Jointly edited by AKR’s son, Krishna, and scholar, Guillermo Rodriguez, this compilation of diaries from over five decades will interest poets, researchers and AKR aficionados. Would this mean wading through reams of leaden prose - or what modern-day lingo so succinctly terms TMI? Which made me approach his recently published diaries ( Hymns for the Drowning would probably rank among my top five volumes of mystical poetry in the world.Īlthough he died prematurely at the age of 64 in 1993, AKR’s work endures. Ramanujan (AKR) infuses living sap into Nammalvar. It takes an extraordinary poet to make a thousand years seem a mere heartbeat away. It takes an accomplished poet to make a long-dead poet relevant in translation. There’s more.”īut it was when revisiting his translations of the mystic, Nammalvar, that my admiration turned to awe. “Look,” his work seems to say, “There’s more. Always a step ahead of his reader, his essays, translations and poems continue to point to a tantalising spectrum of traditions, approaches, possibilities. Culturally sophisticated, intellectually exploratory, never doctrinaire, he is both pathfinder and trailblazer. Ramanujan’s presence in Indian letters is canonical.
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