The Department of Comparative Literature and the Languages & Literatures Team congratulates Archana. Brava!
Endless Song is Archana Venkatesan’s monumental translation of the Tiruvāymoḻi, one of India’s most enduring Bhakti poetic texts. Over the course of 1,102 intricately wrought stanzas, the 9th-century Tamil poet Nammāḻvār sings of his dizzying, ecstatic love for the always-present, yet always-elusive divine. Thanks to Venkatesan’s more than three decades of work on this project, this important text now sings to us in the English-speaking world as well. In south India, this work is not just read and studied on the page, but also performed in communal readings. It is therefore appropriate that Venkatesan has crafted a translation that one can experience not only as a well-annotated, definitive work of scholarship, but also as a living, breathing work of contemporary poetry, too.
This is a huge honor: Archana’s translation is the first work of South Asian Literature and the first Tamil work to win this prize. You can read more about the award here: https://literarytranslators.wordpress.com/2021/10/16/announcing-the-winner-of-the-2021-lucien-stryk-asian-translation-prize-endless-song/