A New Translation of the Patiṟṟuppattu

 

Roland Ferenczi has recently completed the MSCA MariTamil project, in the course of which he prepared a critical edition of the Paṭṭiṉappālai, together with its mediaeval commentary, an English translation, and studies on the literary images of Kāvirippaṭṭiṉam. His new project (September–December 2026) turns to the Patiṟṟuppattu, a unique anthology of panegyrics composed for the ancient Cēra kings of South India. Made up of ten decades of ten poems, of which eighty survive along with eight summarising patikams, it is one of the eight old anthologies (Eṭṭuttokai) of the Caṅkam corpus, and one of the two puṟam anthologies of heroic songs. 

These poems are more than court poetry. They tell us how the early Cēra kingdom worked: how kings succeeded one another, how their courts were run, how they fought and fortified their towns, and how ordinary towns and villages lived. One notable feature of the poems is the openness of these southern kings to political and religious developments reaching them from the north: Cēra rulers are shown maintaining royal chaplains and ordering Vedic rituals, all set within a Tamil courtly world. In connection with this aspect of the project, in the autumn semester, Ferenczi is teaching a course at the Universität Hamburg on Vedic influences in Caṅkam literature, based on close reading of the Tamil texts. 

Taking his earlier work on these poems further, Ferenczi is now revising the translations and carrying out the background research needed to finalise the volume of the Patiṟṟuppattu translation for publication. The morphological analyses and translations of the individual poems will also be made available on the Tamilex website.