Copioso sangue e rossa pasta di sandalo. La poesia tamil del Muttoḷḷāyiram (‘la novecentina dei tre re')

Résumé En

The Muttoḷḷāyiram ('The nine hundred poems of the three kings'), a Tamil poetic text composed around the middle of the first millennium, comes down to us only in fragmentary form through a network of quotations from works of later centuries. The poems collected there are dedicated to the kings of the three paradigmatic royal dynasties of southern India (Pandya, Cola and Cera). This work offers a precious glimpse into the political and identitary dimensions of Southern India in the first millennium. Furthermore, the Muttoḷḷāyiram is of considerable importance in the history of Tamil literature, since it is among the first works of the period following the Caṅkam (first centuries of our era) in which the themes of war (puṟam) and love (akam) are mixed. In the figure of the monarch, the undisputed subject of the collection, the two ideals of the Tamil poetics of the origins are welded together: 1) the hero who returns victorious, acclaimed by the crowd and 2) the ever-unreachable beloved who perturbs the hearts of the girls who attend the parade. Scepter, banner and spear thus become symbols of the victorious king as well as of the lover in the height of his virility. This annotated translation and study of the work represent an ideal entry point to access the invaluable treasure trove of classical Tamil literature.