Author: A K Ramanujan
Molly Daniels-Ramanujan/Keith Harrison
Editor(s): Molly Daniels-Ramanujan / Keith Harrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 109
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195672917
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This book brings together for the first time, poems and essays that could not be published in the lifetime of Ramanujan, recognized as a preeminent scholar of South Asian language and culture.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 This book brings together for the first time, poems and essays that could not be published in his lifetime.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.
REVIEWS
Ramanujan had an enquiring mind, ever uneasy and ever creative, This volume has only helped to give to admiring world more reasons to be awe-struck by the range of his concerns, the variety of his themes and the freshness of insights.
-The Book Review
A wonderful compilation of his works, A collage of ideas which brings out the man's sensitivity and presence in his absence.
-The Pioneer
We are left with someone who is elusive. Ramanujan's thoughts are a delicate poise between, skepticism and an even deeper belief in the essential goodness of the world.
-Business India
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