naRRiNai 310 translated by G. Hart

[N. Ganesan]

Dear Tamilists,

I wrote letters to Tamil professors at Trivandrum and
aged Tamil pulavars in India who were involved in the Murray Rajam
effort that published old Tamil texts in a pioneering way.
Ie. with the sandhi and metrics broken, and words printed
as separate units with the addition punctuation marks.

They agree that naRRiNai 310 and akanAn2URu 106 are
poems with totally opposite themes. kaLiRu in aka. 106
and kan2Ru in naR. 310 should be compared with the
'etukait toTai' used in the respective poems.
They informed me that early in the 20th century
this 'etukait toTai' argument was used to decide
upon the name of the great poet, ParaNar.
vE. vEGkaTarAjulu ireTTiyAr, Prof. at Madras university
showed that ParaNar, even if he was from the PaaNar kulam,
had the name "paraNar" and not "paaNar". This
is evident from the song by AuvaiyAr where she
employs 'etukait toTai'.

   paraNan2 pATin2an2 man2 kol maRRu nI
   muraN miku kOvalUr nURi nin2  - puRa 99:12-13

It's possible to connect the second letter, "Li"
in kaLiRu with that of oLiRu and veLiRu in aka. 106:

   oLiRu vAL tAn2ai koRRa ceziyan2
   veLiRu il kaRpin2 maNTu amar aTutoRum
   kaLiRu peRu valci pANan2 eRiyum  - aka. 106:10-12

OTOH, In the naRRiNai 310, a consonant, "l" is the etukai
both before and after.

   collalai kol O nI E vallai
   kan2Ru peRu valci pANan2 kaiyatu ai
   vaL uyir taNNumai pOla
   uL yAtu um illatu Or pOrvai am col E - naR. 310:8-11

kan2Ru (possibly from the root, kal-, cf. pol/pon2, cil/cin2)
fits with the etukai consonant, "l" prior and after
to naR. 310:9. The "empty words" are again a theme
employed in naR. 380.

Regards,
N. Ganesan


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