Question

Short Biography A.K. Ramanujan

Answer 1

A .K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore in 1929. After a brief teaching career in India he moved to U.S. in 1962 and settled down there. He was Professor of Linguistics and Dravidian Studies in the University of Chicago till his death on July 13, 1993.

His first book of poems The Striders was published in 1966 by Oxford University Press and his second volume of poems Relations was published again by OUP in 1969. His poems have found a place in many anthologies of Indian English poetry and Commonwealth poetry and he himself has been discussed in a number of critical works on the two areas.

He is much more well-known as a translator and his The Interior Landscape is a translation of the great Tamil classic Kurunthokai. While this book won a gold medal from the Tamil Writers’ Association, his Speaking of Siva won the National Book Award in 1974. Another well-known translation of his is Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar (1981). His latest work is Second Sight (1986) which is a set of poems very different from the earlier poems both in content and form.

Answer 2

Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan (16 March 1929 – 13 July 1993) also known as A. K. Ramanujan was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, a philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He published works on both classical and modern variants of this literature and argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due. Though he wrote widely and in a number of genres, Ramanujan's poems are remembered as enigmatic works of startling originality, sophistication and moving artistry. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Awardposthumously in 1999 for his collection of poems, The Selected Poems