Tamil love poet
Hardy) and also an expert Sanskritist and astrologer. His father was a famous mathematician (not Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was “discovered” and brought to Cambridge by G.H. He was, however, on home ground: he had grown up in a Tamil-speaking Brahmin family in Mysore, and Kannada, the language of Karnataka, was one of his three languages-he wrote poems in Kannada and English but never, I think, in Tamil, his mother tongue, or mother’s tongue. He was physically slight, on the edge of invisibility except for burning black eyes. When we were introduced, I had trouble connecting this soft-spoken, shy man with the great linguist, translator, poet, and scholar whom I knew from his books. We were at a conference of folklorists, linguists, and philologists convened by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, which housed the participants in the old hunting lodge of the Mysore rajahs, deep in the Karnataka countryside. I first met Raman (as he was usually called by friends) in 1980 in Mysore. This from one of the strongest, most original South Asian minds of the twentieth century. One of the first fears of ageing, I’m sure, of being unexpressed, of having missed the boat, therefore of not belonging, and so of not wanting to belong, to withdraw and hide, to struggle with disappointment in oneself, or do small things that one guards and resents. At fifty this is appalling, because I’m surrounded by professionals whom I envy, admire…. In one such note, he writes on November 9, 1979: “Maybe publish a journal of ideas, a writer’s notebook with no pretensions.” This thought is embedded in a candid paragraph filled with self-doubt and self-laceration:Īs a writer or thinker, I’m quite an amateur. And while Ramanujan honed his poems to something approaching perfection, with each syllable accounted for, in some sense they are like his diary notes to himself, light with ellipses, thus not quite finished.
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His own poems were often like eavesdropping on a rich, frequently sad, very private conversation, with several disparate and incongruous voices. Ramanujan used to say, can never be heard, only overheard.
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LaVerne Harrell Clark/University of Arizona Poetry Center/Arizona Board of Regents