by Nammalwar
Some fifty years later, Friedhelm Hardy largely agrees with Richards’s review and dismisses Hooper’s translation and the accompanying explanations of the Tiruviruttam as missing the point of the poem. In Hardy’s estimation, Hooper doesn’t acknowledge what the Tiruviruttam owes to its literary antecedents—true enough—and therefore fails to know how to proceed in his interpretation.134 He acknowledges that Hooper is guided in his brief notes by the commentators, but since the commentators themselves were unaware of the Caṅkam past (according to Hardy), the errors of our intrepid translator are somewhat deflected. All of this is largely in keeping with one of Hardy’s central arguments in Viraha-Bhakti that the emergence of the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial tradition stifles the ecstatic, experiential and expressive elements of Tamil Vaiṣṇava bhakti. But as we have seen in the discussions above, commentators like Periyavāccān Piḷḷai were not unaware of the Caṅkam past; rather, their focus was elsewhere, and they were guided by different aesthetic imperatives. In recent years, Frank Clooney, John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan have all argued sensitively for the need to take the commentators’ readings of these poems seriously.135
As early as 1929, Hooper had certainly recognized the value of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ exegetical tradition and he strove to incorporate the commentators’ voice into his translation. It is hard to tell if this impulse was guided by his difficulty with the text or on the guidance of two learned advisers, Govindacharya Svamin and S. Vasudevachariar, the bursar of Wesley College; the former seems to have directed him to the Ācārya Hṛdayam. Although Hooper doesn’t cite the Ācārya Hṛdayam, he provides a translation from what he claims is an anonymous Sanskrit text which provides detailed allegorical concordances for the characters and other elements that occur in ālvār poetry. Of using this work Hooper says, ‘The understanding of sacred erotic poetry is simplified if generally accepted esoteric meaning of recurring symbols is held in mind.’136
Hooper’s decision to include the Tiruviruttam instead of selections from the Tiruvāymoli demonstrates his primary interest in showcasing that which is unusual about Tamil Vaiṣṇava poetry. In addition, the ability to present a text in its entirety so as to convey a ‘consecutive view of the qualities of the hymns’ was also clearly important to him.137 He does not of course translate all of the Tiruviruttam; missing are several verses, but there doesn’t seem to be any discernible logic for their omission.138 Nonetheless, Hooper sees the Tiruviruttam as representative of Nammālvār’s poetry.139 He notes that the poem is obscure and difficult, and correctly identifies that it is inconsistent in maintaining its personae and fails to adhere to any notion of consecutive action. Hooper, though, is clearly puzzled by these elements and explains them away by asking the reader to simply imagine that the lover comes and goes between verses.140 For all these drawbacks—and the translation in stilted four-line English verse is the most obvious one—Hooper is sensitive to the poem’s dual architecture. Each translated verse is accompanied by a colophon of sorts in which he provides the literary situation, and in some cases its metaphysical counterpart within parentheses. Here is his colophon for Tiruviruttam 2 followed by his translation:
The maid speaks, seeing the state of her mistress, unable to endure separation from her lord, who has left her. (Here the maid stands for the Ālvār’s disciples, the mistress for the Ālvār, the lord for Vishnu).
Long may she love, this girl with luring locks,
Who loves the feet that heavenly ones adore,
The feet of Kaṇṇan, dark as rainy clouds:
Her red eyes all abrim with tears of grief,
Like darting Kayal fish in a deep pool.141
The translation is heavily annotated, although the notes are quite brief. He offers single-line sentences on the significance of the feet (line 2), and the name Kaṇṇan (line 3), explains the logic of the simile of the fish-like eyes, glosses the ‘heavenly ones’ as nityas (that is, nityasūri), then cautions the reader to banish any correlation of red eyes to weeping (line 4), and guides them to associate it with high passion instead. Hooper’s translation is very much a product of its time, not just in its ponderous English rendition but more importantly in all its accompanying apparatus of introduction, notes and annotation, and well in keeping with the stated mission of Farquhar’s The Heritage of India Series.
Exactly fifty years later, Prema Nandakumar, a prominent Indian scholar and translator, published a translation (or rather transcreation) of the Tiruviruttam under the title Nammālvār’s ‘Tiruviruttam’: The Drama of the Love Divine. This transcreation emerges out of the Writers’ Workshop, a working group founded in 1958 in Calcutta with the express purpose of integrating English into India’s cultural ethos.142 Nandakumar’s effort is accompanied by a brief introduction that charts the correspondence developed in the commentarial traditions between each of Nammālvār’s four poems and their respective Vedic counterparts. Within this framework, the Tiruviruttam is regarded as the equivalent of the Ṛg Veda. The translation itself is careful to adhere to the four-line verse format of the Tiruviruttam, with brief headers that condense the poem’s primary akapporuḷ content: He on Her eyes, Bless the Night, She on Her Heart, and so forth. The headers succeed in conveying the dramatic and dialogic qualities of the Tiruviruttam (hence Nandakumar’s title), and ultimately work to weave the poem into a continuous narrative with the final verse (phala śruti) of the poem titled ‘Consummation’. An example of her English transcreation is as follows:
25 SHE ON HIS GARLAND
Beloved of Him who’s greater than Brahma
Lord of all gods. His tulasī garland
Has caused the loosening of my bangles,
And there’s no end to the harm it can do.143
The great translator of Indian literary works, A.K. Ramanujan, brought his own unique and extraordinary aesthetic sensibilities to the Tiruviruttam in Hymns for the Drowning, published a mere two years after Prema Nandakumar’s Writers’ Workshop transcreation. As was typical of Ramanujan, he chose those poems that spoke to him and selected just seven verses from the Tiruviruttam that he identified as being in the classical mode.144 Six of them (7, 11, 12, 16, 60 and 68) appear in the book’s section entitled ‘Four Returning Voices’ and Tiruviruttam 94 rounds out the selection provocatively designated ‘Questions’. The arrangement of the translated verses is meant to invite contemplation of the inter-animation of the individual verses, and between the Tiruviruttam and Tiruvāymoli. In this, Ramanujan is certainly influenced by the tradition’s own intertextual reading and interpretive practices, and his radial approach to interpreting Indic texts.145 Further, the verses are organized to mimic the alternation between philosophical sections and other kinds of verses that is a hallmark of the Tiruvāymoli, and hints of which you see in the Tiruviruttam as well. In Ramanujan’s arrangement, the six Tiruviruttam verses are placed towards the end of the narrative progression and occur right before the verses from the Tiruvāymoli depicting what he termed ‘mutual cannibalism’. The Tiruviruttam translations in Hymns for the Drowning are beautiful, moving poems in their own right. In keeping with his minimalist translation style, unadorned by punctuation, the English words flow down the page evocative of unrestrained emotion. The Nammālvār verses (especially those in the akam mode) hark back to their Caṅkam ancestors and Ramanujan’s own initial translation efforts of those old Tamil love poems with the headers that he made standard:
What She Said:
Skin dark as young mango leaf
is wilting.
Yellow patched spread all over me.
Night is as long as several lives.
All these are the singular dowry
my good heart brings
as she goes over
to the cool basil
of my lord, the Dark One
with the wheel that cuts down demons.
Tiruviruttam 12146
Srirama Bharati (1949–2000), most famous for his reimagining of Araiyar Cēvai, the Śrīvaiṣ�
��ava hereditary ritual practice, published a bilingual translation of the entire Nālāyira Divya Prabandham in 2000. The book was brought out under the aegis of the trust he founded, the Sri Sadagopan Tirunarayanaswami Divya Prabandha Pathasala in Jaladampettai, a suburb of Madras. The purpose of the trust (which includes the Tirunarayanaswami Temple) was to reacquaint Śrīvaiṣṇavas with the works of the ālvārs and to thus inculcate a virtuous life. Attendant to this effort was Bharati’s interest in ‘reviving’ Araiyar Cēvai, a form he saw as dying out. Renaming it devagānam (divine music), he reconstituted Araiyar Cēvai and styled himself as an Araiyar under the title Selvamudaiyanpettai Araiyar. Bharati’s English translation of the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham bears the distinct imprint of these twin concerns. The blurb on the back of the book informs us that Bharati is from a family of scholars and that the present work is the result of over twenty-five years of deep contemplation on the words of the ālvārs and the ācāryas. And, crucially, Bharati is identified on the blurb and on the book’s front page both by his given name (Srirama Bharati) and his performative identity of Selvamudaiyanpettai Araiyar. Although regular editions of the Divya Prabandham are not published with associated paṇ (tunes) like the Tēvāram, Bharati, in keeping with his concern for the performative dimensions of the ālvār compositions as songs, identifies a rāga and tāla for each decad (tirumoli). This is Bharati’s own innovation, and the textualization of his reimagined Araiyar Cēvai as devagānam. However, since the Tiruviruttam falls under the Iyarpā, or the so-called prose section of the Divya Prabandham, he assigns neither rāga nor tāla to the individual verses. Visually, the English text follows below the Tamil, with the sequence of alternating Tamil–English verses set into two tight columns. No artificial breaks of text, identification of speakers or assignments of musical modes and rhythms intervene, and the entire Tiruviruttam (including the single taniyan, or laudatory verse) is rendered into simple, serviceable prose. The following is a typical translation, and his debt to the commentarial tradition is evident. I have not reproduced the Tamil.
The lord is the antidote for the venom of evil Karmas and manna for good deeds. He is the bridegroom of the goddess on the lotus. Without belittling himself, he grazed cows and protected them. Then in the yore he strode the Earth in two steps. Alas, when will we attain him? (89)147
Crossing the Wastelands: Some Thoughts on Translating the Tiruviruttam
My translation of the Tiruviruttam is in many ways utterly accidental. I first read the Tiruviruttam deeply over the course of a year around 2007 for two reasons: I was interested in the use of the female voice in ālvār poetry, and I was working on the ritual performance repertoire of Nammālvār’s temple in Alvar Tirunagari. At this time, I was more concerned with the Tiruviruttam’s commentaries than the poem itself, for this is what translated itself into the ritual performances at Alvar Tirunagari.148 The poem failed to capture my attention, and I recall labouring through it, veering between confusion and frustration most of the time. The only anubhava was one of pain and discomfort. The exhilaration I had felt when I first encountered Āṇṭāḷ or Tirumaṅkai’s Periya Tirumoli was completely absent. Although I found individual verses of the Tiruviruttam arresting, I could discern no structure, no logic to the text beyond what the commentators had so carefully laid out. Nevertheless, I dutifully translated the poem in service of these other projects and began annotating it, guided primarily by Periyavāccān Piḷḷai’s commentarial genius. But, as I lived with this poem for six years, compelled to return to it over and over again, sometimes just a verse at a time for several days, my understanding of it began to unfurl, hesitant and shy as the first new buds of spring. The poem slowly but surely began to assume a new shape and new sound in English. The translation become a sort of yoga, a self-discipline I imposed on myself to enter into the skin of the poem, to inhabit its strange, mysterious, many-limbed body, and through the exegesis of translation to create and finally experience anubhava. It is the symbiotic experiential dimension of anubhava that has guided this translation, a work that is in every way my anubhava grantha on Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam.
In its new figuration as my anubhava grantha, the first things to go were some of the Tiruviruttam’s distinctive formal features: head-rhymes, rhyming in general, metre and, of course, the antāti. The poem is rendered into free verse, but this does not mean I have been insensitive to its internal rhythms or that the lines are arranged arbitrarily. I have chosen a style that approximates the tight, dense structure of the poem, where the vocabulary is straightforward, but their use and the ideas they express are profound. For the most part, I have kept the lines in translated English short, the vocabulary simple (īnaccol), and I have happily embraced contractions, for instance in Tiruviruttam 14.
He Said:
Are her two eyes
spears that cut through me
or lovely fish that illumine my life
and don’t draw back?
Are they radiant arrows of divine Kāma?
Or are these enchanting eyes two kayal
searching for the city of the lord
whose form is a brilliant dark fire?
While the aforementioned word density of the Tiruviruttam lent itself readily to a suitable English form, the antāti proved a formidable obstacle to resolve in translation. In Nammālvār’s hands, the antāti is forged through a supple use of homonyms, puns and a masterful manipulation of syllabic sound. He deploys these to make significant theological arguments about the never-ending cycle of lovers’ union and separation; of Viṣṇu’s nature as the universe’s cause and its end; of the endless cycle of birth and death from which only Viṣṇu can offer release; and the poem, which has neither beginning nor end, thus becomes the very embodiment of Viṣṇu’s unfathomable nature. There can be no argument that this is one of the distinctive formal features of the poem, and ideally one ought to be able to reproduce it in translation. But the multiple ways in which Nammālvār employs the antāti—where the same word is used at the end and beginning; where the same sound is used (homonyms); or, in still other cases, where only one part/syllable of the word is used—are close to impossible to reproduce without sacrificing comprehensibility. The wordplay in the Tiruviruttam, common in Nammālvār’s poetry and undoubtedly one of the pleasures of the text, is an insurmountable hurdle, and one for which I was unable to find a sufficiently satisfying solution. As a result, I arrived at several compromises and alternatives. Wherever possible (when the word or phrase is duplicated) I follow the antāti, but in other instances I have sought recourse to other strategies and rhetorical devices—assonance, consonance, alliteration have been stalwart companions—to convey the feeling of the antāti, if not its formal features. I have made no attempt to link each individual verse as tightly as Nammālvār does in the Tiruviruttam, and have instead let subtler links (such as repeated motifs and myths) speak their own connections.
There are other features of the poem that have been easier to approximate. For the most part, each translated verse adheres to the order of the Tamil’s four-line verse. That is, rather than reverse the word order as is often the case because of Tamil’s so-called left-branching syntax to accommodate English’s right-branching one, I have, for the most part, retained line order if not word order. This has been made easier by the structure of each individual verse, which generally posits a proposition in its opening two lines, and what I call a (re)turn in its closing two lines. While there was no way to keep the four-line structure without compromising intelligibility, I have rendered each verse as having two distinct parts. I have avoided punctuations wherever possible in the first part of the verse to indicate continuity of thought and idea between its proposition and return. So, although each verse is divided into two parts, these are not meant to be taken as two separate stanzas.
In the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial tradition, the Tiruviruttam’s two complementary layers—the exoteric (anyāpadeśa) and the esoteric (svāpadeśa)—are essential to gui
ding any faithful reading/rendering of the text. The exoteric is expressed in the poem’s literary architecture, in its slow unfolding of the narrative of love between the anonymous male and female leads. This carefully constructed literary plan serves to make the poet’s profound esotericism palpable. According to the poem’s traditional interpreters, only thoughtful, deliberate contemplation of the interpenetration of the literary and the theological will reveal the Tiruviruttam’s central arguments. In some instances, the interpenetration of the erotic and esoteric planes is so complete that it is hard to distinguish one from the other. Tiruviruttam 84 illustrates this beautifully, where the love-longing of the heroine echoes the same intense feeling of the poet. In Tamil: