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Below is a list of the past winners of the AAS South Asia Council (SAC) Ramanujan Book Prize for translations from South Asian languages into English:
2006: Clinton B. Seely: The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004)
2004: Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman: Classical Telegu Poetry: An Anthology (Oxford University Press, 2002)
2002: George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz: The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom (Columbia University Press, 2000)
2000: Stuart Blackburn: The Fatal Rumour: A Nineteenth Century Indian Novel (Oxford University Press, 1998)
1998: Patrick Olivelle: Upanisads (Oxford University Press, 1993)
1996: Rajagopal Parthasarathy: Cilappatikaram of Ilanko Atikal (The Tale of an Aklet): An Epic of South India (Columbia University Press, New York, 1993)
Clinton B. Seely: The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004).
The 2006 Ramanujan Prize for Excellence in Translation goes to Clinton B. Seely for The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal. Michael Madhudusan Datta’s mid-nineteenth century Meghanadavadha Kavya, considered the first important literary work in modern Bengali, is a Ramayana with a difference. The hero of the poem is a humanized Ravana, who grieves for his beloved son Meghanada, killed in the bloody battle of Lanka. As Datta was to admit later: “People grumble that the sympathy of the Poet in Meghanad is with the Rakshasas. And that is the real truth. I despise Ram and his rabble[,] while the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination.”
Seely’s translation is a work of art, mirroring the original’s limpid blank verse with great sensitivity to diction and detail. His scholarly introduction places Datta in the context of the intellectual and creative milieu of colonial Calcutta. It shows a poet attracted to the culture and religion of the British but as strongly inspired to recreate and return to his own. It is in the tension between two great traditions, between Milton, Tasso, Homer, Virgil, Dante on the one hand and earlier Bengali Ramayanas and the cults of Krishna and Durga on the other, that Datta captures the particular modernist moment which would go on to create his own enduring reputation.
Seely’s magnificent translation invites us to enter the emotional world of humanized demons, to share their collective mourning, and to feel the tragedy of a father whose son is lost.
Selection Committee: Rachel F. McDermott, Chair; Vasudha Dalmia; Heidi Pauwels.
Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman: Classical Telegu Poetry: An Anthology (Oxford University Press, 2002)
The 2004 A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation goes most deservedly to two preeminent scholar-translators, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, for their Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology, published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. This superb anthology is breathtaking in scope, beginning at the beginning, which is the 11th century C.E., for Telugu literature, and coming up into the 19th century. Additionally, it serves to complement two other books by the same translators, both part of the 2004 Ramanujan prize competition field of eight remarkable entries. Rao’s Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry: An Anthology, also published by OUP, New Delhi, beautifully carries on whence the classical anthology concluded. Rao and Shulman collaborate again on The Sound of the Kiss: or The Story That Must Never Be Told, from Columbia University Press, that text being a complete translation of a sixteenth-century narrative, an excerpt of which is found in their Classical Telugu Poetry.
Within this constellation of three stellar works, one is struck by the rich variety of linguistic registers, both high and low. For instance, from the prize-winning book, we are admonished in down-to-earth English, reflecting equally plebeian Telugu: "Don’t meddle with poets / who make a living out of finding fault. / They’re bad news." The Ramanujan Prize selection committee would like to respond in kind: "No problem, Mr. Telugu poet. We shun nay-saying fault-finders. Rather, we associate ourselves with the praiseful and praiseworthy poet-translators, Rao and Shulman, as we are certain A.K. Ramanujan himself would also have wanted to do."
George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz: The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom (Columbia University Press, 2000)
In their elegant and revelatory translations of "The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom," George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz collaborate to excellent effect. George Hart’s lucid introduction provides a solid scholarly grounding for the collection, both situating it historically and exploring it thematically. Hank Heifetz, speaking as a poet, explains that the original Tamil "runs like a river—long words, rapid speech, accumulating syllables—and these translations (sometimes straining against the bounds of English syntax) attempt to communicate something of the feel of these rolling rhythms." The translations not only attempt this formidable task, but succeed in it beautifully.
The volume that Hart and Heifetz have produced has another distinctive excellence as well. Since it is a translation of the one surviving complete anthology among the eight anthologies of the Tamil Sangam corpus, it presents the literature as the culture’s own redactors presented it—it "translates" not just the individual poems, but the anthology itself. Thus Hart and Heifetz challenge the reader not only to savor the individual poems, but also to experience and consider them as parts of the larger work within which they were collected and preserved.
And what poems! They are complex, detailed, multivalent, evocative of both inner and outer experiences. More than 150 poets, with at least ten women among them, join to create a work in which, as Hart says, the poets can be found variously "advising kings, addressing moral issues, or lamenting the instability of the world." The result is an anthology that indeed "provides a mirror for the society that produced it and for subsequent life in South India." We are indebted to Hart and Heifetz for recreating this mirror so skillfully in our own place and time.
Stuart Blackburn: The Fatal Rumour: A Nineteenth Century Indian Novel (Oxford University Press, 1998)
In The Fatal Rumour: A Nineteenth Century Indian Novel, Stuart Blackburn’s translation of B.R. Rajam Aiyar’s 1896 Tamil novel ‘Apattukkitamana Apavatam allatu Kamalambal Carittiram’, we have that rare phenomenon, a translation that both speaks to a 21st-century audience and conveys a palpable sense of the work in the original, and in its time and place. As one of the earliest novels in Tamil, Fatal Rumour rightly claims an important position in the history of South Asian literature, and the novel has never lost its popularity among Tamil readers. But Blackburn’s translation places it before us as a work worth reading for its considerable achievements as an engaging work of fiction. This is no easy task. Fatal Rumour is a quirky novel, the early work of an eccentric intellectual who died young. It does not deal with issues of modernity and the nation, but focuses on the complex relationships among ordinary people in "Little Pond" (Sirukulam), a fictitious village. But the work’s greatest challenge for the translator and reader is the novelist’s preoccupation with language itself.
In a brilliant and authoritative ‘Afterword’, Stuart Blackburn describes Rajam Aiyar’s novel as an experiment in the novel as folklore, a celebration of Tamil cultural and literary traditions. Fatal Rumour, Blackburn says, is a novel about speech in its familiar forms, ranging from proverbs to classical poetry. In his translation, Blackburn has met the challenge elegantly, translating the tonalities and registers of Aiyar’s exuberant linguistic experiments into a fluid modern English idiom. He makes Aiyar’s portraits of Sirukulam and its inhabitants come alive for us, capturing the felicities as well as the idiosyncrasies of Aiyar’s style, the weight and balance of his sentences, the lyricism of his descriptions. The entire range of speech of the novel’s characters is represented in a prose that seems effortlessly "natural". We are delighted to award the A.K. Ramanujan Translation prize for 2000 to a translation that so splendidly exemplifies Ramanujan’s ideals of translation: accuracy, aesthetic excellence, accessibility, innovation, and outstanding scholarship.
Patrick Olivelle: Upanisads (Oxford University Press, 1993)
A corpus of Sanskrit prose and poetic works, the Upanisads are among the most important religious and literary texts of ancient India. Presenting secret doctrines mainly in the form of dialogues between teachers and students of sacred learning, the Upanisads contributed substantially to the development of philosophical ideas in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Patrick Olivelle’s elegent, lucid, and accurate renderings capture the power and beauty of these ancient texts.
His terse English prose matches the spare style of the dialogues in the original, while the poetic passages evoke the lyrical spirit of the Sanskrit in full measure. His refusal to archaize his translation of these sacred texts, which are so far removed from us in time and in cultural contexts, is refreshing and very effective, resulting in dialogues vivid with the tones and rhythms of living , spoken language. While specialists will revel in the depth, originality and impartial spirit of Olivelle’s scholarship, the author has aimed his work above all at an audience of uninitiated readers. His historical introduction to the Vedic religion and society out of which the Upanisads arose is at once magisterial and eminently accessible, yet his greatest achievement is his ability to let the translation speak for itself. At every point his renderings offer new insights to these enigmatic texts.
Patrick Olivelle tells us that one of his goals in translating the Upanisads is to illuminate the distant past of India for the reader, but as he himself remarks in another context, a text is a living reality, not an artifact to be excavated. By making the far near, and by letting these ancient voices speak to us in all their humanity, Patrick Olivelle has made the Upanisads a living reality for us. In doing so, he has acted fully in the spirit of A.K. Ramanujan, the poet-scholar-translator for whom this prize was named.
Selection Committee: Indira Peterson (Chair), Wendy Doniger, Frances Pritchett.
Rajagopal Parthasarathy: Cilappatikaram of Ilanko Atikal (The Tale of an Aklet): An Epic of South India (Columbia University Press, New York, 1993)
The 1996 A.K. Ramanujan Prize is awarded to R. Parthasarathy for his translation of the Cilappatikaram of Ilanko Atikal (The Tale of an Aklet): An Epic of South India, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993. The judges felt that this work merited the prize for a number of reasons, including the importance and beauty of the original work—an epic rich in literary, religious, and historical power and meaning; the care and accuracy of the scholarship imbedded in the translation; and the grace and inviting flow of the English translation. Always sound and intelligent, the translation often rises to the level of true poetry; it manages to convey the tone of an ancient and courtly work without losing the immediacy of the rhythms of contemporary English. Its meticulous correlation with the original text, line by line, makes it useful even for readers who know some Tamil, while its elegance makes it a pleasure to read aloud. It makes one of the great classics of Indian literature truly accessible in English.
We are in the unusual position of actually knowing Ramanujan’s own evaluation of this book. He described it as, "a fine, luminous translation of an Indian classic. It’s a poet’s translation. Parthasarathy’s poetic skills are everywhere in evidence, yet guided by his sensitive scholarship and fidelity." While we can not know Ramanujan’s opinions on the other excellent entries submitted for this prize, now or in the future, we do hope that he might have concurred with our choice for this first award of the prize in his name.
Selection Committee: Wendy Doniger (Chair), Indira Peterson, Kirin Narayan.