Dating from the early decades of the third century C.E., the Ainkurunuru is believed to be the earliest anthology of classical Tamil love poetry and known to be a work of enduring importance. Commissioned by a Cera-dynasty king and composed by five masterful poets, the anthology renders the five landscapes of reciprocal love distinctive to the genre: jealous quarreling, anxious waiting and lamentation, clandestine love before marriage, elopement and love in separation, and patient waiting after marriage. Despite its centrality to literary and intellectual traditions, the Ainkurunuru remains relatively unknown beyond specialists. Martha Ann Selby, well-known translator of Sanskrit poetry and literature, opens the anthology to all readers, presenting crystalline translations of 500 poems dense with natural imagery and early South Indian cultural materials. Because of their poems' short length, the anthology's five authors relied largely on double entendre and sophisticated techniques of suggestion, giving their works an almost haikulike feel. Groups of verse center on one unique figure, whether an object or animal, a line of direct address, or a specific conversational or situational context. Selby introduces each section with a description of the poet and the conventions at work within the landscape. She then incorporates notes throughout the text that explain the shifting contexts. Excerpt:He has gone off all by himself beyond the wastes where tigers used to prowl and the toothbrush trees grow tall, their trunks parched, on the flinty mountains, while the lovely folds of your loins, wide as a chariot's seat, vanish as your circlet worked from gold grows far too large for you.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Marutam (100 Poems on Jealous Quarreling by ?ramp?kiy?r)2. Neytal (100 Poems on Lamenting the Lover's Absence by Amm?van?r)3. Kurinci (100 Poems on the Union of Lovers by Kapilar)4. P?lai (100 Poems on Separation by ?tal?ntaiy?r)5. Mullai (100 Poems on Patient Waiting for the Lover's Return by P?yan?r)ReferencesIndex

About the Author

Martha Ann Selby is associate professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She is the author of Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India and A Circle of Six Seasons: A Selection from Old Tamil, Prakrit, and Sanskrit Verse and the coeditor of Tamil Geographies: Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India.

Reviews

Rather than translating a small set of poems picked out of a much larger collection, Selby translates one entire Sangam text, from the first poem to the last. In doing so, she gives the English reader a chance to see how deeply each of these poems works in relation to the ones that precede and follow it. In other words, her translation reveals the sensibility not just of individual poems but of the poetic collection itself. The Ainkurunuru, with its exquisite haikulike poems, is, by any standard, a major South Asian literary text, eminently worthy of a good poetic translation into English. Martha Ann Selby is one of the finest translators from Tamil, Prakrit, and Sanskrit in this generation. She has a wonderful ear for the deft turn of phrase in English and is a very sensitive and erudite reader of Tamil. She has opened up the Ainkurunuru to the worldwide audience it deserves. In Selby's exquisite translation, the Ainkurunuru can finally speak to an English-language audience. In these brief, densely packed verses, all the varieties of desire, erotic longing, jealousy, anger, infidelity, and domestic romance find their own natural landscapes. By rendering the entire anthology, Selby enables an appreciation of both the evocative individual poems and the subtle gathering architecture of the whole.