38:1/2 Winter 1992

A.K. Ramanujan

Elegy & Butcher's Tao

In Winter 1992 CR released a thick double-issue devoted to “Contemporary Indian Literatures.” In their introduction, CR editor David Nicholls and guest-editor Aditya Behl wrote:

In selecting from the many texts offered to us, we followed the editorial logics of two different forms of literary assemblage, the literary magazine and the anthology, seeking simultaneously to choose fresh new work and to maintain a sense of historical and linguistic balance. The resulting eclecticism is designed to convey new developments along with ongoing traditions in Indian writing. This new issue should provide an excellent introduction for the reader new to Indian literatures, while providing many surprises for the initiated.

A.K. Ramanujan, professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, contributed several translations to the issue, as well as these two poems of his own. His landmark collection of ancient Tamil love poetry in translation, The Interior Landscape, was published in 1967. Since his death in 1993 Oxford has released his Collected Essays (1999) and his Collected Poems (2006).

CR’s “Contemporary Indian Literatures” was picked up by Penguin, and is still available as The Penguin New Writing in India. The anthology was one of several special issues published during Nicholls’s tenure. This past summer he reflected on his strategy:

Editorially, the journal staff I joined spent most of its time judging the submissions that came unsolicited through the mail. I felt that we needed to do a lot more solicitation and shaping of the editorial content. I also thought we might be able to get grants for specific projects. Some big projects were the issues on India, the North Pacific Rim, “Poetry and Mass Culture,” and Chicago. This set a much more expansive, international vision for the journal and brought more attention and more readers. In addition to more translations, we began to publish short features on individual authors. We also started asking staff members to write book reviews. This brought us more closely in contact with contemporary writers and poetics.

The tradition of devoting a double-issue of CR to anthologies of literatures in translation has continued into the 21st Century: see the Fall 2000 issue on New Polish Writing and Summer 2002’s New Writing in German.

[ES, 2006]

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