English Department to host poetry reading by Parthasarathy
The Department of English will present a poetry reading by the noted poet, translator,
and English professor, R. Parthasarathy, at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 22, in Davis Auditorium,
Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.
Parthasarathy is the author of Rough Passage (Oxford University Press), a long poem, and has edited Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (Oxford University Press), an anthology. Rough Passage was a runner-up for the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, London. "He is the Joycean artist
who, godlike, observes reality from a distance while he pares his nails, the Wallace
Stevens poet who sees 'the world as it is'," wrote Bruce King, author of The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 13: 1948-2000. Parthasarathy's poems and translations have appeared in Chelsea, Chicago Review, Encounter, Fulcrum, London Magazine, Modern Poetry in Translation,
New Letters, Poetry, Poetry Australia, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, the Times Literary
Supplement, and Verse, and in numerous anthologies, including Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton), The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Vol. 1, and The Penguin New Writing in India.
His translation of the fifth-century Tamil epic, The Tale of an Anklet (Columbia University Press), was awarded the 1996 Association for Asian Studies A.
K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation, the 1995 National Academy of Letters (India)
Translation Prize, and the 1994 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation, which
noted: "Thanks to R. Parthasarathy, The Tale of an Anklet joins ranks with the major world epics available in excellent English translation."
The Neustadt laureate Raja Rao wrote: "R. Parthasarathy's Tale of an Anklet is without doubt the most remarkable translation of an Indian text made in a century.
It would be difficult to compare his work with that of any other translator. It is
a great achievement." The book was reissued as a "Penguin Classic" by Penguin Books.
Among the books he has completed and not yet published are A House Divided: Poems; One Hundred Sanskrit Poems, translations; The Earliest Tamil Poems, translations; and The Forked Tongue: Essays on the Indian Writer and Tradition, a monograph on literary theory and practice.
He is included in several international biographies, notably Contemporary Writers of the English Language, Vol 1: Contemporary Poets; The Oxford
Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English; and The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English.
Parthasarathy will read from A House Divided and from his translations of poems from
the Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Punjabi.
