The book under review titled ‘The Poetic Works of Tiruloka Sitaram with Translation and Notes’ has 55 poems by the great Tamil poet Tiruloka Sitaram duly translated into English by Sekkizhar Adi-p-podi Dr TNRamachandran.
Tiruloka Sitaram was born to Lokanatha Iyer and Meenakshi Sundarammal on 1-4-1917 in a small town called Thondaimanthurai in the Trichy district of Tamilnadu, India. His father passed away in his third year and his uncle raised him. His mother tongue was Telugu. He married Rajamani at the age of 10 at the age of 19.
He began his life as a priest. He was very interested in Tamil literature. He went to Ramasami padayachi, a great Tamil scholar and learned all the Tamil epics like Kamba Ramayanam and Bharatham.
He began composing his own wonderful poems. He started publishing a Tamil magazine under the name India Valiban and had written articles under the moniker Mandahasan. He later had used his own name for all of his writings.
He was very attracted to the poems of the great poet Subramanya Bharathi. He made it a habit of not spending a day without reading or quoting at least a few lines from Bharatiyar.
The bond was so deep that he assumed himself to be a spiritual son of Bharathi even though he had never seen the great poet when he passed away in 1921.
He went to the house of Chellammal Bharathi, Bharathi’s wife, during her last days. Chellammal breathed his last in her lap.
As a journalist, he founded a magazine under the name of Sivaji and the poems and articles published there appealed to the Tamil world. She lived only 56 years and breathed her last on 8-23-1973.
His famous poem Gandarva Ganam describes the dawn, the evening in powerful words.
The translation is like this:
The day dawned on the peak of Pothika
And below the sprint that lay a crescent
It was the irregular mountain-cave
Its gaping mammoth mouth
‘Twixt whose teeth, solemn and devotion
The flood flowed over the plain.
We can compare these lines with Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:
“..That deep romantic abyss that bowed
Down the green hill.”
The afternoon comes like this:
The rushing Sun rushed headlong
And he struck the spring with millions of arrows;
The vaporous foamy foam
In the atoms rose like a marvelous arc
who looked with great delight,
The hunting bow on the shoulder went slack.
Here, the line ‘vaporescent foamy foam; can be compared to Milton’s
‘When the vapors shot
Impresses the air”
This is just one example to explain how Tiruloka Sitaram’s poetic mind explores nature.
We have fifty-five such wonderful poems duly translated into English.
The book is beautifully printed in such a way that one would not leave it without reading all the poems.
Translator TNRamachandran has compared many of the poems to Shakespeare’s and concludes: “Donne and Coleridge’s thoughts are less powerful than Shakespeare’s, who, however, finds a match in Tiruloka Sitaram.”
We may see some more poems by this great poet in our next article.