Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a series of translations from largely Tamil, but also Sanskrit, texts, by one of the great modern poets of India, who was the greatest translator of ancient Indian poetry into modern English. It’s equivalent to Ted Hughes doing his translations from Ovid, the same sort of thing. A great modern poet taking on ancient poetry and making modern literature. It’s a very slim text – you can savour it and get the essence of it in half an hour; it’s a very quick way of getting into something extraordinary."
I suppose that’s the same for the final book you’ve mentioned, The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, translated from the ancient Dravidian.
Yes. The Interior Landscape is a very slim book of utterly beautiful ancient Indian poetry, much of which is surprisingly and wonderfully erotic: again, this incredibly rich ancient Indian culture which we have no inkling of in the British education system – at no point in my education, certainly.
This is a series of translations from largely Tamil, but also Sanskrit, texts, by one of the great modern poets of India, who was the greatest translator of ancient Indian poetry into modern English. It’s equivalent to Ted Hughes doing his translations from Ovid, the same sort of thing. A great modern poet taking on ancient poetry and making modern literature. It’s a very slim text – you can savour it and get the essence of it in half an hour; it’s a very quick way of getting into something extraordinary.
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Travel writer and historian William Dalrymple wrote his first book, In Xanadu, at the age of 22. Since then he has published seven further books and been awarded a host of awards for his writing and broadcasting. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.
