When Jesuit priest Padre Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi landed in South India in 1711, he was 31 years old. In a short period, the priest, later known as Veeramamunivar, mastered Tamil with a missionary zeal and penned the epic Thembavani in chaste Tamil verse in 1726.
Now, 293 years later, retired English professor M. Dominc Raj has translated all the 3,615 stanzas into English, in unrhymed quatrains.
The completion of the English translation marks the 339th birth anniversary of Veeramamuivar, a native of Italy, that falls on November 8.
“I was stunned by the amount of imagination and the pure beauty of the Tamil language in the work. Moreover, Veeramamunivar has consciously avoided Sanskrit words,” said Mr. Raj, who retired as the Head of the Department of English, VHNSN College, Virudhunagar.
He said his interest in Tamil classical literature was kindled when he worked as chief resource person, Department of Translation, Central Institute of Classical Tamil (CICT), Chennai.
It took Mr. Raj six years to complete his work and publish it.
Mastery over Tamil
“I have dealt with Beschi, the poet, and not Beschi, the priest. He wrote the epic to prove wrong the argument of local Tamil pundits that foreigners, who had come to preach a new religion, could never gain mastery over the local language,” he said.
The hero of the epic is Joseph, the father of the Divine child, and the heroine is Mary. “His objective was to propagate the idea of virtue, and he treated Joseph as the model of virtue. In the process, he elevated Joseph to a level on par with Mary in Christian belief,” Mr. Raj said.
Veeramamunivar had said, “And narrate the story of Valan the Excellent in order to primarily propagate virtue.” Thus, Valan became the Tamil equivalent for Joseph.
“Though Joseph died long before Jesus started preaching, Beschi adopted an imaginary narrative to foretell Joseph the events in the life of Jesus. The epic tangentially relates the past events in the Bible with the future life of Christ,” he said, acknowledging how the availability of various Tamil dictionaries on the net came in handy to find suitable words.
P. Marudanayagam, former officer-in-charge and fellow, the Department of Translation, CICT, in his introduction, recalled the words of F.W. Ellis, a member of the Madras Civil Service, that Beschi had imitated not merely the expression, but the modes of thought of previous Tamil writers.
Mr. Ellis had translated select stanzas of Thembavani into English.
“What Kamban says in praise of rain is echoed in Thembavani in an equally melodious verse,” Mr. Marudanayagam said.
