The Book of Desire by Meena Kandasamy

The Book of Desire, Meena Kandasamy’s translation of the love poetry found in the seminal Tamil text the Tirukkuṟal, shares a surprising amount of DNA with Emily Wilson’s recent ground-breaking translation of The Odyssey. It is a strange comparison, perhaps; the two texts, after all, have little in common, although they have finally, after millennia, both been translated by women. But Kandasamy’s rendering, like Wilson’s before her, is striking in how it understands translation as an act of intervention, that demands a strident political and aesthetic positionality. Wilson gave us a Greek epic that spoke to the female silences in the original; Kandasamy’s frank, yearning prose contains a decolonial urgency that undoes the historic erasures of the Tamil language, tackling Hindu nationalism and British Empire and reclaiming the beauty and lust of language as an expression of vivacity.

In rearticulating the longings of the lovers, both male and female, in the original, Kandasamy recovers the Tamil woman from centuries of the male canonical gaze, giving her both textual and paratextual authority. In Kandasamy’s hands, desire becomes a kind of illness, an overwhelming bodily surrender; and yet, Kandasamy draws out a force to the Tirukkuṟal’s ancient lovers – desire operating not as lack of agency, but as willing subsumption. There is an erotics, Kandasamy tells us, to that kind of eager capitulation, to the need to parse the headiness of such madness.

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Galley Beggar Press, 2 Feb