Before 1973, an English reader curious about Lingayatism had few ways in beyond academic survey articles written from the outside. A. K. Ramanujan changed that with a single small paperback, and part of why it worked is that he was not, himself, purely an outside observer of the form he was translating. Ramanujan was a poet in his own right, trained in linguistics, who taught for decades at the University of Chicago while continuing to write and translate across Kannada, Tamil and English throughout his career.
His afterword to the collection explains its title in one plain sentence: these poems "all speak of Siva and speak to Siva." That double sense, a poem that describes God while also talking directly at him, is exactly the quality that formal, Sanskritized translation had tended to flatten out of the vachana form in earlier renderings. Ramanujan's translations keep the poems' colloquial bluntness intact rather than dressing them in the more ornate register English readers might expect from a religious classic.
The result was not just an academic contribution. Speaking of Siva became one of the more widely read Penguin Classics volumes to come out of South Asian literature, assigned across university courses well outside Indology specifically, and it remains, decades later, most English readers' first encounter with Basavanna, Mahadeviyakka, Allama Prabhu and Devara Dasimayya. A single scholar's translation choices shaped how an entire tradition's founding poetic voice would sound to a global audience for the next fifty years.