Tamil by David Shulman

Author:David Shulman [Shulman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780674974654
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-09-25T22:00:00+00:00

Lovely lady with eyes like a doe’s:

If m-l-r-ṇ come at the end,

in reverse order, then these four—

nā-nī-ṇū-ne—

will nicely serve the lord

who holds a woman in half his body.5

That should be clear enough. The poet even has enough space left over for a long vocative to some anonymous listener (start of line 3 in the Tamil). Everything is compressed into a riddle-like format—and indeed, this verse is just that, a riddle, posed by the poet to whoever might like to unravel it. All the information is stated simply, barely encoded. The supposed questioner has been rendered superfluous. If you follow the poet’s orders, then you will get the following four words: nāṇ, “a string or belt”; nīr, “water” (here the river Ganges); nūl, the sacred thread draped across the chest; and nem, “poison,” also “love / ambrosia.” Each of these attributes is to be found on the body of Lord Śiva—and the order follows the opening line of the poem. To make the riddle just a little more teasing, there is the unconventional meaning of “throat” for nĕñcu, normally “heart.” Why not challenge the decipherer lexically as well as phonetically and metrically? There are a few other minor surprises thrown in for good measure, but I think we can make do with this elegant, phono-geometrical solution.

As Dan Pagis has shown us, once a literary riddle is solved, the package of riddle-cum-resolution becomes a new poem in its own right.6 Suppose you, the reader, haven’t fully followed the technical explanation of the previous paragraph. It doesn’t matter. Is the poem not rather lovely nonetheless? It has a gently tantalizing, rather surreal quality, as perhaps suits a verse speaking about god. The two ladies, one outside the poem (listening to it), the second inside it and, even further inside, merged in with the god as the left half of his body, seem to converse across the phonematic barrier in the middle. A Tamil reader is likely to be ravished by the simple music of the concluding four syllables. Such verses are well known in Sanskrit and other Indian languages.7 Once embedded in a narrative like the one we started with, they tend to deepen their expressive force. Such is surely the case here, although the final form of this story is a late-medieval or early-modern concoction. Nonetheless, the story explicates hints lurking in what lies at its core—that is, the text of the many verses it cites. The true poet—learned, entirely immersed in Tamil, the very embodiment of Tamil erudition and the power of Tamil speech, but also playful, inventive, continuously experimenting with what he has been given—offers himself, that is, Tamilness itself, as the stake in a game of incalculable consequence. The goal of this chapter is to understand both game and outcome. I shouldn’t have to tell you that Black Cloud triumphs over his rivals; and it is of interest that he ends by cursing the city of Tirumalairayan pattinam to become a wasteland, as, of course, it does.8

We find ourselves

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