Veteran Tamil publisher S Ramakrishnan dies of Covid-19 in Chennai

Ramakrishnan founded Cre-A, a Tamil publishing house in 1974, which published eminent Tamil writers such as M Ashokamitran, Sundara Ramaswamy, Sa Kandasamy, and translated classics from French, German, Hindi, Bengali, and Kannada into Tamil

Veteran Tamil publisher S Ramakrishnan, 75, died of Covid-19 at a Chennai hospital on Tuesday.

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Ramakrishnan founded Cre-A, a Tamil publishing house in 1974. Cre-A published eminent Tamil writers such as M Ashokamitran, Sundara Ramaswamy, Sa Kandasamy, and translated classics from French, German, Hindi, Bengali, and Kannada into Tamil. The translated works included those of Albert Camus and Franz Kafka.

Ramakrishnan, whose mother tongue was Telugu, believed that direct translations made literature richer.

On November 14, while Ramakrishnan was on oxygen support, a revised edition of Cre-A: Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil was released at the hospital where he was undergoing treatment.

Tamil Nadu chief minister Edappadi Palaniswami and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief MK Stalin were among those who condoled Ramakrishnan’s death.

“He edited works which were not done by most publishing houses. He also perfected translations,” said Kannan Sundaram, the editor and publisher of the award-winning Kalachuvadu publishing house based in Nagercoil. Sundaram knew Ramakrishnan since the late 1970s. Ramakrishnan was part of an informal group of a magazine called Ka Sa Da Tha Pa Ra in the 1960s. “He brought in influences from the small magazine movement and his experiences from working in an advertisement company in terms of ideas, content, design and packaging. So in general, Cre-A books are well produced.”