In Our Translated World ─ Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Edited and translated from the Tamil by Chelva Kanaganayakam. IN OUR TRANSLATED WORLD brings together, for the first time, in bilingual format, a translation of poems written in Tamil, from around the world where Tamils, over a period of several decades, have settled. The poems were written over the last three decades, and since modernity shapes contemporary perspectives in important ways, the struggle between modernity and tradition looms large in this poetry. The transition from an oppressive plantation culture to urban spaces involves numerous concerns, and they find expression in the poetry of Malaysians and Singaporeans. In Tamil Nadu physical dislocation from, say, the rural to the urban, is not seen as traumatic. More problematic, however, is the force of tradition that refuses to change with the times. For Sri Lankans, the frame is political upheaval and its consequent social and cultural disintegration. The poets who chose to live in Sri Lanka and those who moved to the West might point to different perspectives, but both are conscious of dramatic changes in their social and cultural worlds. Taken together, these poems offer an exciting and insightful representation of contemporary global Tamil experience.

Chelva Kanaganayakam is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and is also the Director for the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. His publications include Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature, Counterrealism and Indo Anglian Fiction, Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka, and Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose.