Paratitacan represents the contemporary milieu of Tamil identity and Tamil consciousness, in which we find a rich synthesis of the hoary tradition of the Tamils and their aspirations and achievements of the present moment. One of the sources of Paratitacan's greatness consists in his true comprehension of the Tamil literary tradition. For him, tradition does not mean a blind adherence to the ways of the previous generations. It is the critical labor of sifting the good from the bad and of knowing what is good and useful. In other words, Paratitacan's historical sense involves a perception, "not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presentences". He realizes that in great poetry the timeless and the temporal go together.
Paratitacan's Antiwar; Paricu typifies the accumulated wisdom and experience of the Tamil mind through ages. In it we come across the Laotian conception of tradition,".... just as the past directs and guides the present, so the present alters and modifies the past". The greatness of this poem stems from its introduction of the new, by which to modify and enrich the existing monuments of Tamil literature. Besides, this great poem abounds in richness of texture, a large body of f ore grounding devices both linguistic and conceptual, and a sense of verbal melody and vibrancy, integrated into the nuances of all that is best and unique in Tamil culture which Paratitacan envisions for his fellow men and women to draw their models on.
Translation of such classics into English, a medium of international communication, should facilitate more of cross-cultural studies, besides, contributing to the strength and vibrancy of 'World Literature'< a pursuit which the Insttute of Asian Studies is committed to. We are grateful to Mr. M.S.Venkatachalam who has measured up to this challenging task through his decades of emotional identification with the Dravidian ideology, the one which has largely defined the poetic art of Paratitacan.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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