Villanelle: Whose Terse Lines Lie Entangled In the Colophon
Villanelle: Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
for the author - male or female, prince or pauper, playboy or priest - of the
THIRUKKURAL*, the reputed "bible" of the Tamils, the principal Dravidian race credited with having engendered the first literary heritage of the Indian sub-continent. Only one thing might be said of him with certitude:
he tamed the language like none other and was more alive to his "times" and his literary, inter-personal, romantic, religio-philosophical and political environment than any prince, philosopher or priest ever since. In my view, whoever he may have been, he was an unjustifiably oppressed individual like King Wen who wrote the judgments on the hexagrams and provided the explanations of their images and the Later Heaven arrangement of the Yi Jing, the Canon of Change.
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
Words come asunder blown on road side-table
Debris of wanton collisions intone
Long-gone ages singe the stylo his work shone
Who knows what diamond crumbs spill disable
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
Sans case-endings morphemes participial pun
Regimented feet in seven steps enable
Debris of wanton collisions intone
Who confined meaning in drumbeat phoneme moan
Lest envy upper-caste knowledge expose enable
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
None know who he was nor what age saw he sun
Savants pat cheeks his lines to render readable
Debris of wanton collisions intone
While lordly conferees seek to feather nests own
His sculpted riddles tease meaning and jumble
Whose terse lines lie entangled in the colophon
Debris of wanton collisions intone
* Thiru=Sacred; KURAL, meaning "short" or epigrammatic composition in the form of couplets (1330: ten kurals allotted to each topic in three books with a short introduction), composed and ordered according to the rules of a strict classical prosodical pattern: the "venba" metre while adhering to complex rhetorical features, such as, alliteration, assonance, initial-rhymes and ellipses. The author was known as Thiru-VALLUVAR. One of the earliest commentaries on the Kural, still extant, was made by a Tamil scholar PARIMELALAKAR during the 13th century.
(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 2017
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2017
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