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.

Purchase on Barnes & Noble
Purchase on Oxford University Press
  • From Good Reads

    These four works add yet another dimension to the rich contribution A. K. Ramanujan has made to Indian and American letters. The books of poems are written in an extraordinary variety of modes and moods. The novella, "Someone Else's Autobiography," is an unusually complex story told by the fictional K.K. Ramanujan, which manages to tell us a great deal about the author's own life story.

    Ramanujan was an Indian poet, scholar and author, a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and English. He published works on both classical and modern variants of these literature and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.
    He was called "Indo-Anglian harbingers of literary modernism". Several disciplinary areas are enriched with A. K. Ramanujan`s aesthetic and theoretical contributions. His free-thinking context and his individuality which he attributes to Euro-American culture gives rise to the "universal testaments of law". A classical kind of context-sensitive theme is also found in his cultural essays especially in his writings about Indian folklore and classic poetry. He worked for non-Sanskritic Indian literature and his popular work in sociolinguistics and literature unfolds his creativity in the most striking way. English Poetry most popularly knows him for his advance guard approach.

  • Description text goes here
  • Description text goes here
Purchase on Amazon