"Kamban is said to have spent every night in studying the original in Sanskrit by Valmiki, analytically, with the help of scholars, and every day in writing several thousand lines of his own poetry.  Of his task in assimilating Valmiki in the original and reinterpreting him in Tamil verse, Kamban says, 'I am verily like the cat sitting on the edge of an ocean of milk, hoping to lap it all up.'  Etched on palm leaves, Kamban's work, running to ten thousand five hundred stanzas, must have mounted into an enormous pile..."
--from R.K. Narayan's introduction