Author: A K Ramanujan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 107
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195656318
Description
This book brings together for the first time, poems and essays that could not be published in the lifetime of Ramanujan, recognized as a preeminent scholar of South Asian language and culture.
Poet, translator, folklorist, A K Ramanujan has been recognized as a preeminent scholar of South Asian language and culture. This book brings together for the first time, poems and essays that could not be published in his lifetime. Also included are Ramanujan's interviews with various academics and friends with whom he discusses subjects as diverse as exile, the politics of language, his relationship with his father, and his own writing. He discusses folktales, Shakespeare, and translation. What is revealed for the first time is Ramanujan's political self, a vision that is both regional and transnational. The poems have an immediacy that is hard to resist; their sanity and joy evoke Ramanujan's warmth and his elusiveness, bringing within the same cover the whole range of his work.
Ramanujan believed that his creativity, and his wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests, owed much to his early Montessori schooling, his father's conversations in the library, and his grandmother's folktales at dinner. During his tenure of thirty years at the University of Chicago, he taught Linguistics, Anthropology, Folklore, and Literature. His achievements as a bilingual poet, and as a trilingual translator won him: a Padma Sri, A Macarthur Foundation Fellowship; election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a posthumous prize from the Sahitya Akademi for poetry in English. In these pieces, as elsewhere, Ramanujan gives expression to his two chief preoccupations, his desire to articulate an Indian way of thinking, and his own quest for modernity.
This volume has been edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan and Keith Harrison, both of whom knew him personally.
THE AUTHOR
AK RAMANUJAN (1929-1993) was born into a Tamil family living in Kannada-speaking Mysore City. He was educated in English at the University of Mysore, and at Indiana University. As William E Colvin Professor at the University of Chicago, his academic interests became increasingly interdisciplinary. He translated from Classical Tamil and Medieval Kannada; he wrote poems in English; he wrote experimental poetry in Kannada; he gathered folktales from all over India's he translated fiction from English into Kannada, from Kannada into English, and wrote an original novella in Kannada. In all these fields his skill won him world renown.
THE EDITORS:
MIKLLY DANIELS-RAMANUJAN holds a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. She is the author of three works of fiction, and two books of Criticism, including The Prophetic Novel.
KEITH HARRISON is Professor Emeritus of English at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry and translation.
Contents
Acknowledgements / Preface by Keith Harrison
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
* Invisible Bodies
* 1951
* Eagle and Butterfly
* Twenty-four Senses
* Farewells
* Figures and Disfigurement
* All Night
* Many a Slip
* Children, Dreams, Theorems
* However
* Returning
* Anchors
* On Julia
* Postmortem
* Blackstreet Visit
* Smells
* Love 10
* Time Changes
* Museum
* A Rationalist Abroad
* Daily Drivel: a monologue
* Lying
* Waiting
* Bluebottles
* Dances Remember Dancers
* Suddenly
* Surviving
* Becoming
* Computers Eat Fingertips
* He to Me or Me to Him
* Renoir at Eighty
* Oranges
TWO INTERVIEWS
* Chiantan Kulshreshta and AKR
* A L Becker, Keith Taylor, and AKR
UNCOLLECTED PROSE
* The Ring of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Indian Literature For Barbara Miller
* A Note on AKR's Uncollected Poems by Molly A Daniels-Ramanujan
Index of Titles / Index of First Lines