One of the most important early treatises on the figures of speech in Sanskrit, the Kāvyādarśa (‘Mirror of Poetry’, eighth century CE), was adapted into Tamil for the first time in about the eleventh century CE as part of a bigger treatise, and then again a century later as Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram (‘Ornaments of Taṇṭi’). The author of the Kāvyādarśa, Daṇḍin, became ‘Taṇṭi’ in Tamil and remained a sort of tag for the tradition concerned with the figures of speech in poetry; in fact he left his trace as an author’s name as late as the sixteenth century in the preface to Māṟaṉalaṅkāram (‘Ornaments of Māṟaṉ’), in the form of a dialectal variation, Teṇṭi. The preface to the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram that informs us about ‘Taṇṭi’ does not have a broad basis of sources; it is apparently transmitted only in a limited number of the manuscripts that contain the frequently copied and important text Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram. Consequently the preface has found entry only into few of the editions. Recently a new manuscript has come to light (MSSML 631) which gives additional information which might have been deliberately suppressed in the print tradition. The parentage and education of ‘Taṇṭi’ in the paratexts of this Tamil sub-school of poetics thus may teach us a lesson not only about the fluidity of transmission but also about the arbitrary choices of editors and their possible political agendas.