, 1873 The Kural text, considered to have been written in the 1st century BCE, remained unknown to the outside world for close to one and a half millennia. The first translation of the Kural text appeared in
Malayalam in 1595 CE under the title
Tirukkural Bhasha by an unknown author. It was a prose rendering of the entire Kural, written closely to the spoken Malayalam of that time. It took another three centuries before the next Malayalam translation was made in 1863 by Perunazhi Krishna Vaidhyan. The Kural text has enjoyed a universal appeal right from
antiquity owing to its secular and non-denominational nature that it suited the sensibilities of all. The universality is such that, despite its having been written in the pre-Christian era, almost every religious group in India and across the world, including Christianity, has claimed the work for itself. Owing to its ethical content, the Kural remained one of the most admired ancient Indian works among the
Christian missionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries, who arrived in India during the
colonial era and found the Kural text containing many more ideals in addition to those that are similar to their own
Christian ideals. This marked the beginning of wider translations of the Kural text. In 1730,
Constantius Joseph Beschi rendered the Kural text into
Latin, introducing the work to the Europeans for the first time. However, only the first two books of the Kural text, namely,
virtue and
wealth, were translated by Beschi, who considered translating the
book on love inappropriate for a Christian missionary. Around 1767, an unknown author made the first French translation, which went unnoticed. The first available French version, however, was the one made in 1848 by
E. S. Ariel. Here again, only parts of the work was translated. The first English translation ever was attempted by
N. E. Kindersley in 1794 when he translated select couplets of the Kural. This was followed by another incomplete attempt by
Francis Whyte Ellis in 1812, who translated only 120 couplets—69 in verse and 51 in prose.
William Henry Drew translated the first two parts in prose in 1840 and 1852, respectively. Along with Drew's English prose translation, it contained the original Tamil text, the Tamil commentary by
Parimelalhagar and
Ramanuja Kavirayar's amplification of the commentary. Drew, however, translated only 630 couplets. The remaining portions were translated by
John Lazarus, a native missionary, thus providing the first complete English translation. In 1886,
George Uglow Pope published the first complete English translation in verse by a single author, which brought the Kural text to a wide audience of the western world. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the Kural had already been translated to more than 37 world languages, with at least 24 complete translations in English language alone, by both native and non-native scholars. By 2014, the Kural had been translated to more than 42 languages, with 57 versions available in English. Along with the Bible and the
Quran, the Kural remains one of the most translated works in the world. In October 2021, the
Central Institute of Classical Tamil announced its translating the Kural text into 102 world languages. ==Criticisms on translations==