The book contains translations of the five shorter works of the Vaiṣṇava Bhakti saint-poet Tirumaṅkai Āḻvār, the Tirukuṟuntāṇṭakam (TKT) and Tiruneṭuntāṇṭakam (TNT), consisting of 20 and 30 stanzas respectively, the Tiruveḻukūṟṟirukkai (TEK) consisting of 46 lines, and the Ciṟiya and Periya Tirumaṭal, consisting of 77 (CMA) and 148 (PMA) lines respectively. Tirumaṅkai's longer, sixth, work is the Periya Tirumoḻi of 1084 quatrains. The saint is generally dated in the eighth century. In a foreword, the series editor writes that the translations of Bhakti poetry available so far lack philological rigour and are tainted by later, fourteenth and fifteenth-century theological interpretations. We are told that what the new translations might lack in poetic beauty would be compensated by their faithfulness to the original reading. Furthermore, we are promised, they are accompanied by extensive annotations and a glossary.

The book under review is the second in a series which aims to cover the entire corpus of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti poetry. How are the texts presented? Of every stanza or every group of lines first the text is given in Tamil script, cut up into metrical feet (acai) the boundaries of which do not necessarily coincide with those of words. Next the same text is given in Roman script, in which the sandhi is solved and the words are written separately. This is followed by a so-called literal English translation, which whenever it was deemed necessary is accompanied by footnotes. Finally, tucked away in an appendix (pp. 361–392) yet another translation is given, this time one uninterrupted by annotations, which, the author hopes, will “reveal the poet's voice and the tone and flow of his works” (p. v). To me, all this seems a bit too much. What if the editors of the BORI edition of the Mahābhārata had decided to subject the more than 100,000 ślokas of the epic to a treatment like this! Or, to stay closer to the project at hand, by the same method Tirumaṅkai's 1084 quatrains will result in a book of approximately 1,000 pages. It is unclear to me why the much more efficient and elegant presentation used by T.V. Gopal Iyer and François Gros in their Tēvāram edition had not been adopted in Tamil script with all words standing on their own.Footnote ¹

The literal translations given next are meant to serve as a bridge between the Tamil texts and the “poetic” translations. However, they do not always make access to the Tamil texts any easier. For instance, in the case of the seventh quatrain of the Tiruneṭuntāṇṭakam, it is quite a puzzle to determine which English words represent which parts of the Tamil text. The transcribed version of TNT 7 reads:

• 1^a vaṟpu uṭaiya varai neṭum tōḷ maṉṉar māḷa

• 1^b  vaṭivu āya maḻu ēnti ulakam āṇṭu

• 2^a veṟpu uṭaiya neṭum kaṭal uḷ taṉi vēl uytta

• 2^b  vēḷ mutal ā veṉṟāṉ ūr vintai mēya

• 3^a kaṟpu uṭaiya maṭa kaṉṉi kāval pūṇṭa

• 3^b  kaṭi poḻil cūḻ neṭum maṟukil kamalam vēli

• 4^a poṟpu uṭaiya malai araiyaṉ paṇiya niṉṟa

• 4^b  pūm kōvalūr toḻutum pōtu neñcē.

Ate's literal translation runs as follows (between brackets the text passages concerned are added):

Admittedly, this going back-and-forwards has to do with the convoluted syntactic structure of the Tamil verse, with embedded sentences within embedded sentences. However, it is not as if there are no alternatives, as shown by Pope's line-by-line translation of the Tiruvācakam by the Śaiva Bhakti saint Māṇikkavācakar, the one by Filliozat of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, and the one by the above-mentioned François Gros of the Paripāṭal.Footnote ² The above translation is accompanied by several notes, three of which identify figures mentioned in the poem: the virgin dwelling in the Vindhyas is a form of the goddess Durgā, the one bearing a curved axe is Viṣṇu's incarnation as Paraśurāma, who destroyed the warrior class, and the youth throwing a spear is God Murukaṉ, or Skanda, Śiva's son.

The above translation is in the first place an attempt to account for the complex syntactic structure of the poem. For an easier read we have to turn to the appendix (pp. 366–367):

However, like the first translation, the second one cannot stand on its own. To understand it properly we need the information supplied in the notes to the first translation about the virgin who dwells in the Vindhyas, the hero with the curved axe and the youth who throws a spear into the sea. Here, too, we thus end up with two overlapping texts.

In the foreword of the series, the editor promised us extensive annotations. However, leaving aside footnotes of the type mentioned above, and others dealing with realia, many of them I would not call “annotations”. Some are unnecessary, such as the ones that inform us that the verb āḷ- in tēr āḷum, “who mastered the chariot” (TNT 20, 1), means “to rule” as well as “to control”, and that poru- in poru kaṭal, “crashing seas” (TNT 20, 2), means “to fight, to dash against [as waves]”. At the same time the author is silent about a difference between the first and second translations of TNT 7 quoted above. Where the latter has “for the king of the … mountains”, the first translation reads “for the king of [the people of] the mountains”. This difference rests on different interpretations of the sequence malaiyaraiyaṉ, that is, as malai araiyaṉ, “king (araiyaṉ) of the mountain (malai)”, in which y after malai functions as a sandhi glide, or as malaiyar aiyaṉ, “lord (aiyaṉ) of the mountain people”. In some cases one would wish that the author had delved somewhat more deeply into the matter. Thus, in a note to aimpāl ōti, “[her with] hair of five types” (TEK 33–4), for the five types of hair she first refers to lists supplied by the various editors of the text, one of which includes curly, glossy, fragrant, thick and soft hair. Then she refers to the series editor who would have informed her that the earlier Caṅkam literary tradition also knows of five types of hairstyles. However, if she had checked this information, she would have found that Caṅkam poetry does not speak about five hairstyles but about women wearing their hair in five tresses (nāṟ(u) aiṅkūntal, “with five (aiṅ) fragrant (nāṟu) tresses (kūntal)”, Akanāṉūṟu 65). Furthermore, one of the most extensive footnotes, on kaṟpōr puricai, translated with “walls made by craftsmen” (TEK 40), in which the author takes kaṟpōr as a participial noun of kal-, “to learn”, is completely superfluous. The phrase means “(earthen) rampart (puricai) covered (on the outside) (pōr) with stones (kal, with l>ṟ before a voiceless plosive). (Compare Periya Tirumoḻi 5.1.4 kaṟpār puricai, “a rampart with (on the outside) a layer (pār) of stones”). Another irrelevant note is found with the passage PMA 17, “tell [us] of one who went on this ancient path which is called ‘release’ going through some crack right in the center of the ever fierce-rayed one's orb!”, which would provide “an interesting cosmological image of release from rebirth as an escape through [a tiny orifice of, H.T.] the sun”. In her translation, Ate overlooked the word aṉṉatu, “like”: “through a hole as small as the one in the very middle of the sun”.

This brings me to the translations themselves, and the question of how philologically sound they are. In this connection I will, to begin with, focus on TNT 3. This quatrain opens with an enumeration of the forms and colours of Viṣṇu in different eras (for example, in the Tretā Yuga) or in his different incarnations (here, that of the tortoise). The subsequent part reads:

for which Ate provides the following translation (with the Tamil words and phrases added by me):

However, allāl usually means “except”, not “without”, and the expression ūḻi tōṟu ūḻi, “in era to era” (is this good English?), is as far as I know not otherwise attested in Tamil. Unfortunately, instead of explaining the problems she has with these two expressions, Ate produces ad hoc solutions. Starting from the regular meanings, the passage (with a full stop after allāl) may be paraphrased as follows:

Though with this god anything is possible, I venture to suggest that the answer to the latter question is “no”, as red eyes are symptoms of anger.

The verb kaṭṭurai- in the above passage brings me to another passage, CMA 19–26, in which the family has called in a female soothsayer (kaṭṭuvicci) to discover the cause of their daughter's strange behaviour. After having gone into trance, the kaṭṭuvicci explains (kaṭṭuraittāḷ) that the girl's conduct is caused by her infatuation with Viṣṇu. However, the soothsayer does not mention this god by name, but speaks in riddles, asking for instance: “who measured this whole world?” (the answer is: Viṣṇu in his incarnation as dwarf), or referring to him indirectly, for instance, as the “One with the Thousand Names”.Footnote ³ A sentence of the latter category reads pērttēyum kārār tirumēṉi kāṭṭiṉāḹ (22^ab), which Ate translates with “Furthermore, she indicated [his] sacred body like a raincloud”. “Furthermore” is her interpretation of pērttēyum, which she analyzes as consisting of pērttum, “again”, with the emphatic particle ē inserted in the middle of it, that is, as pērtt-ē-(y)um. Ate does not provide any other examples of an insertion of this type, which of course there are not: her analysis of the word is completely nonsensical and only shows what extreme solutions she is prepared to resort to when a passage is not immediately clear to her. In fact, the make-up of pērttēyum is clear. It consists of pērttu, “having altered, distorted”, and ēyum, “which resembles”. The passage may be translated with “She (the kaṭṭuvicci) pointed to His sacred body (visible) in (ār) the black raincloud, which resembled (the body) in a distorted form”. The colour is right, the cloud's form is not; the kaṭṭuvicci is doing a Rorschach test!

Another passage I want to consider in more detail is TKT 17, 3–4:

In the preceding two lines it is said that people who praised god have escaped rebirth; those who abused him have been saved as well (have stayed alive). The difference between the two ways of life is experienced only after this life. Ate translates the lines quoted above as follows:

The translation is accompanied by a note on pāl, which would be used as a locative postposition here, and one in which the phrase ācaiyō peritu is compared to kāmamō peritē in Kuṟuntokai 18, 5 (not 185, 5!), which according to information provided by Eva Wilden is “a fossilised Caṅkam formula of yearning or loss”. I suppose this explains “[a]h” in the above translation for ō. If I understand Ate's translation correctly, Viṣṇu is anxious to save people from rebirth. However, if nī- means “to reject”, it does so in the sense of “to reject as an option for yourself”, so that Viṣṇu cannot be the subject of the desire. Furthermore, pāl also means “quality, nature”. As I see it, the saint-poet has decided to praise god, not to abuse him, for two reasons:

Admittedly, I have no good explanation for ō in ācaiyō either.

Sometimes I simply do not understand Ate's translations and wonder if she understood them herself. Take her translation of PMA 11–14. The passage describes ascetics, who live off rotten fruit, sleep in leaf huts (which do not protect them against the rain), expose themselves to the sun and lie in full ponds (vaḷ taṭattiṉuḷ kiṭantum). What are the ascetics doing in those full ponds? The context suggests that we are dealing with a form of mortification, but from Ate's translation the image arises of a holiday maker taking a swim to cool off after sunbathing. However, the adjective val̥ does not mean “cool”, but “abundant, rich”. On the other hand, besides being an adjective val̥ could also be a noun, meaning “strap”, and besides the noun taṭam, which among many more contextual meanings also means “pond”, there is also a noun taṭam meaning “noose, snare, trap” (related to taṭaṅku-, “to be obstructed”?). So, vaḷ taṭattiṉuḷ may mean “in a contraption made of straps”. We have here clearly to do with the so-called yogapaṭṭa, that is, a cloth strap thrown over the back and knees used by yogis as an aid for sitting still during meditation.Footnote ⁴ The verb kiṭa-, in kiṭantum, thus does not mean “lying down” but “being inactive, sitting still”.

At this point I will comment on some points of grammar discussed in the notes to Ate's translation. The first concerns verb forms like viṭukilēṉ in TKT 1 and aṟikilēṉ in 10. These are taken to consist of the verbal roots viṭu-, “to leave, abandon”, and aṟi-, “to know”, plus the verb kil- “to be able”, followed immediately, that is, without any tense marker, by the first person singular ending. These formations are translated with “I will not be able to leave” and “I am not capable of knowing”. I doubt, however, if this analysis is tenable. For one thing, in irukka killāḷ, “she cannot sit” in TNT 11, the verb kil- is, as one would expect, construed with the infinitive and not attached to the verbal root. Furthermore, in the case of matikkilar in TKT 8 “to be able” cannot be fitted in. Ate translates matikkilar with “they don't consider” and explains in a footnote that it is a present tense negative form, that is, a form consisting of the verbal root mati- plus a present tense suffix -kk(u) followed by ilar, “they are not”. It is unclear to me why this analysis is not applied to viṭukilēṉ as well. Another form which may be mentioned here is kāṇkiṟpār in TKT 18 and TNT 3. According to Ate we have to do with the verbal root kāṇ-, “to see”, followed by kiṟpār, the 3^rd person plural (-ār) of the future (-p-) of the same verb kil- mentioned above. However, as I have already discussed elsewhere,Footnote ⁵ in kiṟpār we might well have to do with an accumulation of two tense suffixes, -kiṟ- for the present (found in modern Tamil. For instances of the variant –kiṉṟ- in our texts, see Appendix 3.7 on p. 414) and -p- for the future. This accumulation is comparable to the suffixes -tap- and -dap-, and –dah-, found in Old and Middle Kannaḍa respectively.Footnote ⁶

I was surprised to see that quite a number of tense formations (but not all; see matikkilar mentioned above) are described in the book in terms of aspect. Thus, īṉṟaṉai, “you bore”, in TEK 2 is identified in a footnote as a “classical perfective aspect formation”, and niṟṟum, “we remain”, in PMA 38 as the 1^st (not 3^rd) person plural of the imperfective aspect. The source for what to all intents and purposes appears to be a new concept in the study of the grammar of Old Tamil appears to be Eva Wilden's recent Grammar of Old Tamil For Students (Pondichéry, 2018). This work, however, does not offer an in-depth study of aspect in Old Tamil;Footnote ⁷ the concept is introduced there more or less parenthetically. It therefore seems premature to apply the concept as blindly as is done by Ate here. This is not to say that it is easy to account for tense in Old Tamil. Take the past tense form viḻuṅkiṉēṟku in TKT 4:

Ate translates these lines as follows:

As said, viḻuṅkiṉēṟku is a past tense form, “to me who (have or had) swallowed”. Should the passage therefore not be translated as:

Ate presents Tirumaṅkai as an author fond of literary experiments. While his Periya Tirumoḻi, which is divided into groups of ten stanzas, each decade being dedicated to a particular place of worship of Viṣṇu, falls in line with a large, if not the largest, part of Bhakti poetry, Vaiṣṇava as well as Śaiva, the shorter works collected by Ate do indeed stand apart. For instance, the Tiruvēḻukūṟṟirukkai and both the Ciṟiya and Periya Tirumaṭal do not represent stanzaic poetry but are long poems pieced together on the basis of longer and shorter sentences which do not necessarily coincide with metrical boundaries. A text of the Tiruvēḻukūṟṟirukkai type, which plays with numbers, is also found among the works of the Śaiva saint-poet Campantar (Tēvāram 1, 128). As shown by Ate, both versions abound in verb forms with the ending ai (instead of āy) of the second person singular, which is otherwise rare. We seem to be dealing with a peculiarity of this type of text here. However, while Campantar's version ends with a few lines which mention the author, the one by Tirumaṅkai does not. Furthermore, Campantar describes his text as a kaṭṭurai, a term we have come across above in the passages dealing with the kaṭṭuvicci and which may refer to the figurative language used, in the case of the Tiruvēḻukūṟṟirukkai literally, as the numbers occurring in the text can be arranged into a pyramid-like figure, as shown by Ate (p. 26).

The maṭal theme is derived from the earlier Caṅkam poetic tradition. It depicts a man who threatens to “ride” through the village on the jagged stem of the palm tree (maṭal) to show his despair at being refused by a girl, abusing her in the process. In Tirumaṅkai's poems, however, it is the girl who threatens to ride the maṭal to abuse unapproachable Viṣṇu. Tirumaṅkai's two extensive maṭal poems are the only ones of their kind in the Bhakti literary tradition.

The innovative nature of the Tirukuṟuntāṇṭakam and Tiruneṭuntāṇṭakam is not clear to me. The texts have nothing in common with the Śaiva saint-poet Appar's Tirutttāṇṭakam (Tēvāram II 6), except that the latter text, like those by Tirumaṅkai, has the word tāṇṭakam in the title. An interesting observation made by Ate is that Tirumaṅkai, in his Tiruneṭuntāṇṭakam, in the definition of one particular metrical foot adhered to a more traditional rule than in the Tirukuṟuntāṇṭakam.

A problem in any investigation of possible innovative developments within the Bhakti literary tradition is the absence of a verifiable internal chronology. The attempts undertaken to this end so far are flawed anyhow, as they place the beginning of the tradition as early as in the sixth century, that is, during the reign of the Pallavas, who for all we know had no interest in the use of Tamil as a literary language or a language with which to address god.Footnote ⁸ As a result it cannot be established with any degree of certainty if Tirumaṅkai's Tiruveḻukūṟṟirukkai was inspired by Caṃpantar's kaṭṭurai or the other way around, or if his two maṭal poems were inspired by the two stanzas by Nammāḻvār that deal with this theme (Tiruvāymoḻi 5, 3, 9–10) or the other way around.

By way of conclusion I would like to discuss one more passage, from the first stanza of the Tirukuṟuntāṇṭakam, which is also the first in Ate's edition. In contrast to some of the passages discussed above, this one consists of words with narrow semantic fields and lacks complex constructions. However, a translation is more than the sum total of the words. As I see it, in this case the position of the stanza at the head of the text should be considered as well. The stanza starts with a list of Viṣṇu's qualities (He is a treasure) and heroic deeds (He killed Kaṃsa). In the third line the text continues with:

which Ate translates as follows (with the Tamil words added by me):

Supplying “[him]” in “to leave [him]” does not do justice to the text, and I do not think Ate made the right decision in doing so. Rather, the object of viṭukilēṉ is the viti(yiṉai) (Sanskrit vidhi) mentioned at the beginning of the same line: the saint-poet will not abandon (viṭukilēṉ) the course of action (viti) of praising Māl (Viṣṇu), which he had completely internalised (eṉ maṉattu vanta). The stanza thus forms a very apt beginning of a text the main aim of which is to praise god.

As I see it, the next volumes of the series would profit considerably from a more compact presentation by avoiding needless repetition in the presentation of the Tamil texts as well as the translations. More importantly, the translators should take more seriously their responsibility of developing a sound philological approach in dealing with the Tamil text, which, as shown once more in the publication under review, is dearly missing so far in classical Tamil studies in general.