Vivek Narayanan – The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror

Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror is a fractalized translation and reinterpretation of a classical work in the Tamil Sangam canon, an anthology of 401 short poems composed between 100 CE and 300 CE. As Narayanan writes, the poems “explore in excruciating detail the relationship between the interior and the exterior, the personal and the public” to reflect on the fracture of poetry itself. The influence of The Kuruntokai on Tamil culture and more broadly has been vast but webbed; the poems’ inherent eroticism and expressive range has complicated their history of open dissemination, surfacing most prominently in the English-speaking world through a formally liberal, or “Poundian,” translation by A. K. Ramanujan in the late 1960s. For our contemporary moment, Narayanan provides a close experience and elaboration of The Kuruntokai.