OUTPOURING: A TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

It is not easy to read a collection of poetry, any collection for that matter, at one stretch. And if you were me, watching your man walk away, Buddhalike, there is no greater pain than reading about love. I have been living on a razor’s edge, wagering my sanity ever since I returned to India. Reading Ravikumar’s poems, reliving what love was and what it could be, what love is not and what it pretends to be, and how love struggles against itself, I wept.

Rain and rain songs. Rain as a lover, a favourite clamouring to be claimed. Ravikumar writes of trees. And evening and night. And colours, flowers even. Fields, and the scent of waiting soil. Yet, earth’s thirst leads to water leads to rain, and so she wins hands-down in taking up all his attention. Well, it shouldn’t be any other way, if you ask me. The rain is a moody woman. She’s old as the earth, but she’s fresher than first love. Everytime. She’s feisty and if you are to be trusted, she’s almost-fascist, silencing even the trees. Ravikumar’s poems capture that heaviness of blankness beautifully, likening the experience of standing under last-night’s-rain-drenched tree to a home without your lover.. His shorter poems that obliquely refer to the rain stab my heart like some of the lovelier kamathupaal kurals do. I like it when he accuses the rain, repeatedly. For delay that destroys crops. For indifference on where it pours out (like love, not always to those in need). Thiruvalluvar merely sang its praise. Ravikumar almost carry on a lover’s quarrel with her.

I often called my lover Rainmaker. (No translation there. Somethings work in some languages. If they work at all, that is.) The skies always lashed when he entered the city. It rained on those days we met: sometimes after we parted, sometimes while we made the plans, sometimes when we were together. Rains ruined his work, his visits: but who, in love, can rue the rain? That is why, the mazhaiyil nirkum rayil (a train standstill in rain), the vaanin thalaimeedhu kadalai kavizhthadhupol (like toppling the oceans on the sky), appeal so intensely. Because the imagery isn’t always just visualization and experience, but also exaggeration and drama. Whatever is love but all of this?

I will end my ode to Ravikumar’s rain portrayal here. He does not even leave out that ultra-famous sangam poem—red-earth-and-pouring-rain—our parents were not kin, we came from different lands which he uses skillfully, sensitively to demarcate what a lover is not: nee parthirupaai ethanaiyo manidhargalai… un azhagil nilai kulaindhavargalai… (…) avargalul oruvanaai irundhadhillai orupodhum (You would have seen many men/ those who lost themselves to your beauty .. I have never been one of them)—and thus defines himself by being nothing but a lover, a kadhalar, a sweetheart.

There are poems that subvert, that rebel, that criticize society (an abandoned child on the railway tracks), that rationalize (the clay and its consumer, the conversion into deity and disciple). That’s what other people will talk about because of his activist background. That is a writing that I have read many times before, in his prose. I will not take it up here.

I loved his work because it took me to where I came from. For all this writing-in-English, for all this exposure to Rilke and Sappho and Ghalib and Neruda, I am only a rustic/gypsy Tamil girl at heart. Vayalkalin naduve/ Allikodigal adarndha kulathil/ Unakku poo parithu tharugiren/Vaa (From the lily-filled pond/ In the midst of fields/I will pluck you flowers/Come). A stanza that took me to Aranthangi in Pudukkottai, my land, where I have been only half-a-dozen times but which has been fixed and fastened in my heart. Those lakes, those lilies, those many, many green fields. And that love, which I long for, and which I will never know. If writing is the process of returning home, by reading Ravikumar’s poetry, I had already got there.

Here, I share some of my favorites, in translation.

Meena Kandasamy