Aingurunuru

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Sangam literature
Ettuttogai
("eight anthologies")
Pattuppattu
("ten chants")

The Aingurunuru ( Tamil : ஐங்குறுநூறு Aiṅkuṟunūṟu [ ˈai̯ŋɡurɯn̪uːrɯ ] "five short hundreds") is a work of the Old Tamil Sangam literature . It is an anthology of 500 short love poems. Within the Sangam literature it belongs to the group of the "eight anthologies" ( Ettuttogai ).

Formal aspects

Of the two genres of Sangam literature (love and hero poetry), the Aingurunuru represents the genre of love poetry ( agam ). The 500 poems of the Aingurunuru are, like the majority of the Sangam corpus, written in Agaval metrum and are three to six lines long. Two poems (129 and 130) have not survived. The work is preceded by an introductory verse.

The Aingurunuru is divided into five sections of 100 poems each. The subdivision follows the old Tamil concept of the five tinais - love situations, each associated with a certain type of landscape. The first section takes place in the arable land ( marudam ), the second on the coast ( neydal ), the third in the mountain landscape ( kurinchi ), the fourth in the desert ( palai ) and the fifth in the pastureland ( mullai ). Each of the five sections is attributed to a single poet, namely Orambogiyar (farmland), Ammuvanar (coast), Kabilar (mountains), Odalandaiyar (desert), and Peyanar (pastureland). The five sections are divided into ten decades each, groups of ten related poems.

Dating

The poems of Aingurunuru are likely to be somewhat more recent than the poems of the other love anthologies Kurundogai , Natrinai , and Agananuru , which belong to the oldest layer of Sangam literature. An indication of this is the fact that the poems of Aingurunuru were written not as individual poems, but as decades. The absolute chronology of the texts is not certain, but it is suggested that the poems of Aingurunuru were written in the 4th century AD. A few centuries after their creation, the original orally transmitted individual poems were combined into an anthology.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kamil Zvelebil: Tamil Literature, Leiden, Cologne: EJ Brill, 1975, p. 90.
  2. ↑ Takanobu Takahashi: Tamil Love Poetry and Poetics, Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1995, pp. 49-51.
  3. ^ Eva Wilden: Manuscript, Print and Memory. Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu, Berlin, Munich, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014, p. 8.
  4. ↑ Wilden 2014, pp. 413–414.

literature

Text output
  • Eṭṭuttokaiyuḷ mūṉṟāvatākiya Aiṅkuṟunūṟum, paḻaiyavuraium. Edited by UV Swaminatha Iyer . Ceṉṉapaṭṭaṉam: Vaijanti Accukkūṭam, 1903. [Numerous reprints]
Translations
  • Martha Ann Selby: Tamil Love Poetry. The Five Hundred Short Poems of the Aiṅkuṟunūṟu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. [Complete translation into English.]
  • AK Ramanujan : Poems of Love and War. From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil . New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. [Translation of selected poems a. A. from Aingurunuru into English.]
  • George L. Hart: Poets of the Tamil Anthologies . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. [Translation of selected poems a. A. from Aingurunuru into English.]
Secondary literature
  • Eva Wilden: Manuscript, Print and Memory. Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu . Berlin, Munich, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014.
  • Kamil V. Zvelebil: Tamil Literature. Leiden / Cologne: EJ Brill, 1975.

Web links