Guillermo Rodríguez's fine book, When Mirrors Are Windows, is the first authoritative study of what the translator and poet A. K. Ramanujan left behind upon his sudden death on July 13, 1993. A culmination of twenty years of research, the book is based on his 2006 doctoral dissertation and “aims to fill a critical vacuum by offering a systematization of Ramanujan's poetics and an overview of his life and work, covering a wide spectrum of published and unpublished primary sources, including his private diaries and journals, drafts of poems, and other papers” (p. xxi).
As a writer, Rodríguez is engaging; even though this book has the many elements of a reference work, it does not read like one, for the most part. The writing is a bit dry in places, but this is a result of Rodríguez's drive for thoroughness and is outweighed by his more lyrically written passages, particularly in chapter 3.
The book begins with a survey and assessment of literary criticism on Ramanujan, which focuses primarily on works that analyze Ramanujan as a poet and a translator (p. 4), all of which tend to fawn, but there is no hero worship in Rodríguez's book.
In chapter 2, Rodríguez unfolds for us the narrative of Ramanujan's influences, which turns into a history of intellectual engagement: poets, theorists, linguists, and critics such as Walter Ong, Roman Jakobson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Victor Turner; and later, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin, who helped Ramanujan think through his own breaking down of useless dichotomies. While Rodríguez characterizes Ramanujan's intellectual growth as an “evolution from a trained linguist to cultural anthropologist” (p. 38), the linguist in him certainly never left.
The third chapter is the most biographical in the book. Rodríguez makes it clear that Ramanujan's intellectual eclecticism began at home with his early embrace of rationalism, with linguistics and mathematics as perhaps the most crucial point of convergence. Ramanujan characterized linguistics and poetry as a “search for forms.” Named after “the renowned mathematical genius Srinivasan Ramanujan” (p. 83), he rejected Hinduism and became deeply attracted to counter-systems but embraced no dogma. Along with his rejection of Hinduism came a shunning of Sanskrit as he felt “drawn to the mother-tongue traditions” (p. 89).
Ramanujan arrived in the United States in 1959 on a Fulbright and moved on to the University of Chicago in 1962, the setting for his legendary encounter with the Tamil caṅkam anthologies in the basement of Harper Library (pp. 91–92). He certainly lived in a “state of permanent contradiction” (p. 92), but what Rodríguez brings out so well is the sheer fact that an almost ethereal beauty arose from all of his anxiety, conflict, and angst.
Rodríguez writes of Ramanujan's “inner aesthetics” in chapter 4, and again stresses the lack of dogma: Ramanujan “did not believe in abstract systems of thought nor did he formulate any particular aesthetic or poetic theory that he would claim his own” (p. 110); he never hunted “for things to write about” (p. 114). I read this chapter through the altered light of the August 2017 solar eclipse, where I encountered hailstorms of detail from his early journal entries; examples of his elegant, spidery handwriting; and details of the birth and refinement of the phenomenal poems of Relations (pp. 141–42). This chapter also documents his experiment with mescaline “as an intellectual exercise” (p. 127), anchored in “his intellectual search and personal conviction of arriving at abstract ideas only through particular experiences and the bodily senses” (p. 151). The hallucinogenic experiment was also linked to the success of Speaking of Śiva (Penguin 1973)—Ramanujan's exquisite translations of the medieval Kannada vacanas of the Śaivite saint-poets—as a “cult book” of the counter-culture context of the early 1970s (p. 154).
As Ramanujan said in a 1980 interview, creativity “does not come out of cosmopolitanism … [but from] sustained attention to one's own experiences, one's own locality, one's own landscape.… [I]t happens at the place of contact between me and whatever is outside … to the skin where all contacts take place” (p. 155), but in chapter 5, Rodríguez also reminds us of Ramanujan's deep readings of the American pragmatists (Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) (p. 168) and the Slavic formalists, Roman Jakobson chief among them (p. 171).
Even though Rodríguez maintains in chapter 6 that Ramanujan kept “most of his explicit personal views on poetry and theory of poetry as well as his poetry in English out of his scholarly prose” (p. 207), I would assert that his poetic voice and his acute powers of observation were crucial to his prose: that voice is alive and well in his essays. And even though he worried that his poems were too autobiographical, he did say that his intellectual and emotional lives were “not two different things” (p. 208). He also refused to embrace the narratives and nostalgics of exile, or to pin his experience down “to a set of post-colonial critical clichés” (p. 212).
Rodríguez emphasizes Ramanujan's fondness for “writing and translating short image poems, which fostered his principle of ‘zero redundancy’” (p. 227), and chapter 7 explores his own characteristic brand of literary formalism, grounded in his “lifelong allegiance to linguistics … and its theoretical and practical application to the study of poems” (p. 271). Poetry was, of course, “the discipline and art that illuminated all spheres of his life and thought.” He was especially attracted to the “voices and sensual concreteness of classical Tamil” (p. 289), but he did tend to treat the caṅkam poems and the Śaiva vacanas as his own poems (p. 295). Though he was no less the scholar for it, he especially “relished the Tamil compositions and their poetics with the artistic envy of a poet”; the poems “overwhelmed him” (pp. 305–6). Ramanujan's translations stun his readers, and as he said, “I translate what I want, what I care for, what touches me as a writer,” regarding translation “equally as a scholarly discipline, art, and existential urge” (p. 368).
I write this review as a ghost haunting several pages of When Mirrors Are Windows, and many of us who were left behind in the wake of Ramanujan's death will find this a difficult read—old sorrows well up, and quiet grief becomes loud and jangling some twenty-four years hence: Ramanujan's “delicate voice and soft modulation” (p. xvi) become audible again in many of these pages, but we must thank Rodríguez from our heads and hearts for this meticulous, honest, and monumental book, and for reasserting Ramanujan's “absent presence” (p. xvi) among us all.
