Journeys

A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993) was one of the most respected Indian literary figures of the twentieth century: a poet, translator, folklorist, essayist and scholar. His English renderings of ancient Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, along with his translation of U. R. Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, are regarded as classics. He was also a pioneering modernist poet, with four collections in English published in his lifetime. Ramanujan kept journals for decades and meant to publish them one day. After his early death, his family gave the journals, diaries, papers and other documents to the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library in June 1994. The material spans fifty years, from 1944 to 1993, and has been carefully preserved and catalogued there, largely unread by the public. Journeys, edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, brings a selection of these private writings to a wider readership. It gathers entries written on his travels, reflections on the craft of writing, drafts of poems, and records of his dreams. The pages show a writer at work. Ramanujan used his diaries and journals as a place to try out ideas, and many of the images and themes in his published work first appear here, which gives readers a close view of how his creative process unfolded.