The Guilty Reader: Acrostic Form and the Recovery of Intimate Address in Sangam Tamil Translation

Abstract

This paper argues that the acrostic form functions as a formal mechanism for recovering intimate address in the translation of classical Sangam Tamil akam poetry. Bringing cognitive poetics, reader-response theory, Tamil poetics, and translation theory into dialogue, the paper proposes that addressed acrostics may intensify reader receptivity through attentional salience, self-reference, reward anticipation, empathic social cognition, and predictive processing. It further identifies an eavesdropper effect, in which readers who are not the encoded recipient nevertheless experience the poem as a witnessed intimacy, producing a form of guilty attentiveness that deepens engagement. Through analysis of acrostic translations from the Kuṟuntokai (c. 100 BCE–250 CE), the paper argues that akam poetry and the acrostic represent mirror solutions to the same affective problem: how to make a poem feel personally addressed. It further proposes that the acrostic translator who encodes a reader's name throughout a translated anthology installs that reader in the formal position of the Thozhi (Tamil: தோழி; tōḻi /t̪oːɻi/), the heroine's intimate companion and mediating interlocutor in Sangam Tamil akam poetics. The acrostic thus becomes a compensatory formal system for recovering intimate address across cultural and historical distance.