SOMA. POEMS BY A.K. RAMANUJAN

with additional features

edited by Guillermo Rodríguez and Krishna Ramanujan

For A.K. Ramanujan, who infused his diverse knowledge of Indian literatures and traditions into his poetry, the idea of Soma, the mysterious plant used by Vedic priests to extract ambrosia, fed his creativity.

Sifting through Ramanujan’s archives, the editors discovered a series of unpublished ‘Soma poems’ whose style and theme set them apart from his earlier work. This volume includes these poems besides essays and an interview that contextualize them. It also contains a foreword written by the poet and critic A.K. Mehrotra.

Krishna Ramanujan’s essay ‘Hummel’s Miracle: The Search for Soma’ explores the connections between the poems and the quest for the plant’s identity from the 1960s to the present. ‘The “Ordinary Mystery” Trip: Soma in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry’ by Guillermo Rodriguez dives deep into Ramanujan’s layered perspective on Soma. ‘The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant’,by Wendy Doniger, which influenced Ramanujan’s perception of Soma, originally published in 1968, is reprinted here with a special preface. The interview conducted in Chicago in 1982 between Malayali poet K. Ayyappa Paniker and Ramanujan offers a peek into Ramanujan’s perspectives on poetry and translation.

While Soma focuses on A.K. Ramanujan’s poems and his creative mindset as an expatriate in America, it also provides a glimpse into a fascinating period in Western Indology when Indian philosophies and traditions were debated, some of which became so ingrained that they influence contemporary culture to this day.

EDITOR PROFILES

Guillermo Rodríguez, an active promoter of Indo-Spanish cultural relations, is the founding director of Casa de la India, a pioneering cultural centre in Spain, which has become the model for India’s cultural diplomacy abroad. A passionate traveller, it was during an overland trip to India in the early 1990s that he chanced upon A.K. Ramanujan’s poetry and translations, an interest that evolved into a PhD. on the poet-scholar, obtained from the University of Kerala and University of Valladolid. He is the author of When Mirrors Are Windows. A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics (2016) and co-editor of Journeys. A Poet’s Diary by A.K. Ramanujan (2019).

Krishna Ramanujan is a science writer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Coupled with life-long literary interests, he has worked as a writer for Earthwatch Radio, NASA and Cornell University, and has published more than 2,000 news stories on topics related to climate change, ecology, biology and genetics. He is the winner of the State University of New York Award for Excellence in Writing (2022), and co-editor of Journeys. A Poet’s Diary by A.K. Ramanujan (2019). He is the son of AK Ramanujan.

The Striders

And search

for certain thin-

stemmed, bubble-eyed water bugs.

See them perch

on dry capillary legs

weightless

on the ripple skin

of a stream.

No, not only prophets

walk on water. This bug sits

on a landslide of lights

and drowns eye-

deep into its tiny strip

of sky.

(A.K. Ramanujan)

I am pleased to announce that the current issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (September 2019) is carrying a piece by David Shulman on Journeys. A Poet`s Diary (by A.K. Ramanujan), edited by Krishna Ramanujan and me (Penguin Random House 2019). Shulman`s highly perceptive and thought-provoking article is titled “Waiting for the Perfect Word”:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/09/26/ak-ramanujan-waiting-perfect-word/

Very saddened to know that Girish Karnad, legendary actor, playwright, filmmaker and social activist passed away in Bangalore on Monday 10th June 2019 after a prolonged illness. We had recently worked together on Journeys. A Poet´s Diary (A.K. Ramanujan) which I co-edited with Krishna Ramanujan (AKR`s son) and for which he had kindly agreed to write the Foreword. The book was published by Penguin in April this year and I am glad he got to see it before his demise… He was delighted to be part of this the volume as AKR had been a close friend and remained a strong influence on him.

I last met Girish when we shared a session on Ramanujan at the Bangalore Literature Festival in November 2017:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kIZfWAXwk

We were discussing AKR and my book When Mirrors Are Windows. A View of A.K. Ramanujan`s Poetics, which had recently been published by OUP (also carrying Girish`s Foreword), and we got so immersed in the conversation that it became a jugalbandi of sorts: a Spanish scholar from the Castilian plains and the towering figure of Karnad, the essential Kannadiga, a modern quixotic genius bridging past and present, drama and poetry,  reciting AKR`s verse as if this gentle bard had composed it for that very moment! To enact, -and possess- its hidden meanings and be possessed by his own words, – Vac, the goddess of speech in full ritual...

Girish was a great artist, thinker, mentor and friend…

and, above all, a free spirit!

 

…This is to you, Girish:

 

Still Another View of Grace

I burned and burned. But one day I turned

and caught that thought

by the screams of her hair and said: ‘Beware.

Do not follow a gentleman’s morals

 

with that absurd determined air.

Find a priest. Find any beast in the wind

for a husband. He will give you a houseful

of legitimate sons. It is too late for sin,

 

even for treason. And I have no reason to know your kind.

Bred Brahmin among singers of shivering hymns

I shudder to the bone at hungers that roam the street

beyond the constable’s beat.’ But there She stood

 

upon that dusty road on a nightlit april mind

and gave me a look. Commandments crumbled

in my father’s past. Her tumbled hair suddenly known

as silk in my angry hand, I shook a little

 

and took her, behind the laws of my land.

(Poem by A.K. Ramanujan. Published in his first collection The Striders by Oxford University Press, London, in 1966 thanks to Girish Karnad`s recommendations)

 

The Takeover

Poets

   beware, your life is in danger:

the lord of gardens is a thief,

   a cheat,

master of illusions;

 

he came to me

   a wizard with words,

   sneaked into my body,

            my breath,

 

with bystanders looking on

   but seeing nothing,

he consumed me

   life and limb,

 

and filled me,

            made me over

into himself

(A.K. Ramanujan,  “The Takeover”, translation from Nammalvar’s Tiruvaymoli 10.7.1, Hymns for the Drowning  (Princeton University Press 1981) 76.)

https://www.facebook.com/notes/penguin-india/penguin-random-house-india-is-proud-to-announce-the-publication-of-journeys-by-a/2177094132361155/