The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom

by George Hart (Translator), George L. Hart III (Translator)

Two prominent translators present the first complete English-language edition of one of India's greatest works of classical literature: the Purananuru. This anthology of four hundred poems by more than 150 poets between the first and third centuries C.E. in old Tamil -- the literary language of ancient Tamilnadu -- was composed before Aryan influence had penetrated the south. It is thus a unique testament to pre-Aryan India.

Beyond its importance for understanding the development of South Asia's history, culture, religion, and linguistics, the Purananuru is a great work of literature, reflecting accurately and profoundly the life of southern India 2,000 years ago. One of the few works of classical India that confronts life without the insulation of a philosophical facade and that makes no basic assumptions about karma and the afterlife, the Purananuru has universal appeal. It faces the world as a great and unsolved mystery, delving into living and dying, despair, love, poverty, and the changing nature of existence.

To this hidden gem of world literature George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz add a helpful appendix, an annotated bibliography, and an excellent introduction describing the work and placing it in its social and historical context.

Genres: Poetry, India, Classics, Ancient History

436 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 300

About the author

George Hart was a British Egyptologist. He studied classics and Egyptology at University College London. He was a staff lecturer in Egypt and the classical world at the British Museum from 1973 until his retirement in 2004. In addition to his museum work, he also taught Egyptian hieroglyphs and lectured on cruises.

Reviews

[Hal Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fell in love with George L. Hart’s earlier translation of Tamil poetry (some of which overlaps with this volume), Poets of the Tamil Anthologies: Ancient Poems of Love and War; especially compared with the earlier work, The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom is disappointing. This could be because the Purananuru is not the strongest of the Tamil anthologies, and it could be because Hart could not in this book, as he did in the earlier collection, cherry pick the best poems for translation. I know almost nothing of old Tamil poetry, and couldn’t say. But I think the real problem is in the addition of Hank Heifetz to the translation team. Heifetz is ostensibly supposed to “poeticize” Hart’s literal translations, but the resulting poems are wordy, and ugly in syntax.

You when you confront a war win that war as you take
your stand routing their armies, your body slashed over
with the scars and wounds from their swords, and you become then
a grim sight to the eyes but a sweet thing to hear about!
167

This may be a very faithful translation, for all I know, but it’s certainly an awkward one. Hart’s Poets of the Tamil Anthologies is marked by a simplicity of style that never conceals the beauty of what translates well from the Tamil originals: the images, the metaphors, and the themes. This is Hart by himself:

My feet will not walk further,
My eyes
looking and looking
have lost their clearness.
Surely more than the stars in the wide dark sky
are strangers in this world.
(Kuruntokai 44.)

This may not be great poetry as poetry, but the point is: Nothing gets in the way here. It’s almost unheard of for poetry to be translated into great poetry, and even competent versifiers (Luquiens, Mandelbaum) are rare; all I want is to be able to appreciate the translatable parts of the Tamil anthologies, and a line like “You when you confront a war win that war as you take” isn’t helping. It’s Hart’s artlessness that lets the art of the original shine through. I prefer Hart’s translations even to R.K. Ramanujan’s in his Poems of Love and War from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil precisely because Ramanujan tries harder to make his poems pass as poetry; but Ramanujan is both better at it and less baroque and distracting than Heifetz.

Hart had translated in his earlier book some of the same poems that appear in this one. Compare #356 by Hart alone:

The burning ground has seen the back of every man,
for it alone is the end of all men on earth.
No one has ever seen its back.

with #356 by Hart and Heifetz:

It [the burning ground] has seen the back of every human being, all the people
living in this world as they go away,
but no one has ever seen it turn its back and go away.

The second is much wordier, and this is especially fatal in the last line, which bathetically loses its epigrammatic pith. It’s possible that the second is more literal, but I can’t find much virtue in that; it’s a far weaker poem.

It’s fun to read one of the Tamil Anthologies in toto, including the fragmentary and the abstruse entries; but overall, anyone interested in classical Tamil poetry for an English-speaking layman should try Hart’s Poets of the Tamil Anthologies: Ancient Poems of Love and War or even Ramanujan’s Poems of Love and War from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil instead.

[Karthick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review here

https://wavesunceasing.wordpress.com/...

[Naomi Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I forget sometimes that I am a scholar of sorts until I read books like these that say: if you haven't studied this before you should probably just sort of skim and read here and there" and I'm like: "READ ALL THE THINGS!" and I read everything from start to finish.

Um. Random rant.

I enjoyed this. I have some favorite poems I'm pulling from this collection to put up on my wall of favorite poems. I thought the introduction was good.

Although I will admit: I didn't read the notes at the end. I hate notes at the end. I don't read them. They almost always bore me. BUT. I'm weird. The rest of the book was really enjoyable though. I know a tiny bit about this general area of the world and it was exciting to learn more about the culture and history through their poetry. So much to learn!