Being literal, then, would mean not blind literalness but rather the REVIEWS charting out of given material to a new set of coordinates - you have to use your judgement as to what those coordinates should be, but once they exi?t you have to stick to them with rigour. In Ramanujan's translations from ancient and medieval Tamil, and from medieval Kannada, he says that he has had to start his 'charting' with the actual physical look of the poems. Both languages were written without punctuation or spaces between the words, or even divisions between the phrases. It is, therefore, impossible to reproduce directly the look of the original on the English page. In any case, Tamil i$ dense, 'participle-packed5 and a Tamil poem of four lines may need to become an English poem of ten lines. His method then is to try and mimic, not the external, but the internal structure of the original - to use the English tools of space, length of line, punctuation, even typographical arrangements (little blocks of words, 'steps', insets of imagery) as signals to the inner form of the originals. "I've tried to suggest by spacing the distance or closeness of elements in the original syntax.'4 About the poems in The Interior Landscape he writes that, given the difference between English and Tamil, it would not have made sense to translate the poems line by line - he had to translate them phrase by phrase, in syntactic units. About actual choice of words, Ramanujan would hardly be able to indicate the infinitesimal considerations which make him choose one word in preference to another. But here it may be useful to briefly compare a Ramanujan translation with another translation of an ancient Tamil poem. The latter is by George L Hart III, from his book The Poems of Ancient Tamil (University of Columbia Press). It is only fair to add that the author quotes this poem only in order to make a point •and not as poetry per se — I am using it here only as a convenient illustration of how scholarly accuracy combined with literalness can nonetheless fail to present a satisfying experience of a poem. The speaker of Hart's poem is a widow who is addressing a potter while he makes the urn which will hold her husband's ashes. She tells him to make it large to hold her own ashes too: Potter who makes vessels listen: Journal of Arts and Ideas 71