In the field of translation A.K. Ramanujan is one scholar who has succeeded so brilliantly that it is worth piecing together his scattered observations about his method of translation. He has presented ancient Tamil love poetry (The Interior Landscape, Clarion Books), medieval Kannada bhakti poems (Speaking of Shiva,. Penguin Classics) and the poems of Nammalvar (Hymns for the Drowning Princeton University Press) in English. For aspiring translators of poetry it is a doelful fact that he is himself a poet and they are not — even so, a very useful brief for translators in general can be extracted from his remarks. For a start, we may note that Ramanujan believes that everything can be translated or, as he says, "A translator must believe so, even irrationally.5 The condition is that it must meet the right translator - one for whom 'the poem speaks through him9. This because it is unrealistic to think that the translator can prevent his own personality from asserting itself and intervening between the work and the translation. "A translation has to be true to the translator no less than to the originals. He cannot jump off his own shadow.51 A translator cannot just be a transparent pane, he has to become a mirror; but if he feels close enough to the original work, it will not be too distorting a mirror. Therefore, it is a safe choice to do what Ramanujan has done - *I have let the [poems] choose me, letting them speak to my biases....92 Next, he is clear about a precept which many translators now accept: that the watchword of a translator must be literalness. "In the act of translating, "the Spirit Killeth and the Letter giveth Life". Any direct attack on "the spirit of the work" is foredoomed to fuzziness. Only the literal text, the word made flesh, can take us to the word behind the words. The trouble, of course, is how to be literal. (I am reminded of the French-English translation course, where participants began by attempting a translation of the phrase 'Ie bon Dieu9 into English. As I remember they continued to try for three days. As they pointed out, a literal translation would be "the good God9, but then what do you do with the good-naturedness of the original phrase, the touch of humour yet not frivolity which is present in these words but not in the word God, nor in The Good God, nor in The Lord, nor in The Good Lord. let alone in The Almighty?) What we want, after all, is not the letter but the Letter. 70 July-September 1983