ABSTRACT
A.K. Ramanujan occupies a unique position among Indian and post-colonial theorists and practitioners of translation. His independent work focuses on the underrepresented language-combination of English, Kannada and Tamil, and his work in collaboration with other scholars enlarges the combination to include Indian languages like Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi that continue to be marginalized in world literature. Over almost forty years – between the mid-1950s and the early 1990s – he translated texts in several genres from most of the important periods of Indian literary history, covering classical poetry and bhakti poetry in Tamil, Vīrasaiva vacanas in Kannada, bhakti and court literature in Telugu, folktales and women's oral narratives recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and poetry and prose fiction written in the post-independence decades. 1 He usually chose originals of exceptional aesthetic, historical or cultural significance, and produced a large number of versions that are marked by literary excellence in themselves. His output as a translator is distinguished not only by its quantity, quality and variety, but also by the body of prefaces, textual and interpretive notes and scholarly commentary that frame it, reflecting on particular materials and cultures as well as the general process of translation. 2
