet, and to analyse the interdependency between the different facets of his inquisitive and artistic mind. I could tackle Ramanujan’s poetics from this canopy of disciplines while tracing the evolution of his academic interests, personal experiences and poetic craft in a new light.
Ramanujan studied the physical sciences during his undergraduate days. And, one of his last lecture drafts noted “that the opposition between poetry and science…was abhorrent” to him. How did science matter for his own poetry?
Ramanujan inherited his interest in science from his father who was a famous mathematician. After becoming a professor of English, this natural inclination was satiated by his study of linguistics, first in Pune in 1958 and later in the U.S. Linguistics, the science of language, had a heavy impact on literary studies in those years, and it became an indispensable tool in his method as a poet and pioneering translator of Dravidian classics. As a linguist, he was trained to see poems as objects and treated them in a clinical manner, dissecting their parts.
You mention that Ramanujan watched a lot of American television in the years preceding his death. Is this suggestive of new intellectual preoccupations in him?
Ramanujan’s interests were quite eclectic. Throughout his life, he read everything he came across, from commercial and popular novels to scientific papers. And just as he had always been interested in popular and oral traditions, he also indulged in popular films on TV in the latter part of his life.
Chandan Gowda teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
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Published - December 24, 2016 04:30 pm IST
