Books by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma

A new translation of the classical Tamil masterpiece on ethics, power, and love, bringing Tiruvalluvar's poetry and practical philosophy to new generations seeking guidance and care in a stressed out world.Drawing on the poetic tradition of W. S. Merwin, Wendell Berry, and William Carlos Williams, and nurtured by 2 decades of study under Tamil scholar Dr. K. V. Ramakoti, this new translation of the Kural by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma brings English readers closer than ever to the brilliant inner and outer music of Tiruvalluvar's work and ideas.Tiruvalluvar's Tirukkural is a masterwork of poetry and practical philosophy. On par with other world classics such as the Tao Te Ching, the Kural is a compendium of 1,330 short philosophical verses, or kurals, that together cover a wide range of personal and cosmic experience, such as-POLITICS:Harsh rule that brings idiots together-nothingBurdens the earth moreHOSPITALITY:The life that cherishes strangers each dayNever falls upon ruinFRIENDSHIP:Friendship is not a face smiling-friendshipIs a heart that smilesGREED:Those who won't give and enjoy-even with billionsThey have nothingAccompanying the translation is a foreword by the founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism, Andrew Harvey; an introduction by the translator and scholar Archana Venkatesan; and a "Commentary of Notes," in which Pruiksma elucidates key words and shares insights from important Tamil commentaries.Rich with indelible wordplay, learning, and heart, Pruiksma's translation transforms the barrier of language into a bridge, bringing the fullness of Tiruvalluvar's poetic intensity to a new generation.

The Safety of Edges ponders liminal times and spaces, tracing the borders between now and then, here and there, childhood and the grown poet. The edge of anything is both a limit and a possibility, an encounter either safe or risky. Pruiksma’s poems seek what it is one awakens to in the half light between darkness and dawn, an emptiness that is not empty, a “saying in the silence,” “a song we can’t see,” or whatever in movement might remain still. Pondering a world waiting to be whole, they return repeatedly to home. Theirs is a quiet voice of the hints that the past, like the things that inhabit it, emanates, of evanescences, of questioning and questing, of the mystery of ordinary moments: playing cards, drawing, opening a door, building sheds, seeing neighbors. Not only doors or walls, not only voices, all things leave traces. ΓÇèThere is nothing “to dull the emptying darkness beyond even the darkness I could see,” Pruiksma writes in a poem that appears early in his book. ΓÇèYet he finds, near the end of it, “a darkness not dark, an emptiness not empty.” The Safety of Edges is a work of a compassionate discreteness, a generous simplicity, in which the hours of life are not lost but found, sometimes, “all of it here in our hands.”Peter Weltner, author of The Light of the Sun Become Sea and Unbecoming Time