Poetical Legacy of Ramasamy

Seenu Ramasamy is an award-winning filmmaker and Tamil poet. The Days of a Small Brook and Other Poems: A Book of Dithyrambs, Lyrics and Elegies is neatly divided into three sections—Dithyrambs, Love Poems, and Elegies. In the Foreword to the book the translator writes, ‘Choosing the poetic idiom directly from the native soil, Seenu Ramasamy’s poems give us the mystic feel of listening to a ritualist folk song sung with dithyrambic ecstasy. It was extremely challenging for a translator to cope with the natural and near stream-of-consciousness flow of the poet’s thought and render it into a culturally and linguistically different language, English. That is why this translator chooses to call a section of poems as Neo-Dithyrambs.’ Elango has successfully sustained the native flair of Ramasamy’s Tamil poems in English which gives easy access to non-Tamil readers. Herein lies the power of translation, even though it is an arduous task to capture the culture-specific subtle nuances of a regional language.