ABSTRACT
Written in the ninth or tenth century by the Tamil devotional poet Manikkavacakar in the so-called akam style of composition, this poem has been translated from the original Tamil by the anthropologist Saskia Kersenboom in her book Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text (1995: 71). As a style of poetry, akam signifies an inner world of emotion and love, ‘of intense longing and vulnerable yearning, an opening up until borders of the Ego melt and merge with the divine’ (Kersenboom 1995: 70). In her commentary on the poem, Kersenboom points out that in the context of bhakti (Sanskrit: ‘share, partake, enjoy, experience, undergo, feel’) or devotion this poem expresses:
The love between god and man (that) is consummated in the moment of grace (Tamil: arul). This experience redescribes — in fact, reshapes — reality […]. This type of appropriation is deeply and openly devotional. It is believed to be two-sided: god appropriates man, and man appropriates god; god becomes man and man becomes god. This is not the recovery of ‘meaning’, but a recovery of ‘Being’. (Kersenboom 1995: 71).
