Poems and a Novella by A.K. Ramanujan


Translation by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels-Ramanujan

A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993)  was William E. Colvin Professor at the University of Chicago and taught at various other institutions for forty years. He was awarded a Padma Shree in 1976 by the Government of India, and a MacArther Foundation Fellowship in 1986. 

This book is an English translation of Ramanujan’s three books of poems and a novella. The books of poems—No Lotus in the Naval, And Other Poems, and Kuntobille—are written in an extraordinary variety of modes and moods. Ramanujan, the poet roams freely and widely in Kannada, the language of his childhood. He quarrels with himself, with his traditional roots, and his adopted country—the United States, giving us memorable poems such as, Oh Lord, Whether you Exist; A King of Soliloquies, and The River.

The prose work, Someone Else’s Autobiography is an unusually complex story told by the fictional K. K. Ramanujan, to A.K. Ramanujan. Though the crisis of consciousness depicted in the novella is thoroughly modern, the author has chosen a traditional Indian mode of telling it.

This book is co-translated by Tonse N.K. Raju, and Shouri Daniels-Ramanujan. This book is published by the Oxford University Press in 2006.