Challenges of Translating Classical Tamil Poetry into French: The Tiruppavai as Example

This article focuses on classical Tamil poetry, represented by the Tiruppavai of Andal. The article seeks to understand the challenges of translating from Tamil into French, of a poetry that is non-contemporary, and which communicates layered meanings relating to religion, metaphysics, spirituality, nature and simply, the self. While every literary translation poses difficulties, translating classical Tamil poetry comes with a set of challenges by way of being spatially, temporally, contextually and even to an extent, linguistically removed from the present. Which route should the translator take: Faithful reproduction, brave reinvention or a middle path? The corpus for this article is drawn from two translations in French of the Tiruppavai that are studied and compared in this perspective.