God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati - Tapa dura

These renderings of Annamayya's poems to Lord Venkatesvara waste no words in the long-practiced invisibility of translators Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman. With a practiced wit borne of long experience, a blunt honesty borne of deep conviction, Annamayya cuts quickly and so do the translators. The concision doesn't just invite, it forces the reader to participate in the magical play of word and intimacy. The unaided poems can be read for pure joy, while the apparatus is just enough to make second and third readings as rich and exciting as the first. (Tony K. Stewart, translator of Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal)

The devotional poems of Annamaya (15th century) are perhaps the most accessible and universal achievement of classical Telugu literature, one of the major literatures of pre-modern India. Annamaya effectively created and popularized a new genre, the short padam song, which spread throughout the Telugu and Tamil regions and would become an important vehicle for the composition of Carnatic music - the classical music of South India. In this book, Rao and Shulman offer translations of 150 of Annamaya's poems, which are wonderfully readable as poetry in their own right.