Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

Sangam works now in Hindi

Staff Reporter

Tamil poetry of love and longing from 2 B.C. rendered into Hindi

CHENNAI: Long after the renditions into English, the Tamil poetry of love and longing from the 2nd century B.C. have now been translated into Hindi.

The publishing of the translations of Sangam literature is tentatively scheduled for after the elections, said M. Rajendran, director of the Tamil Development Department.

The final work would include a transliteration of the original poetry in the Devnagri script, to introduce the sounds of the original to the reader, and a prose translation. It would be difficult to translate the finely-crafted quatrains of the Kurunthogai into poetry again. "That was why ornamental prose using techniques like alliteration has been used," said V. Subramaniam, formerly with the Tamil Virtual University.

He was part of the expert committee that supervised the translation effort and is currently "vetting" the Silappadhikaram translation. "Poornam Vishwanthan's brother tried to translate some Sangam literature but this is the first systematic attempt to introduce our unrivalled corpus of the 2nd century B.C. literature to the Hindi readers," he said. Next on the list for translation into Hindi are medieval literature of devotion, of which the Thevaram has been translated into Bengali, and the modern Tamil short story.

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