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In the ancient Tamil country, the Vaiyai was much more than a mighty river rushing towards the sea. People knew the river intimately and lived their lives upon its banks. In these exquisite poems from the distant past (second to eighth century CE), we glimpse the ebb and flow of everyday life: the bathing, the water games, the lovers quarrels and the sacred rituals. Breathtaking in their descriptive power and graceful in their celebration of sensuality, the Vaiyai poems from the Parip al anthology delight our senses and give us insight into a world long past. In V.N. Muthukumar and Elizabeth Segran s radiant new translation, the Vaiyai River comes alive to a new generation of readers.

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Poetry

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 octobre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184756944
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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The River Speaks
The Vaiyai Poems from the Parip al
Translated by V.N. Muthukumar and Elizabeth Rani Segran

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Key to Transliteration
Introduction
Parip al VI The water fight has begun
Parip al VII Waters loud as furious thunder
Parip al X They offer the river liquor
Parip al XI Check your strength and flow on gently
Parip al XII More lovely than their words was the river, with its bathers
Parip al XVI The Vaiyai makes her blush
Parip al XX You are like the shallow waters, in which anyone can play
Parip al XXII Thunder resounds like the battle drums
Parip al Compilation Did the fresh waters know you were here?
Notes to the Poems
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
THE RIVER SPEAKS
V.N. Muthukumar and Elizabeth Rani Segran received their masters and doctorates in South and Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. They each specialized in classical Tamil literature. This is their first collaboration.
Muthukumar s doctoral dissertation, Poetics of Place in Early Tamil Literature , borrows ideas from the disciplines of phenomenology and the anthropology of the senses, and examines the experiential dimensions of place in classical Tamil poetry.
Elizabeth s doctoral dissertation, Worlds of Desire: Gender and Sexuality in Classical Tamil Poetry , considers how gender is constructed in classical Tamil poetry. She uses recent frameworks from the field of gender studies as a point of departure for her analysis.
Key to Transliteration
The Tamil alphabet has twelve vowels and eighteen consonants. In transliterating these, we follow a scheme which is widely used today. See, for instance, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html .
Vowels
The twelve vowels in Tamil are classified as five short (a, i, u, e, o), five long ( , , , , ) and two diphthongs (ai, au).
a
pronounced like the o in the word other

pronounced like a in far
i
pronounced like i in it

pronounced like ea in eager
u
pronounced like oo in book

pronounced like oo in brood
e
pronounced like e in bell

pronounced like ay in pray
ai
pronounced like I
o
pronounced like o in once

pronounced like o in go
au
pronounced like ow in fowl
Consonants
The eighteen consonants typically occur in combination with any of the twelve vowels.
k
pronounced like k in cake
c
pronounced like ch in chalk

pronounced like t in dental
t
pronounced like th in there
p
pronounced like p in map

pronounced like ng in strong

has no simple English equivalent; it is a nasal pronounced like jn , with the tongue raised to the palate
n (dental nasal)
pronounced like n in need
(alveolar nasal)
pronounced like n above, but with the tongue closer to the ridges of the jaw
(retroflex nasal)
pronounced like n above but with the tongue positioned at the upper or lower teeth
m
pronounced like m in mad
y
pronounced like y in yacht

pronounced like r in rain
r
trilled r like the r in trill
l
pronounced like l in late

retroflexed l , somewhat like the l in click
v
pronounced like v in van

has no simple English equivalent. Try saying r while moving the tongue from the middle of the mouth through the upper palate.
Introduction
I
The Vaiyai River begins in the hills of western Tamil Nadu and flows through Maturai, erstwhile capital city of the P iya kings. Today, the river dwindles to a trickle of water in the Ramanathapuram district, but in poems from the distant past, the Vaiyai is described as a mighty river, rushing towards the sea. The Vaiyai was such a central force in the lives of the citizens of ancient Maturai that they would address the river by name, singing it songs of praise.
In this volume, we offer translations of songs written to the Vaiyai River. These songs are part of the Parip al anthology, which belongs to the corpus of classical Tamil literature. The corpus is known as ca kam literature, named for the academies (or ca kams) of poets believed to have composed these poems. While there is some disagreement about when these poems were written, most scholars believe that the bulk of them were produced between the first and fourth centuries CE with significant outliers on either side of this time frame. Today, approximately 2300 poems survive, constituting a wealth of primary source material on ancient Tamil Nadu.
The Parip al is one of the eight anthologies of poetry that form the classical Tamil corpus. 1 It was first published in 1918 by the renowned Tamil scholar, U.V. Swaminatha Aiyar. 2 In his research, he discovered that the Parip al had originally been an anthology of seventy songs. 3 However, from the manuscripts he collected, Aiyar could only retrieve twenty-two of these poems. Among them, six are on the god Tirumal, eight on the god Vel (also called Murukan) and eight on the Vaiyai River. In this edition, we have translated all eight Vaiyai poems edited by Aiyar. The eighth is unfortunately incomplete, having survived only in fragments. We have also translated a Vaiyai poem cited as an example in a medieval Tamil commentary; it is very similar to the other eight, and there is a consensus among scholars that this poem belonged to the original Parip al compilation.
The Parip al poems are unlike most other poems in classical Tamil. For one thing, they are much longer than the poems in the other anthologies. A typical poem in the Parip al comprises about sixty lines and the longest runs to a hundred and forty, while poems belonging to the other anthologies are typically thirty lines long. The Parip al is also one of the two anthologies in the corpus ( Kalittokai being the other) that contain dialogue between protagonists. There is good reason to believe that this poetic device was used in the musical performance of the Parip al , for it is the only text in the ca kam corpus which was organized according to the melodic scale (called pan) to which the poems were sung and performed. Even a cursory reading reveals the performative nature of these poems. The poems themselves contain many references to music. For example, one Vaiyai poem describes the banks of the river in this way ( Parip al VII:147-58):
The yal, its strings tuned to the seven p lai notes, produces sweet music.
The flute joins in harmony, while the mulavu drums add their percussion.
Men and women begin to dance, while the cascading waters loud as furious thunder crash against the banks.
Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to reconstruct the music of these poems today. However, we urge readers to imagine how these poems would have been received by their earliest audience. The Parip al was presumably such a feat of musical virtuosity that one Vaiyai poem defines and describes it as inniyal man tercci icai Parip al , the song of graceful, sweet music ( Parip al XI:302-03). 4
II
Although they are highly stylized, the Parip al poems display remarkable diversity in scope and expression. Some of the earliest and finest representations of the devotional genre (known as bhakti) are found in the poems on Tirumal, while the Vaiyai poems are an unbridled celebration of sensuality and love.
The lovers quarrel is a theme common to all the Vaiyai poems. This is a well-known motif in ca kam poetry and the Tamil literary tradition assigns a specific name to it-utal. The quarrel usually occurs between husband and wife and, occasionally, between the husband and his mistress. The reason for the quarrel is always the man s infidelity. In poems depicting utal, the woman accuses the man of neglecting her and tells him she is aware of his infidelity. Very often, the poems end with the wife indignantly asking her husband to go back to his lover.
In the poems, one common situation involves a wife accusing her husband of bathing in a river with his mistress. With some minor variations, this theme occurs throughout ca kam literature, and it is particularly interesting in the context of the Vaiyai poems. As a representative example of such poems, we offer an excerpt from a poem in the Akananuru (an anthology of love poems in the classical Tamil corpus). Here, a woman addresses her erring husband ( Akananuru VI:6-22):
Yesterday, you frolicked in the Kaviri s abundant waters 5 where even oars cannot stand without bobbing,
with your beloved adorned with glittering earrings and jewels, holding the white sugar cane as if it were a raft.
You were as happy as the elephants that seek the lake of the Puliar, the flowers on your ravishing chest withering.
Today, you come, speaking deceitful lies: You, with yellow specks on your lovely breasts . You, of unblemished chastity, the mother of our son . It is not becoming to mock my age.
our youth too is long gone.
How can your lies bring us any happiness?
In poems such as this, the reader is forcefully drawn into the betrayed woman s pain, which in turn reveals her erring husband s ways. The speaker is almost invariably the heroine (or her female companion) and the invisible hero exists only as the person addressed. Although the poems describe the hero s behaviour, his impulses and actions are reduced to certain stock phrases such as (you) frolicked in the waters with the woman you desired . Note that these poems do not bestow any significance to the river, aside from marking it as the site of the husband s infidelity. In short, the theme of the lovers quarrel in these poems centres on the betrayed heroine s feelings. Everything else in the poem acts only to accentuate her emotions.
In contrast, the Vaiyai poems are primarily and emphatically about the river. The river is not merely a stage for the husband s infidelity; it is the setting for a wide range of events, specific sensory experiences and feelings. It is a place which is known in the most immediate manner, through the senses. In turn, such bodily experience brings together memory, imagination and desire, turning the river into a place that possesses