Kalittokai in English (An Old and Rare Book)

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Preface Translation is a significant and purposeful aid toward a unified human consciousness. It has grown into a major academic pursuit today with universities and colleges nurturing it as a graduate and research programme throughout the world. In a multilingual society like India, where we have as many as 1652 languages and major dialects, where localism in varied garbs rears its ugly head now and then, and where the medium of instruction is progressively changed to the regional languages, translation is bound to play an increasingly domineering role in the university curricula. But for translation, most of us would not have had access to the imperishable riches written in the languages of the old such as Greek and Sanskrit, and our minds would have remained poorer beyond measure had we been shut off from a Plato and an Aristotle, a Thiruvalluvar and a Kalidasa, a Homer and a Dante, a Vyasa and a Sophocles. Besides, transcultural migration of ideas benefits individual languages in multifarious ways. The greatest literatures of the world such as the Bible and Tirukkural, the Mahabharata and the Aeneid reveal areas of transcendental perspectives rather than exclusiveness of vision. That the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer down to the present forms one continuous literary tradition has been made possible through an uninhibited commerce of thought and experience across the continents through the vehicle of translation.

Keeping this overriding conceptual significance of translation in view, the Institute of Asian Studies (IAS), Chennai, has made it the central focus of its academic objectives. As a global participant of the UNESCO's Memory of the World project, this Institute has brought out in print a considerable number of ballads of folk Literature in Tamil along with their English translations. As part of the "IAS Classics in Translation Series", some of the individual poetic anthologies of the classical Tamil, known as Cankam literature, as well as selected poems of these anthologies under the series Tamil Poetry through the Ages have already been translated into English, while the translation of other anthologies is in progress. The translation of the masterpieces of devotional literature in Tamil - Nalayira Tivviyap Pirapantam and Panniru Tirumurai - into English has now been going on, with ripe, competent scholars being engaged in this stupendous task.

Kalittokai in English by Dr. V. Murugan, a professor of English and practising translator, is in line with the above objective of the Institute. It is a matter of pride for us to bring out the complete text of Kalittokai in English translation for the first time, a work that is universally acclaimed as the 'delight of the learned', the one known for its great structural complexity and multi-dimensional aesthetic strength.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages