Shivaprakash - I keep vigil of Rudra: the vachanas

It was unfortunate that he passed away before seeing it completed. My Ph.D supervisor Professor C.N. Srinath gave me many useful suggestions about translation during my Ph.D years. In those days when the computer was unknown, Sandhya worked very hard to make copies of several drafts of my translations. My encounter with Professor Daniel Weisbort, former editor of the influential journal, Poetry in Translation, at a workshop in Bhopal helped me gain many insights into the art of translation. He also pointed out that after A.K.

Ramanujan had introduced vachanas to English readers with his brilliant translations, there was a need for more specialized versions of these texts. He inspired me to rethink my translations. It was in Iowa city in 2000 that I nearly finalized my translations with the generous help of the young American poet Parker Smothers who was introduced to me by my friend Philip Lutgendorf. This would not be possible had Professor Peter Green not got me invited to the International Writing Workshop that year. My former student, Manu Devadevan, himself a poet and translator of great merit, lent invaluable help in tidying up the translations and the introduction. It was during the course of a discussion with him that it occurred to me that the vachanas should be arranged not author-wise, but in a dialogic fashion.

There is a great tradition of vachana lovers and scholars right from the twelfth century to the present who, by the dint of their hard labour, preserved and prevented the vachana texts from passing into oblivion. After the coming of printing technology, a whole tradition of textual scholars that includes Basavanal, Halakatti, R.C. Hiremath, M.S. Sunkapur, Ja. Cha. Ni., L.

Basvaraju, S. Vidyashankar went on trying to improve the existing versions of these texts with their painstaking scholarly labour. Every translator has to acknowledge their enormous labour in making the vachanas available to us in the present form. When I had almost given up hope of getting my translations published, my friends Mahalakshmi and Rakesh rekindled it, and Ravi Singh offered to publish them. My editors Sivapriya and Anurag have worked on these texts with loving care.