A Hundred Measures of Time
Page 2
with bees
will rule heaven and achieve the great release.
Tiruvāymoli II.8.1111
In other words, the Tamil literary tradition and local mythologies were just as alive as those of the Sanskrit world. The ālvār poems are littered with allusions to myths that cannot be traced to Sanskrit sources, and instead reflect the circulation and integration of a local Vaiṣṇava mythology.12
The most important elements of ālvār devotion such as singing god’s praise, performing acts of loving service to him and his devotees, singing the greatness of his sacred abodes resonate with the key elements of heroic puram poetry that highlighted the intimate, symbiotic relationship between a king and his bard. In bhakti poetry, the fierce, generous Tamil king becomes the omnipresent deity and the devotee is his willing supplicant and poet.13 Viṣṇu is the patron who protects the poet not just from the prosaic concerns of daily living, but from the very bonds of endless birth. If the puram elements of bhakti poetry express the transcendence of god, the rich treasure house of akam love poetry reveals the intimacy between god and devotee. The mingling of the complementary categories of akam and puram in Tamil Vaiṣṇava poetry reflect the twin, inseparable aspects of god’s nature, his transcendence and immanence, his remoteness and his accessibility. Tiruviruttam 85 characterizes Viṣṇu as the one ‘who measured the world’ and as the peerless golden one, words worthy of a lofty divine sovereign. Yet he is also addressed with typical Tamil endearments as the poet’s own ‘precious gem’ and his ‘beloved emerald’.
Such layering of epic, Purāṇic and local mythology over the deft manipulation of poetic conventions shape ideas about the relationship between Viṣṇu and his devotees and is typical of bhakti poetry. The Rāmāyaṇa is a particularly useful source offering up numerous examples of a devotee’s paradigmatic surrender, of god’s boundless grace and of the fundamentally reciprocal relationship between god and his devotees. Poets like Periyālvār and Kulaśekara innovate within the established framework, imagining themselves often as god’s doting parents or his caretakers, reversing the traditional relationship of dependence between Viṣṇu and his devotee. Indeed, Periyālvār earns the epithet ‘Great Ālvār’ precisely because he sang the Tiruppallāṇṭu, his famous song of protection (kāppu) for Viṣṇu.
A still third element in the making of ālvār poetry is that of the Pāñcarātra Āgamas. The origin and history of the Pāñcarātra is somewhat obscure, and various explanations have been provided to unearth the significance of the five nights alluded to in the name Pāñcarātra (literally, Five Nights). It has been taken to refer to five dialogues, five kinds of knowledge (where the word rātra, night, is taken to mean jñāna, knowledge), the five forms of Viṣṇu or five kinds of sacrifice/worship. Most Vaiṣṇava saṁpradāyas follow the liturgy, ritual formulations and methodologies laid out in the corpus of approximately two hundred Pāñcarātra texts. Vasudha Narayanan has described the contribution of the Pāñcarātra Āgamas to the development of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava tradition as akin to the invisible, subterranean river Sarasvati at the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna at Prayag.14 Although the Pāñcarātra references are not explicit, the ālvār emphasis on the worship of the icon in a temple and the mention of Viṣṇu’s five forms indicate that the esotericism of these ritual manuals significantly shaped the direction of Vaiṣṇava bhakti in Tamil country.15
These early experiments marrying an emergent philosophy, ideology and poetic aesthetic matured into the works of the ālvār poets over a period of two and a half centuries (c. 600–850 CE). Late poets like Nammālvār and Tirumaṅkai are masters of multiple genres and metres, authoring monumental poems that run into several thousand verses. Approximately a century after Tirumaṅkai (c. late eighth century), the compositions of the ālvārs were collected into a compilation of four thousand poems known as the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (The Divine Collection of Four Thousand). Around the same period, the emergent community of Tamil Vaiṣṇavas (who come to be known as the Śrīvaiṣṇavas) began to develop a sophisticated theology called Ubhaya Vedānta (dual Vedānta). Within this system, the Tamil poems of the ālvār poets were placed on par with the Sanskrit Veda and both sets of texts were considered revealed. Thus, the Śrīvaiṣṇava traditions refer to the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham as the Tamil Veda or the Drāviḍa Veda. Even while the entire Nālāyira Divya Prabandham is considered revealed, one poet and one poem are marked as particularly special. Nammālvār, who refers to himself by the name Śaṭhakōpan or Māran, is the most significant of the twelve poets, and his four compositions—Tiruviruttam, Tirvāciriyam, Periya Tiruvantāti and Tiruvāymoli—are considered equivalent to the Vedic Saṁhitā texts. Of these four works, the Tiruviruttam and Tiruvāymoli are given pride of place, with the former being associated with the Ṛg Veda and the latter with the Sāma Veda.16
The Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial traditions regard claims about the revelatory character of the Tiruviruttam and the Tiruvāymoli as emerging from the texts themselves. Revelation in the Tiruviruttam manifests in verses that deliberately break the love-story frame. The story of the anonymous lovers is inexplicably set aside for a verse in which the poet presumably speaks in his own voice, or, as he asserts, in god’s words. Below is one of the first such instances:
Little worms that live in a wound
do what they do.
What do they know of the world?
I learned these songs from that cunning Tirumāl
who uses me to sing of himself.
It’s like people making meaning
from the chirp of a lizard.
Tiruviruttam 48
Medieval commentaries on this verse (c. thirteenth century) interpret it as a confirmation of revelation, that Nammālvār’s compositions are not his own creation. He is simply the conduit through which Viṣṇu reveals himself. We can find several similar examples in the Tiruvāymoli as well. In the seventh book of the Tiruvāymoli (VII.9.1), the poet makes the following claim:
What can I say of the Lord
who lifted me up for all time,
and made me himself, every day?
My radiant one, the first one,
My Lord, sings of himself,
through me, in sweet Tamil.17
Here the speaker of the poem, identified with Nammālvār, sees himself not as the instrument through which Viṣṇu acts; rather, he is the means through which god reveals himself by singing his own praise. Nammālvār’s articulation of revelation in both the Tiruviruttam and Tiruvāymoli is couched in the language of possession. The poet has simply given himself over to Viṣṇu, becoming a capacious vessel, the translucent medium through which god acts, speaks and reveals himself. Yet, such possession also expresses the fundamental intimacy and mutual dependency between god and devotee, a relationship upon which Vaiṣṇava bhakti poetry is predicated. Even as Nammālvār disavows a hand in his own work, his disciple Maturakavi makes a startling claim in his short panegyric Kaṇṇi Nun Ciru Tāmpu. Here, it is Nammālvār who is the source of grace (verse 3), who possesses the student, who teaches him the truth of the Vedas (verses 6, 9). Moments like those cited above from the Tiruviruttam and the Tiruvāymoli alongside Maturakavi’s dramatic claims about the revelatory character of his teacher’s works become the foundation upon which the Śrīvaiṣṇavas develop the theory of Ubhaya Vedānta, ultimately claiming for these compositions (and the entire Nālāyira Divya Prabandham) the title of Drāviḍa Veda/Tamil Veda.
About the Translation
The project to translate the Tiruviruttam began in 2007. In that year, I read the poem alongside the medieval commentaries of Periyavāccān Piḷḷai and the modern ones authored by Uttamur Veeraraghava Acarya, Annakaracharya and Satakopan Ramanujacarya, making my way slowly, one verse at a time, trying to make sense of its complexity, both literary and theological. Although I had read the poem several times before, this was the first time I read it through the lens of commentary. The tradition�
��s own interpretation of the poem’s multiple layers informed my impressions and ultimately determined the very form of this book.
My translation strives for fidelity, a fidelity to the words of the text and its emotion, and owes much to the Śrīvaiṣṇava intellectual traditions in which it has been nurtured over many centuries. Since I discuss the nitty-gritty details of translation in the accompanying essay ‘The Measure of Time’, I will not reproduce them here. In its place I offer a brief overview of method, of how the English translation came to inhabit its current shape. I take as an example Tiruviruttam 76, identified as spoken in the voice of the heroine, and share several early drafts to demonstrate my translation process, and the choices that led to the current version. It is almost customary to paraphrase Valery’s famous quote: a translation is never finished, only abandoned, and below I chart the path that brought me to abandonment.
iṭam pōy virintu iv ulaku aḷantān elil ār taṇ ṭulāy
Vaṭam pōtil naiyum maṭa neñcamē naṅkaḷ veḷ vaḷāikkē
Viṭam pōl virital itu viyappē viyan tāmaraiyin
Taṭam pōtu oṭuṅka mel āmpal alarvikkum veṇ tiṅkaḷē
Tiruviruttam 76 in Tamil
In a very early ‘zero-draft’ I laid out Tiruviruttam 76 on facing pages of a long notebook. On the right side of the ruled notebook I carefully wrote out the Tamil in bright blue ink, with all the sandhi (morphophonemic rules) in place. Below it, in pencil, the Tamil again with the sandhi broken and notated with odd squiggles and brackets indicating words, phrases, and so on, which are linked grammatically and thematically. Further down, also in pencil, rough English equivalents, staccato-like, nouns, verbs, adverbs and participles following each other, connected with more esoteric squiggles and brackets. The first translation, composed almost in prose, bare of punctuation and sans diacritical marks, runs below the Tamil text and endeavours to follow word and line order and strives to replicate Tamil grammatical forms in English as far as possible:
he measured this world, having come down and expanding (virintu)—his lovely, cool, special tulasi garland’s buds that [is] desired by innocent/naive heart [The innocent heart that desires his lovely, cool, special tulasi of him who measured …]
[for] my white bangles it spreads like poison—is this surprising! [Is it a surprise/what a surprise!]—the bright white moon that closes the broad/large buds of the awesome/excellent lotus and blossoms the delicate ambal.
Even in this very early draft I had already made translation choices that would carry through the many revisions. The Tamil tulāy (sacred basil, Ocimum tenuiflorum) was rendered into the Sanskrit tulasī almost instinctively, and the Tamil āmpal (Nymphaea lotus), an indigenous water lily, remained as such, making this English translation not wholly English at all.
Below the prose version appeared brief notes about the verse, written in ink, based on my reading of Periyavāccān Piḷḷai. These were meant to act as my guide to both understanding the verse and its interpretation. The italicized, transliterated words in the text below indicate those that were written out in Tamil script in my notebook.
This verse is spoken by the talaivi after a separation follows the union indicated in the previous verse. The despairing heroine addresses her own heart, calling it innocent/naive (maṭa neñcam) for it desires the garland of tulasi, something that is difficult to obtain. Even things that were at one point friends have become enemies, like the moon. She accuses it of being stupid and indiscriminate, unable to differentiate between exalted and lowly things. The verse may either be taken as the heroine speaking to her friend, or speaking/offering consolation to her own heart.
In this verse she desires the garland that he wore during the Trivikrama Avatāra, for this garland demonstrates that he is the master of the whole world. Moreover, it is made beautiful because it touches his skin/body (tirumēni). Thus her heart is described as maṭa neñcam as it desires an unattainable object and despairs when it does not realize that desire.
The moonlight spreads like a poison and appears to the talaivi that the moon desires her bangles because she says that he (the moon) thinks that he has a right to it being in form and color like him (white).
Guided by the commentaries’ emphasis on the heroine’s hopeless, naive heart, I began the English translation with the phrase maṭa neñcam (innocent heart), although the Tamil text begins with a grand description of Viṣṇu spreading everywhere. This choice was made easier still because the heart (neñcam) is also the subject of the long sentence that makes up the first two lines of the Tamil text, all that precedes neñcam serving to qualify it: the [this] innocent heart that desires the tulasī of the one who measured the world. But I did not want the translation to make explicit the connections Piḷḷai draws out. So in its first transfiguration from prose to poetry, Tiruviruttam 76 became this, written in English (again, with little punctuation and no diacritics) on the facing page:
My innocent heart desires
the buds in the garland of lovely, cool tulasi
(that adorns) the one who measured the world.
[rising and growing and spreading everywhere]
So is it surprising that this white moonlight
spreads like poison everywhere, wanting my white bangles—
this silly moon which causes the excellent lotus to close
its broad petals and the lovely ambal to bloom.
The initial verse version was concerned with determining how the lines might look on the page. How did I want the images to follow and succeed? What sequence of sounds did I want to replicate? By this point in my translation, almost three-quarters of the way through, I had set myself an impossible goal of trying to translate Nammālvār’s densely packed four-line verses into equally dense eight lines of English blank verse. Some verses from the Tiruviruttam lent themselves to this format almost without effort, but others, especially those with a string of embedded clauses and cascading adjectival participles defied the discipline I sought to impose both on myself and on the poem. Nonetheless, I persisted, translating all hundred four-line verses of the Tiruviruttam into their eight-line English-language counterparts.
Eventually, several drafts and experiments later, the verse began to find a form that I felt reflected the dual structure of the verses and the poem’s two levels of meanings. It identified the speaker of the poem, following a practice (What She Said/She Said) that has become a convention among translators of Tamil Caṅkam poetry. While I debated the value of this intrusion primarily because the text makes no such identification, I eventually decided in favour of its inclusion, partly as a nod to the commentaries, which do. Not only do these identifications bring out the dramatic and dialogic quality of the Tiruviruttam, they also enable those verses that break the frame or are composed in a purely metaphysical mode to stand out in stark contrast. So version ten/twenty/fifty-five, draped in diacritics and showy italics, and preserved in an ephemeral electronic form, looked something like this:
She Said:
My innocent heart desires
the buds of cool, lovely tulasī that adorn
the one who spread everywhere
and measured this world
Is it any surprise that the white moon
that closes the broad petals of the lovely lotus
and makes the delicate āmpal bloom
should spread like poison everywhere
wanting my white bangles?
As I began to play with a leaner and more succinct translation register, one that I felt was closer to Nammālvār’s compact and economical style, the translated lines became shorter, the punctuation was reduced to a bare minimum, and eventually, the intrusive italicization of Indic words was discarded:
She Said:
My innocent heart desires
the buds of cool lovely tulasī that adorn
the one who spread everywhere
measured this world
Is it a surprise the white moon
closes the broa
d petals of the lovely lotus
makes the delicate āmpal bloom
spreads like poison everywhere
wanting my white bangles?
And finally, to reproduce the experience (anubhava) of reading the Tiruviruttam in Tamil from one of those early printed editions of Śrīvaiṣṇava books, which intersperse text with enchanting line drawings of Viṣṇu, his consorts, his symbols and the ālvārs, some of those very images have been inserted into the pages of A Hundred Measures of Time.* The images have been sourced from three books in a collection of approximately 400 old Śrīvaiṣṇava books gifted to me by Prof. George Hart. Prof. Hart acquired them several decades ago from Prof. K.K.A. Venkatachari, who brought the libraries of two old Teṅkalai scholars to the United States. This impressive collection represents some of the earliest publications of Śrīvaiṣṇava scholarship, most of which was centred in the colonial port city of Madras.
Bringing the Tiruviruttam into English has not just been about finding proper linguistic equivalents and an equally proper emotional tenor. It has lived and been nurtured by generations of Śrīvaiṣṇava scholars, who have found ever new things to read and see in this magnificent poem. It is indeed a literary work of startling power and depth, but lest we forget, it is above all a religious poem, one that lays out Nammālvār’s compelling personal vision of god’s nature and of his relationship to that divine being, whom he identifies as Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa.
Part I
A HUNDRED MEASURES OF TIME
Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam
1
False wisdom wicked conduct dirty bodies
let’s not draw near such things now
To protect life
you took birth from many wombs
O master of the unblinking ones
stand before me embodied
listen graciously to a servant’s plea.
2
Her Friend Said:
Her eyes with their fine red lines